I knew the legal profession had changed the day a colleague beamed his business card to my handheld Palm VII. The information zipped electronically on an invisible infrared ray, like the one that changes TV channels with my remote at home. There was no laborious data entry, no mistake and no paper. It took five seconds. We were having coffee at a wood-paneled Caribou Coffee in Chicago, trading stories about how we use our Palm devices to calendar business meetings, send e-mail and search our contact databases.
Once again I had discovered a new way to outmaneuver the competition with my friend, ubermarketer Curtis Linder.
Doing a Lot With So Little
Generically known as PDAs, short for personal digital assistants, these wallet-sized handheld devices weigh a few ounces and fit into a shirt pocket. In addition to beaming information, PDAs allow lawyers to keep time, take notes and read short documents. You can track expenses, use little spread-sheets and check the news. Heck, you can even look up real-time stock prices and relax with video games.
The various Palm devices are the most popular (about seven million of them have been sold) ranging in price from $150 to $450. (See sidebars at the end of this article.) Depending on the model, these devices hold 10,000 addresses, five years of appointments, 3,000 to-do items and 3,000 memos. And they all come with a calculator function.
PDAs will let you be quicker, get more information and impress more clients than your competition. They will lighten your load, as well. Using a PDA allowed me to stop using my bulky laptop, except for writing articles. (A laptop may be portable, but the spare battery, external disk drive and recharger weigh a lot and fill up a padded carrying case.) A PDA is instant on, while a laptop makes you wait while it boots up. You can throw away your bulky day runner or that black appointment book covered with yellow sticky notes.
The ABA's 1999 Legal Technology survey showed that more than 28 percent of respondents use PDAs. Get one now or be left behind. (Last spring I walked the expo floor at the ABA TECHSHOW TM 2000 in Chicago and was surprised to find that most of the high-tech exhibitors hadn't started using Palm devices! Handing out a paper business card was so 1990s.)
Getting In Sync: Reasons to Buy a PDA
May I beam you? One of the main reasons to get a PDA is to be the first to say to a client, May I beam you my business card? People just love it the first time they are beamed. Plus knowing how to work a PDA shows you're up-to-date and tech-savvy, and clients like that.
Information exchange. The PDAs allow you to share information addresses, phone numbers, databases, application files, appointments and memos via an infrared port. Not only can you beam a business card, you can transmit client information or exchange case notes with a colleague.
That sync-ing feeling. You can synchronize the data in your handheld with the data in your desktop computer or Hot Sync it, in Palm computing terminology. This means when someone beams a new business card to your handheld, or you add an appointment or to-do item, you can easily update the data on your hard drive when you return to the office. Knowing the data is safely stored on your hard drive takes away a lot of the worry of losing one of these little gadgets.
PDAs come with a cradle device that you connect to a port on your computer. To synchronize the PDA and computer, you slip the PDA into its cradle, press the HotSync button and watch the data flow. Talk about simple!
If you are one of the truly lazy, you can ask your secretary to update all your information on the computer, and then synchronize with the PDA whenever you return to the office. It's so easy to input information that whether you do it with the little stylus that comes with the handheld or use your computer keyboard, you may not need to delegate this task.
Special designer pens and gadgets on the market make entering data even easier. I bought a special pen that discreetly switches between a .5mm pencil, black ink, red ink and stylus, so I wouldn't give myself away as a technophile.
A great find
The thing that totally convinced me to use my PDA was its "find" feature. I use it when I can't quite remember a date, name or location. I can search simultaneously across my calendar, address book and note pad applications. I tap in a clue or partial word into the "find" feature, and the device reports every occurrence of the search term I've ever recorded. This is incredibly useful when I'm on the road, at a meeting or just riding the train home. With a PDA, all of my information is with me wherever I go.
The portability of all that information, along with the ability to find and use it easily, makes the PDA an incredibly useful marketing and practice management tool. It contains all the information needed to answer the key questions in a lawyer's practice:
- What am I supposed to do today?
- What's the phone number and location of my appointment?
- What do I have to do next?
Shopping for a PDA
For those who must have the very best, get a Palm VII. For me, at $500, it was a bargain. My Palm VII allows me to send and receive e-mail wirelessly. By raising the antenna I can also check up-to-the minute news and weather, view charts of my favorite stocks, get real-time quotes on my portfolio through DLJdirect, get custom directions on the fly from MapQuest, look up movie playtimes in any zip code using MovieFone, look up nearby hotels and restaurants using Fodors, and check the U.S. West Yellow Pages online.
When you're shopping for a PDA, get one with as much memory possible. I consider 8MB the bare minimum. The basic address, appointment, to-do and memo functions will not eat up much space on the PDA's memory, but you will want plenty of memory for the thousands of little applications that you can add on to the PDA. Most of them are free and can be downloaded from the scores of Web sites devoted to Palm devices (see Sidebars below). Simply download the program onto your primary computer, run the installation program, and then hot sync your
handheld and computer to install the program on your handheld.
Add-on programs you may want to investigate include:
Documents to Go This copies long documents spreadsheets from your computer and allows your handheld to read and search them. It also checks to see if the document has been updated. I put a law firm's gigantic phone directory on my handheld as well as my 10-year collection of addresses. This program costs about $40 and it's worth it.
AvantGo The AvantGo program will grab information from the Web and transfer it to your handheld when you synchronize. Just before I leave the office every day, I use AvantGo to get the latest Fox News, The Wall Street Journal report, The Street.Com stock market reports and Weather Channel forecast. Riding home on the train I tap on the stories I want to read. I no longer need to buy the late edition newspaper. AvantGo is free.
BrainForest Lawyers love this outliner tool that allows you to create outlines with collapsible and expandable subsections (called "branches" and "leaves" in the program). You can highlight subsections and drag-and-drop them into new places and change priorities. This costs about $40.
TimeReporter 2000 from iambic software; this is a full-featured timekeeping program with direct synchronization to a desktop component of the software. It tracks time and expenses in many categories and is compatible with Excel, Quicken, Quickbooks, and Access. It costs about $150. Also available is TimeReporter for Timeslips which synchronizes directly with Timeslips (about $120) and TimeReporter for Carpe Diem which synchronizes directly with Carpe Diem (price quotes available from iambic Software).
Cheaper alternatives include Time Tracker at www.inertron.com /plan, for $20, and Time Logger at www.responsivesoftware.com, for $90.
By Larry Bodine, a Web, marketing, and publicity consultant to law firms. He is the operator of the LawMarketing Portal. Reprinted from the September 2000 issue of Law Practice Management, published by the American Bar Association.
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