Boosting Your Practice with Technology

The first of a series of information technology (‘IT’) roadshows organised by the Small Law Firms Committee in conjunction with the IT Committee was held at the Subordinate Courts Bar Room on Thursday, 6 July 2006.

Entitled ‘Boosting Your Practice with Technology’, the roadshow was designed to showcase technology solutions that could help lawyers, especially solo and small firm practitioners, manage their time and practice more efficiently.

In the Bar room, information booths were set up by sponsors to showcase their productivity tools – SingTel Blackberry which provided telephony, internet and e-mails in one mobile device, for lawyers to stay wirelessly connected even when they were out of their office; Scansoft’s applications for PDF conversion for lawyers who wished to use a PDF document as a precedent without having to type it up; and Bizibody-LEAP legal software for law practice accounting, automated precedents and case management.

As an incentive, the sponsors offered special promotional pricing for all showcased products and services. The SingTel Blackberry booth drew the largest audience as they also had on display the latest models.

In the afternoon, Lim Seng Siew and Mark Goh (Chairman of the IT Committee and Chairman of the Small Law Firms Committee respectively) and Serena Lim (member of the IT Committee and Small Law Firms Committee) chaired a 40-minute dialogue session with members.

At the dialogue session, Mark expressed the two Committees’ intention that the IT roadshow be a forum for members to share and learn from each other’s experiences of using technology in their practices. Seng Siew presented some of the systems that he had adopted in his practice and spoke about the falling cost of technology which made sophisticated software and equipment affordable for most lawyers. To show that some of the best things in life can be free, Serena introduced members to software which was available for free on the internet – such as a document search engine (‘Google Desktop Search’) which allows a full-text search (with results within seconds) on all the files (and e-mails) in the workstation; and a collaboration application (‘Groove’) which allows users to create and manage free workspaces on the internet so they can share documents, project calendars and other resources with multiple parties.

From the floor, members asked questions about voice recognition software, PDF conversion (OCR) applications and practice management systems.

The roadshow was a very fruitful session for many practitioners and we hope that members found it useful. As members’ response to this first IT roadshow was good, the Small Law Firms Committee and the IT Committee hope to see more members at the next IT roadshow!

Serena Lim

Member, Small Law Firms Committee

Member, IT Committee

Bizibody Technology Pte Ltd