This is a video interview of a law firm with 20+ lawyers, who have moved to Google Apps. During the interview, the key partners estimate that they have saved $450K in IT costs over 5 years by moving their law firm to Google Apps.
The approach used was consultative to find out the goals of the firm, and then figure out how to implement them in Google Apps resulting in increased collaboration, ease of use, and offsite anywhere/anytime access to critical information.
To see a video overview about Google Apps click here.
http://ediscoverysquad.com/google-apps
With recent developments in the last month, Google Apps is shaping up to be a powerful platform now and in the future for Law Firms.
Google Vault is available now as an App for Google to do compliance archiving and eDiscovery. It allows “matters” to be defined, and tags your email and attachments with the “Matter ID”. When I am involved in eDiscovery engagements, I often see my clients using these “Matter ID’s” in the subject line of their email, and this concept extends very easily to Google Vault.
Kent Walker, Google Senior Vice President and General Counsel gives his perspective on Google Vault:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZd_hIln1-I
Another powerful feature for law firms is to setup a Google Voice number (includes free nationwide calling), and see all of your telephone calls including time and duration in a consolidated log. Voice mails automatically are copied to email, and are transcribed by a speech to text engine that is included by Google.
http://www.obihai.com/obiplus.html
The OBI 110 Device (< $50) can work with your existing cordless phones at home, and the OBI 202 (< $75) handles up to 12 extensions and works with cost effective ( < $100 ) IP Phones from Cisco.
I use this type of a system everyday and have been very pleased with it. When filling out my time cards, I can go back an look at exactly how long a teleconference took, and easily search for text in my Voice mails.
One limitation with Google Voice is that it doesn’t handle Fax, so you will need to setup an online Fax service and route the faxes to your Gmail. However, this is less and less of a problem as most folks scan these days anyway.
