These days, many law firms are suffering the same plight as their corporate clients: downsizing. Demand from clients to cut costs wherever possible results in layoffs of administrative help, increasingly leaving attorneys to fend for themselves to do time-consuming and costly paperwork such as faxing, mailing and scheduling meetings. A little time each day pushing paper can add up to a lot of lost billable time. And then there’s costly travel expenses associated with out-of-town client meetings, resulting in more documents to edit, fax back and forth for approval and then edit again. More lost billable time.

How do you streamline these business processes so that your law firm can be more profitable, cut client costs (while keeping clients happy) and keep attorneys focused on billable rather than administrative work? One answer is e-meetings—highly collaborative real-time meetings over the Internet that offer quality audio, high resolution video, joint document editing, instant messaging, whiteboarding and more, all from a desktop PC. It’s truly a harmonic convergence of voice and data.

While the technology has been around in one form or another since the 1990s, e-meetings have only recently evolved to offer a new level of control and personalization to the desktop, enabling attorneys to easily run meetings that are spontaneous, collaborative, real-time and most importantly, totally secure.

E-Meeting Benefits
Say you’re responsible for technology for a law firm with 50 attorneys. Each attorney has at least one client requiring near-constant handholding (by phone or in-person meetings). That means at least 50 calls a day and perhaps 50 or more trips a month collectively for client visits. Add up the high costs transferred to clients (who want the handholding but not the expense)to the loss of billable time when the attorneys are traveling and what do you have? A potentially unprofitable situation that can put the firm at risk. This is when e-meetings can really show their return-on-investment.

While face-to-face meetings will always be a valuable tool (e.g., for first-time meetings or for training people on how to behave on the witness stand), they can easily top four figures when traveling or downtime is involved. With e-meetings offered on an unlimited use plan and with a minimal upfront investment in a headset and optional Web camera, the savings are obvious after even one use.

In addition to decreasing travel expenses, e-meetings help attorneys increase productivity. For example, they can jointly edit depositions with clients, greatly reducing the time it takes to get to a finalized document because 1) they aren’t waiting for a fax, overnight package or e-mail, 2) they don’t have to merge multiple versions of the same document into one; 3) they can directly see and hear the other party as they make changes, and if necessary, explain the changes in a live meeting, reducing the possibility of incorrectly interpreting comments and revisions. Attorneys can then create folders online around specific clients or cases so they can store documents and files for simple retrieval and use in subsequent meetings or even offline.

In addition, e-meetings allow attorneys to do instant messaging with clients or colleagues while holding on the telephone (time that would normally be wasted) or having a side-conversation. Most importantly, e-meetings can bring together widely dispersed groups for either regular status meetings or crisis situations where travel would simply take too long or is just not desirable.

E-Meeting Criteria
When looking to choose an e-meeting provider, ask yourself these questions:

* Does the e-meeting solution offer the capabilities required for truly effective and collaborative meetings (audio, video, document editing, instant messaging)?
* Is the technology user-friendly? Does it require in-depth training sessions for both attorneys and their clients? If so, is the training included or does it cost extra?
* Does it require special equipment? Does the technology require a complicated firewall configuration? * Will it run on your firm’s current operating system?
* How much does the service cost? Do the rates change as more people attend? Do both the meeting host and participants pay for the meetings?
* Is it secure? One of the most important questions for attorneys (and their clients) is whether the solution will protect client/attorney privilege. Not all e-meeting services are secure and some only provide security as an option with additional costs. Are online documents protected? How are passwords handled? What are their privacy policies?

Persuading Them to Use It
Once you’ve determined the best solution for your firm, the next step is to get the attorneys—and their clients—to use it. Experience shows that integrating any new technology into a law firm—and actually getting the attorneys to use it enough to justify its purchase—can be an extremely challenging task. However, the benefits of e-meetings for the attorney, the law firm and the clients themselves can easily be communicated and understood. Use the following three benefits in your communications:

Decreased travel: Clients appreciate a law firm that leads the way in providing technology that decreases the need for costly and time consuming-travel.

Increased productivity/billability: Attorneys will spend less time waiting in security lines (downtime not always billed back to clients or billed at lower rates) or faxing documents back and forth for revisions, merging the changes from multiple copies, obtaining more revisions, etc. They can use that time to for billable work that will be more valuable to their clients.

Increased profitability for the firm: Decreased travel expenses and increased billable hours can quickly make a firm more profitable. E-meetings can virtually pay for themselves after as little as one replaced client visit.

A Win-Win Communications Solution
Once you persuade your attorneys to use the technology, it’s up to them to persuade their clients—with your help. If you’ve chosen an easy-to-implement-and-use e-meeting solution that helps the clients save time and money, this should be fairly easy to do. Existing clients will not only appreciate the decreased costs, they’ll also receive better service and more face time from their attorneys. Potential clients will see your firm as one that recognizes the value of technology and has their best interests at heart.

About our author . . .

Ronald I. Koenig is President and Chief Executive Officer of VIACK Corporation, an emerging player in a new category of secure, integrated e-meetings for small workgroups. He can be reached at info@viack.com or by phone at 480.735.5925. For more information on VIACK, visit VIACK’s website at www.viack.com.