In my December 28, 2006 post titled 2007 Resolution: Consider Billing Alternatives, I wrote about billing alternatives. Law.com Small Firm Business has an interesting article today titled Small Firms Turning to Flat Fees for Rising Profits. This article talks about the benefits that many firms have experienced in moving to a fixed fee model for billing.  According to the article:

In the past year, the Ambrose Law Group of Portland, Ore., switched from the billable hour to a flat-fee structure.

The results have been dramatic, with the five-attorney firm reporting a 90 percent increase in profits.

While many firms may not experience this same increase in profits, the article does point out many of the benefits that can result from adopting this billing model in addition to increased profits: improved client relations, decreased accounts receivables and less stress for a firm’s attorneys. Quoting Attorney Mark Chinn, the article goes on:

Mark Chinn, of Chinn & Associates, a five-member family law practice in Jackson, Miss., said his firm also customizes the price for each individual client.

"And when the client knows how much it is going to cost, it gives them a better understanding if they want to go ahead and take action," said Chinn, who added that since he switched to flat-fee rates in July 2005, he has zero accounts receivable.

"If you lose a client because of the up-front price, you lost a client that would have ultimately not paid you anyway," he said.

Chinn said, in addition to increasing revenues, billing by flat fees has also improved the atmosphere of his firm.

While this model may not work for every attorney, our profession needs to look at changing its traditional models for doing business to adapt to modern business realities. As a profession, we can refuse to change while other professions and our clients adopt new ways of doing business and billing, continuing to lose ground to non-lawyer providers; or we can embrace these types of changes and focus on delivering value and service to our clients.   

When Yahoo! Mail launched in 1997, users got a whopping (for that time) free 4 MB of storage. Since then, Google launched its Gmail service with 1 GB of storage and the free e-mail market has continue to increase free e-mail storage to 2 GB in many cases. For those of you who have filled your inbox, fret no more: Yahoo! has announced that over the next several months they will phase in and provide unlimited e-mail storage to all Yahoo! Mail users. For more information from Yahoo! on this change, go here

I am attending the ABA TechShow 2007 in Chicago and am happy to see that the attendance is even better than last year and there is a really nice mix of vendors representing a wide variety of services and products for lawyers.

During a session this morning, Jim Calloway, Practice Management Advisor for Oklahoma, and avid blogger shared one of his tips that is simple in its implementation, but extremely elegant in its usefulness. Most of us attend conferences and seminars where we receive CD-ROM’s of materials. The problem with these events is that we are never able to attend all of the sessions we want. Sometimes we actually look at the CD_ROM’s to view the materials of the sessions we couldn’t attend. However, these CD-ROM’s eventually end up in a pile or a rack and sit there accumulating dust. But this isn’t the way it has to be: you have a goldmine of information just sitting there that, if you could easily search it, would be available for your use when you need it. So how do you turn these dust collectors into knowledge?

Create a folder on your computer and call it something like Reference or Library (you can do this on your desktop or under your C drive and then copy the contents of those CD-ROM’s to that folder. If the files are in Portable Document Format (PDF), you will need to verify that there is a text layer in the files so that they can be searched. As you come across online articles that you want to save, go ahead and save them to your Reference or Library folder.

I recommend taking this a step further: you can also scan articles and columns from paper publications and place them in the Reference or Library folder (you will have to create a text layer if you save these in a PDF format using Adobe Acrobat or another Optical Character Recognition (OCR) program such as OmniPage Pro or Abby FineReader. Have you kept forms from others that you liked or papers from seminars that you've placed in folders. Scan these and run them through an OCR program; you want to make these easily searchable and ready at hand as well as the other information mentioned.

Then, when you are looking for something, simply type your query into your desktop search engine and all of these resources are available to be searched. What, you’re not using a desktop search engine? If you aren’t using a desktop search engine, look at Copernic Desktop Search , Google Desktop Search, X1 , Yahoo Search or Microsoft Windows Desktop Search. These are all free programs and can search within multiple file formats. You should carefully review what information the variuos engines may send back to their parent company which is why I recommend Copernic Desktop Search as it doesn’t do this at all. Google can send information back to the company depending on the setting which is a bit hidden. As a lawyer, I’m just a bit paranoid and don’t want to take any chances of confidential information being sent to anyone.

Now, rather than having a folder full of moldy paper from torn out articles or CD-ROM’s gathering dust, you now have a valuable and easily searchable goldmine of knowledge.

My friends over at Technolawyer last week posted a useful link to a side-by-side review and comparison of a number of Internet-based fax services on Top Ten Reviews.   If you're in the market for an Internet-based fax service provider, this is a "must read" before making a selection.  Not only does the review provide a comparison of each product’s feature set, but also includes reviews of each service and pricing information.

These services can help with managing incoming faxes as they arrive in your e-mail inbox (generally in PDF format) so they can be saved with your other client documents without having to scan each one upon receipt.

By running optical character recognition on these files, they become searchable using desktop search engines such as Copernic, Google Desktop Search, Yahoo Desktop Search and others. If you have web access to your e-mail, this means your incoming faxes are available to you wherever you can access your e-mail; which can be a great convenience when you are out of the office.

These services can also make it extremely convenient to send faxes from your computer for those documents generated either by word processor or in PDF format. if you have created an image file of your signature, you can send signed documents this way as well.

The bottom line is that these services can aid you in managing your practice and the benefits that you can receive from using one of these services will quickly outweigh their expense. 

On February 27, 2007 Corel Corp. released a beta of WordPerfect Lightning without much fanfare.  Facing a major challenge to stay relevant to business users, Corel has thrown its hat into the ring of Web 2.0 and desktop applications with a hybrid approach that combines both desktop and web-based functions including the ability to collaborate between different users.

Joe Wilcox of eWeek’s Microsoft Watch in his 'Will Lightning Strike Google and Microsoft?' Article, succinctly lays out what Corel hopes to achieve with this product and how it is avoiding some of the issues that have been problems for other companies that have tried to provide free web-based services without cutting into their profit making products.

You can go here to find the official WordPerfect Lightning webpages.

Consisting of four parts: ‘Navigator', ‘Notes', 'Connector', and ‘Viewer', Lighting seems to be intended to act as a bridge between the desktop application found in WordPerfect suite of office products and online collaboration and access the information such as calendar entries, e-mail and notes. According to the frequently asked questions page for the product:

Corel WordPerfect Lightning is a new kind of free word processing and note-taking software from Corel that fills a gap between today's existing desktop and Web-based productivity tools.

Corel WordPerfect Lightning provides a simple set of tools that make it fast and easy to perform your most common productivity tasks. WordPerfect Lightning makes it easier than ever before to capture, use and reuse the ideas, information and images that are important to you.

In addition to the ‘Notes' feature, you also have the ability to perform screen captures and save them with Notes for use in other documents. It's online tools (the “Connector” feature) includes an address book, e-mail and calendar, which are provided through its partner Joyent .

Whether this is another case of "too little, too late" or will move Corel to a leading position in the new environment of Web and desktop collaboration is unclear at this time. However, it is an interesting attempt at identifying a niche not currently served by either Google or Microsoft.