First Steps

• Author: Dennis Kennedy - Tom Mighell
• Pages: 31-37

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First Steps

Choosing collaboration tools is surprisingly easy. In fact, you

probably are already using many of them every day. Con-

sciously choosing collaboration tools that will work best for

you in your law practice is a different story.

The simple fact is that most of us collaborate by using tools

chosen for us by others or those we simply use by default or

by habit. Today, most drafts of legal documents are exchanged

as unlocked Microsoft Word files. These files are attached to

unencrypted emails sent out over the open Internet to email

systems with questionable security. Spam filters might delete

the email before it is delivered to its intended recipient. If you

were designing an effective document collaboration system

from scratch, email is not likely the system you would choose.

Before you can begin to select collaboration tools or

move to new ones, you’ll need to rethink some of the ways

you currently work with others. This chapter will provide you

with practical, easy-to-accomplish steps that can help you get

started with collaboration tools.

Let’s start with a few basic principles:

1. For better or worse, you already have a system (or

systems) for collaboration. You may not fully under-

stand them, and you might not have chosen them for

yourself, but they do exist and you do use them.

2. Your technology decisions must be made in the

context of and in consideration for the systems you

already have in place. For example, you may decide to

buy some scanners and implement a paperless office,

but until you fully understand the flow and lifecycle

of paper in your office, your odds of implementing the

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