The Untethered Lawyer » Virtual Law Office

Remaking The Bankruptcy Law Firm: Telephone Systems

Jay Fleischman — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 14:56:52 +0000

When attempting to create a location-independent law firm, the first thing that’s important to handle is how telephones are used. Though we live in a digital world, for most the telephone is still the primary means of connecting. Courts need to get through to the office, clients call with a myriad of questions and issues, and we as attorneys are required to be available.

I thought initially of having a voice mail system that used the 4-Hour Workweek system of, “I’m not here, I’ll call you back at 2:00pm, leave a number and buzz off,” approach but quickly discarded it as unworkable for all but a few people in the office.

The old telephone system was unworkable, cumbersome and costly to maintain. 14 lines into the office just to be sure that callers never got a busy signal, proprietary handsets that could not be easily swapped out for replacements in the event of breakage, and lots of wires holding us to our desks.

If you’ve got a wired phone that lives on your hard-wired phone system, you’re hard-wired to your desk. Definitely NOT location-independent.

I tried RingCentral, a virtual phone system that lets you create multiple mailboxes and forward them to a variety of places, but ultimately ditched it. Though a great system and one that I think you should look into, RingCentral fell short in a variety of ways. For example:

RingCentral is a VOIP (Internet-based) phone system, which means that if their central servers go down then so does your phone system; and

RingCentral’s mailboxes don’t offer a huge degree of customization in the way phones are answered and calls handled.

So in the end I went back to Grasshopper, a phone system I’ve been using for my own virtual law firm for a number of years. The idea behind Grasshopper is simple – it takes what would otherwise be an expensive and full-featured phone system and turns it into a web-based service.

Here’s how it works: your caller dials your number and is met with an auto-attendant greeting (“Welcome to blah blah blah, if you know your party’s extension dial it at any time. For a dial-by-name directory dial 8, for the operator dial 0, etc.”) You choose your extension and dial it. The recipient’s extension dials and they pick up or send it to voice mail.

Simple, right?

There are a few things going on under the hood that make it spectacular:

The extension can ring to any phone – a cell phone, a desk phone, a Skype phone … any kind of phone you want. This means I can program Grasshopper to ring my extension (which happens to be 704) in my office, on my home phone line, my cell phone … anywhere I choose. So when someone calls me and connects with me, it doesn’t matter where I am physically.

You can choose when your extension rings to which phone. I can set it up that my extension rings to my office phone Mondays from 9:00am to 1:00pm, my cell phone on Tuesdays, my home phone on Thursdays, and on and on.

You can shut down your phone entirely. If my paralegal is out to lunch from 12:00pm-1:00pm each day, I can tell Grasshopper to stop sending calls to her during that time and send them instead directly to voice mail. If I know I like to get “real work” done each day from 3:00pm-5:00pm then I can tell Grasshopper to send all calls to voice mail during that time. My receptionist, who handles all new client calls, goes to lunch at 12:30pm-1:30pm each day; during that time, I tell Grasshopper to send her calls to a virtual assistant. No more lost calls for us!

Grasshopper sends all voice mail messages to the recipient’s email account in mp3 format. When I miss a call I don’t have to dial in and listen to messages – they come to me. But more important than that, I can save those mp3 files to the client’s folder in our computer system. Record-keeping becomes a breeze!

With Grasshopper, there’s never a busy signal. Though the system is POTS (plain old telephone system) lines rather than Internet-based, when someone calls my firm’s main phone line they never get a busy signal – period. So now instead of having to pay for 14 phone lines (at $50 per month, that adds up fast) for 6 people, I can just have 6 office phone lines going to their desks. That saves us $400 per month right there. Cha-ching!

Of course, we needed to keep our “main” phone line and set up call forwarding to the phone number provided by Grasshopper. But our new business cards will have the Grasshopper-provided phone number on them, so eventually that old number will be a relic. We will eventually decide whether to keep it or mothball it, but I suspect it will remain on the books for a number of years at least (it’s a good number).

Once I signed the firm up for Grasshopper we hired a voiceover artist on Elance for $125 to do a series of outgoing messages for us – the main one (“Thank you for calling Shaev & Fleischman …”), the transfer messages (what people hear when they’re on hold), and a few other main ones such as the one for directions and such.

Each month we’re looking at a significant cost savings over a “regular” phone system. More important, though, is the fact that the entire firm is now location-independent … at least, as far as the phone system is concerned.

Disclosure: The links to Grasshopper contained in this post are affiliate links. If you click on those links and ultimately become a customer of Grasshopper I will get a commission. That commission does not increase your cost for the Grasshopper service at all. Quite frankly, it’s not a ton of money in my pocket but it does help defray the overhead costs of this site. You can also find Grasshopper service online by doing a quick Google search.

Make 2010 The Year You Become Untethered!

Jay Fleischman — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 13:00:31 +0000

The world is changing at such a rapid pace it seems as if nothing is the same from day to day. We went from a cell phone to an iPhone (and, for some, to an Android or Palm Pre). We went from desktops to laptops to netbooks. Our Internet service went from dial-up to Ethernet to wireless.

We used to work in office buildings. Now we can work anywhere.

But you’re still slogging into the office day in and day out. You feel confined to the four walls, and wish you could get the heck out of there.

You can. But there’s a catch (and it’s a biggie).

In order to change your work patterns, you’ve got to want to do something different.

And I’m not talking about that pie-in-the-sky, “Wouldn’t it be nice,” sort of want. You’ve got to really, truly, obsessively covet the change.

In 2010 we’re going to be talking a lot about breaking those work habits and building new ones. It isn’t an overnight process, but it is a fun one. Stay with me and we’ll rock 2010 together.

As for me, I’ve got a lot of incredible things going on in my life – personally and professionally. I’ve got a bunch of new podcasting opportunities, some awesome stuff happening in my lawyer world, and I’m turning 40 this year (the same year my son turns 3). Things haven’t been this good … well, ever.

Keep on hanging out with me in 2010 and we’ll have a fun time. Remember to subscribe to the email updates (just enter your email address in the box at the top of the page) so you won’t miss anything.

Happy New Year!

Virtual Lawyer And The Kindle – Paperless Goes Mobile

Jay Fleischman — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 16:00:51 +0000

I got my Amazon Kindle eReader when I landed home from my recent trip out to Oklahoma City, where I had the privilege and honor to speak at the Oklahoma Bar Association. I enjoyed the trip and meeting awesome people including Jim Calloway, but I was itching to open the box when I got home.

My Kindle review wouldn’t add much except to say it’s as cool as they say it is. But I did something that has already changed my practice.

First, take a step back. I’ve got a bunch of bankruptcy books on my shelf, and they take up a lot of room. Books that I refer to every single week, stuff that’s critical to my base of knowledge. But I’m not near those books that often.

So I embarked on a massive scanning operation, digitizing all of the massive tomes. I began with my NCLC bankruptcy manual and moved on from there. The books went into a big box and got transferred to my closet.

Now that I got my Kindle I wondered if I could copy those books to my new portable reading device.

Yes I could!

So my Kindle now contains my entire bookshelf of professional books as well as the binders of NCLC Reports that I lovingly read on arrival. No matter where I am, I have with me all of the books that were previously on a bookshelf.

Untethered Lawyer Book Giveaway: The 4-Hour Workweek, Expanded and Updated

Jay Fleischman — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 15:00:16 +0000

I’ve been influenced by many authors and books, but few compare to the original The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss. This book wasn’t an eye-opener so much as it was a validation of the way I practiced law. Here was a business owner who stepped forward and unapologetically proclaimed his freedom from the 9-to-5 grind of cubicles and office life.

Ferriss extolled the virtues of outsourcing and coined the term, “lifestyle design.” Some called his book fiction, others questioned whether he was in fact a tango champion or just some guy who made up stories in his spare time. To me, it didn’t matter.

Why? Because Ferriss was telling the world that it was alright to delegate tasks to others, so long as we could delegate those tasks effectively. We are each good at just a few things, and to do anything but those few things was a waste of our time and resources. To get it right, we must find others to do that which they are good at, leaving us to our own core competencies.

Now, Ferriss is releasing an updated and expanded version of the book. It will be released on December 15, 2009.

And to celebrate, I’m going to give away a brand-new copy of the book. Shipped directly to one lucky winner from Amazon when it’s released.

Here’s how you qualify to win. Between now and December 14, 2009 you need to comment on this blog post and tell me the one task you’d like to outsource in your law firm and why you haven’t done it yet. Your comment must include your full name and your email address (you can substitute “[at]” for “@”). The best comment will be chosen at random by me on December 15, 2009, and I’ll contact you by email.

Don’t want to leave a comment on the blog? No problem – you can enter by tweeting this status update.

Please note that this contest is open only to people in the Continental United States. I will not ship overseas or to any foreign destination.

It’s that simple – comment or tweet your entry, and good luck!