As the New Jersey legal community scrambles to adjust to a new way of working during the COVID-19 pandemic, the New Jersey State Bar Association’s (NJSBA) has free resources that members can tap into.
PracticeHQ, a new legal practice management platform, has a wealth of useful articles, comparison charts and tutorials that can help with running a legal practice from home.
PracticeHQ sifts through the welter of features and prices that various service providers offer so attorneys can quickly evaluate what VoIP [voice over internet protocol] they could use to receive office phone calls at their new home-based offices; what web meeting services they may need to conduct business with employees and clients, and how to use VPN service to access their work desktops.
There are whitepapers in the Technology section that address buying a computer: “A Lawyer’s Guide for Buying a Desktop” and “A Lawyer’s Guide to Buying a Laptop,” even one in the Opening and Closing a Law Firm section on “Getting the Best Deals on Legal Technology,” where it maps out a progression of steps to take to ensure you get the best deal. One of the recommended steps is to use a product part number to find the best prices on websites. The checklist on new firm technology is a helpful tool to ensure that you haven’t overlooked anything essential and to keep you on budget. And for that, a technology budget checklist has been provided.
PracticeHQ has an entire sub-section under the Documents section devoted to cybersecurity and disaster preparedness.
There are numerous helpful whitepapers on everything from how to protect your data in “Follow a 3-2-1 Backup Strategy” and “Why the Cloud is Important for Disaster Avoidance” to two-factor authentication and wireless encryption. The whitepaper “Back It Up!” recommends not just relying solely on the internet as a back-up. Instead, it recommends your back-up can also be onsite (either external hard drives or network attached storage) and suggests device and system options. The section includes a disaster recovery kit checklist which provides a breakdown of the items needed to initiate recovery procedures that every office should have.
Billing and accounting will also need to be tended during these uncertain times. The Money section provides helpful comparison charts on cloud-based and traditional, server-based systems.
And although face-to-face client prospecting is off limits for now, the need to find clients still remains. The section on client development provides lots of good advice, particularly the whitepaper on “A Guide to Marketing Your Law Firm on Facebook,” by Stephen Fairley, CEO of The Rainmaker Institute, where he provides invaluable tips, such as lawyers should consider posting or sharing more posts under their own name, in addition to their firm’s umbrella.
PracticeHQ is available under the resources tab at njsba.com.