Saturday, June 19, 2010

Organization in the Age of Google

Why do we organize a law office?

So we can find the things we need when we need it.

Simple, right? That is why generations of attorneys have walked around with tabbed folders and indexed documents.

Well, technology has become the most amazing legal secretary you ever had. Gmail will word index all your email for you. Just imagine the time it would take to word index 3 pages of text, let alone every email you receive.

A new tool we are using in the office is a wonderful piece of free software called, appropriately "Everything." It only searches document titles, but it is screamingly fast and it is so efficient that we've limited it to the case file folders -- otherwise the results were too voluminous. The other advantage it has is it feeds my proclivity for bad puns, ie "Where is Everything? Did I accidentally close Everything?"

Bottom line: In the age of Google, law office organization needs to be completely re-thought.

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