Simple Collaboration Tools for Productivity

• Author: Dennis Kennedy - Tom Mighell
• Pages: 99-109

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Simple Collaboration

Tools for Productivity

We’ve taken a look at online document creation tools, arguably

one of the most essential and straightforward collaboration

activities for lawyers and their clients. If your journey into

the world of collaboration tools needs to be more about small

steps and quick wins, we have some good news for you. There

are a number of really simple tools that not only help you work

better with others, they also help you be more productive. In

this chapter, we’re going to discuss two such collaboration

tools: meeting schedulers and task management tools.

Meeting Scheduling

We believe, to a near certainty, that the single most frustrating

activity ever devised for lawyers (or for anyone working in

an office) is scheduling a meeting with more than one other

person. You’ve done it before: you send out an email to five or

six people with some proposed times for a call or a meeting,

and four or five respond with completely different availability.

You might send out a few (or many) more emails with some

additional times. Just when you think you have a good time

to meet, the last person responds saying “sorry, I can’t make

any of those times—can we try this again?” And so on, and so

on . . .

One of the reasons this process is disjointed is that it

happens in asynchronous fashion. Everyone is answering at a

different time. Everyone is also looking at individual calendars.

Reaching a good outcome becomes difficult.

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