Portals & Mobile Solutions
by Tony Rushin
Even though Richard won, I thought I would still finish out the series!
Portals (no, not a ship’s portal) enable law firms to securely and easily share information with their clients. As with many of these trends, the sum is greater than the parts and portal solutions have benefited tremendously from the evolution of Cloud Computing. In the “olden days” a portal may have been called an FTP Server. It worked okay but had to be part of a law firm’s IT infrastructure and be implemented, configured and maintained by technical people. Now a portal can be located in the “Cloud” and can be maintained by a non-technical person. In addition, these solutions are much more feature-rich than they used to be – making it easy to share documents back-and-forth with clients. Sendthisfile.com, Box.net and FilesAnywhere are just 3 examples of the many solutions available for attorneys to deliver greater client service.
Mobile solutions keep proliferating. Many help with personal productivity but the solutions we’re focused on here help with client service. Whether the solutions are for Tablets or for Smartphones, the mobility enables an attorney to bring more value to their clients. Simply being able to click on a link in a client email, view the webpage and then respond to the client – within 5 minutes and while away from your computer – provides tremendous client service. Here are a couple of other examples of mobile solutions and client service: a personal injury law firm in Phoenix gives iPads to clients during the case; an app helps attorneys work more closely with clients on pro bono cases.
Client service-oriented portals and mobile solutions will continue to be a trend for law firms in 2012.
Network 1 Consulting is a 14-year-old, IT Support company in Atlanta, GA. We become – or augment – the IT department for professional services companies: law firms, medical practices and financial services firms. Our IT experts can fix computers – but what our clients really value is the industry-specific best practices we bring to their firm. This is especially important with technology, along with regulations and cyber threats, changing so rapidly. We take a proactive approach to helping our clients use technology to gain and keep their competitive advantage.
