Software blues

 tl;dr: I have a love/hate relationship with software.

Let me explain what happened... Last year, about this time, I had one attorney and three law clerks working for me. We had checklists and the law clerks would use a template, change the header information, and edit from there. We rarely sent out discovery because it took approximately an hour to edit the template and just wasn't worth the money. 

And then (like more or less everyone is saying), the pandemic hit. We had some staff who were high risk. We had some simply take off to go "home" to California before the state shut down. We had some like me that were just scared and didn't want to be around humans that breathed the same air. So, we moved to work from home (WFH). I still interpret those letters as "what fresh hell?!".

Because I'm primarily practicing in debt defense and because the creditors developed a little bit of a conscience, cases dried up. I'm not one to sit and wait for things to get better and I knew that this was likely only temporary. If businesses are shutting down and people are being laid off, the creditors aren't going to simply get over someone owing them thousands of dollars. They're going to wait, they're going to get their judgments eventually, and when they can do so without looking like pandemic profiteers, they're going to collect. I knew we would eventually see an absolute tsunami of debt collection lawsuits and bankruptcies. So, I took the downtime to improve my software. 

We'd need a communication function. If some are in Ohio, some in California, some in South Carolina, and nobody is face to face, we'd need a way to communicate "I need you to do this answer by Monday." We found some software that worked. I also needed to streamline the process for the future. I put together some Word templates that allow me to enter the information in one place and it auto-populates throughout. Suddenly, I boiled down a process that should have taken approximately 3 hours to less than 30 minutes. Finally, we digitized everything. Every single file came home and got scanned, uploaded, renamed, and sorted into digital files so that it was all accessible from anywhere.

This worked great until recently. I'm licensed in a ridiculous number of states and that tsunami of cases I mentioned?? Well, we haven't even been hit by the hardest wave yet but we can see it coming for us. Frankly, my office manager is struggling to keep my calendar up to date and accurate. So, for the second time in less than a year, we're changing our entire software. 

This has led to about two weeks of 3-4 hours sleep a night while I'm inputting client info. We had a false start on one software before realizing it was not going to do everything I needed it to do. I just paid for a different one today. The scalability is incredible, and I keep finding little features here and there that make me more and more impressed. I truly feel like I'm punching above my weight class with this one, because it's going to take that 30 minute process and streamline it to more like 10. All of the future invoices for future work... it's no longer a matter of 5 minutes per invoice and more time to actually be sent. It's literally a matter of pushing two buttons to create it and then hitting the send button without even switching to a different screen. It's impressive. It's a CRM (client relationship management) software, and although it's often used in sales, I don't think too many law firms use it outside of the major firms.

So why do I hate software? Why do I have software blues? Do you know what it's like to enter information for approximately 200 clients? Everything from the court to opposing counsel to a file number, etc. Then we have to get the files associated with the right people. Finally, I have to create all of the templates all over again that let me push two buttons to send an invoice. Once all of that is done, we still have yet to really dig deep into it and figure out how to make it accomplish even cooler things because I have the gut feeling I've only explored about 15% of this. I am tired. I did not think I would be completely abandoning an entire workflow system and creating a new one from scratch TWICE in one year (let alone this dumpster-fire of a year).

Naturally, since I'm getting my Cybersecurity Master's degree, I am considering all of the other stupid things that normal people don't. Do I change the address making it easier for my employees if they get logged out, or leave it complex so it is not easy for hackers to find? Do I require two-factor authentication and complex passwords, or do I need to set fire to my employees who will just write it down anyway? What is the exact level at which I set permissions for my office manager who needs access to both my calendar and email, but needs to leave the forms alone because she was experimenting with them and changed categories I very much needed? How do I clearly explain the workflow process to my paralegal so that she can do her job when I haven't really played with that particular feature too much in depth? And in a sense, this familiarity with software and cybersecurity is what led to the false start a week or so ago when we tried the other software but ultimately found it lacking. I could not do the things I wanted and needed to do, and I thought it was rather dumb that I couldn't customize it the way I wanted. Ultimately, if I'm told software cannot do something, I know there are plenty of other programs out there. If I can't allow people to do their job to the best of their ability but restrict them from changing something that will badly disrupt other areas, I will go elsewhere.