My New Secret Weapon
I'm posting this now only because my traffic is slow. But I have found a terrific new secret weapon. OK, let's back up. Secret weapon for what? For competing with those big firms of course! You see, I've found that attorneys, even attorneys who represent high tech companies are basically not very savvy in the ways in which technology can help service providers.
Over the years I've been very successful in competing with large firms in terms of my ability to provide excellent service without a huge infrastructure and support staff. Using technology effectively has been one of my best tools.
Since late last year I've been looking at all sorts of law office management software that supposedly allows an attorney to track of clients and work being done for clients. ALL software that's marketed to attorneys sells for retail plus attorneys' net, which means it's very expensive.
So I thought, there's got to be a decent, easily modifiable project management software that will allow me to keep track of what I need to keep track of. I bought Office 2007 Ultimate because it contained Business Contact Manager, which integrates with Outlook, and I'm a very heavy Outlook user. BCM does allow you to track projects and seemed initially very cool. But it is terribly quirky. I mean beyond normal Microsoft quirky. And try to customize it? No way! It seems like this is one of those "not ready for prime time" products that Microsoft added onto Outlook to let us poor customers do their QA checking.
A friend said "Intuit has something" and I finally, after much digging, found QuickBase which I've been customizing (very easily) like mad, and voila - a wonderful client, contract and litigation tracking tool.
But please, don't tell any attorneys.
