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2023 Annual Meeting Breakout Track - Technology

Technology Track

Legal professionals utilize various technological tools to enhance their productivity and accuracy, including case management software, document management software, legal research tools, e-discovery software, secure communication tools, and practice management software. Join Barron K. Henley of Affinity Consulting as he explains how these tools aid in organizing and retrieving documents, managing case information, conducting legal research, analyzing electronic documents, communicating securely, and managing workflow, expenses, time, and billing. Utilizing these essential technologies improves legal professionals' efficiency, effectiveness, and ability to serve clients.

Breakout Sessions:

2023's Best Legal Tech Tips, Tricks, Services, Gadgets and Websites (1.0 G)

The best of legal technology, practice management, electronics, services, and incredibly useful websites for lawyers. This rapid-fire hour is full of great ideas you can immediately incorporate into your practice.  We’ll cover artificial intelligence legal document editing software, tips for improving your web-meeting game, digital signature platforms (demonstrated), cybersecurity tips and services, home office equipment recommendations, and many other practice management tips, tricks, and technologies.


Avoiding Malpractice: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of Legal Technology (1.0 EP)

Legal technology is a double-edged sword in that it can cause malpractice, or it can guard against it. Learn how to avoid common mistakes while using technology to your advantage by building malpractice avoidance procedures into your workflow. There is no prerequisite level of technical acumen necessary to understand these concepts, and almost all of them will improve your office’s overall efficiency, level of client service and profitability. Most of the top causes for malpractice and grievance issues are related to organization, communication, and law office management. As such, they are largely preventable.


Get the Waste Out of Your Practice (1.0 G)

The business of law isn't what it used to be. Competition is up and margins are flat.  Clients demand value from their lawyers and are willing to shop around to find it.  Lawyers face increasing competition from customary rivals as well as emerging online DIY companies that have commoditized many legal services.  These pressures are forcing lawyers to re-examine their practices and processes.  Lean Six Sigma is a managerial approach that improves performance by eliminating the waste of physical resources, time, effort and talent while assuring that the work is done right the first time.  Waste is defined as anything that doesn't add value in your client's eyes (your perception is irrelevant).  In this seminar, you'll learn how to identify and remove the 8 most common types of waste from your practice.

Take the Work Out of Your Workflow - A Case Study (1.0 G)

W. Edwards Deming famously said, "When a good person meets a bad system, the system always wins."  If you know or suspect that there are some inefficient processes in your office, the first step to improvement is to map out the process in question.   In the legal world, lawyers are rarely responsible for every step of a process.  As a result, there's often a disconnect between what a lawyer thinks is happening and what is actually happening.  In this seminar, we'll show you how to map processes and walk you through a real-life example where small adjustments made big differences for a law practice.


How to Protect Yourself and Preserve Confidentiality When Negotiating (1.0 G)

Opposing lawyers routinely email versions of a document back and forth during the negotiation process; and many instruments are never reduced to paper until they’re ready to sign. This approach is unquestionably fast and convenient compared to mailing or faxing paper documents.  However, electronic document exchange presents many issues that practitioners need to be aware of and risks to protect against.  In this seminar, you'll learn when it's appropriate to use word processor files and when it's appropriate to use PDFs.  We'll cover how to track your changes in a document and how to ascertain what changes were made by others (even if there are attempts to conceal those changes).  You'll also learn how to add comments and annotations to Word or PDF files, how to lock documents down to prevent further changes, and how to avoid including hidden (and potentially damaging) information in the files you're working with (this hidden information is known as metadata).  Finally, using plain email arguably affords you no reasonable expectation of privacy.  We'll also discuss your email encryption options which ensure that only the intended recipient can open your emails and/or attachments thereto.