Author Archive
Your Laptop Screen Just Broke, What Do You Do?
You just dropped your laptop and half the screen is black while the other half is either random colors or spider webbed out into a a random cracked screen mess, what do you do? There are a few things you can do here depending on your tech skill and/or budget.
1. Check if your laptop is under warranty. If you bought an el’ cheapo laptop from Staples or BestBuy you most likely have a 1yr warranty. Go online to your laptop hardware vendor may it be Dell, HP or Lenovo and search for Dell Warranty check or HP Warranty check. When you get to the right page they will want a serial or service tag. Enter it in and see if your laptop is under warranty. If it is, call your vendor and see if they can replace the screen portion. Serial numbers are located on the bottom of your laptop.
2. If your laptop is not under warranty and feeling techy, go online to your laptop branded refurbished market or ebay and find a new screen that fits your laptop, purchase it and follow the instructions to replace it. As a tech person, it’s not fun to replace a laptop screen so only endeavor to do this if your up for a challenge, have small screw drivers and have done something like this before. Laptop screens are about $175. For a 4 year old laptop that was $600 it may pay to just buy a new one, which brings me to my next point.
3. JUST BUY A NEW LAPTOP! Sometimes it’s just more cost efficient to buy a new laptop altogether. Forego the costly & risky installation of an after-market screen and buy a new one knowing that you’ll end up with a brand new laptop in the end.
Rekall depends on option 1 because all Rekall hardware is purchased with a 3yr warranty. But for items out of warranty, we go with option 3 more times than not, and for good reason. If you drop a laptop, perhaps something else is wrong with the device that may not be apparent now, but may come up in a few months. If so, you just spent money on IT labor to fix the laptop plus the hardware cost for a new screen and end up with a dead laptop regardless.
Attorneys, Don’t Lose Your Domain Name!
For all you non tech people out there, a domain name is anything after the @ in your email so for us it would be rekalltech.com. There have been countless situations we have seen where clients either come close or completely lose their domain names forcing them to buy a new domain name. Lets explain how this happens, domain loss repercussions and how to avoid this.
How Do Law Firms Lose Domain Names | People rarely pay attention to domain name renewal emails because they either miss them or don’t understand them and delete them. After a domain’s expiration date there is a grace period depending on your domain host may it be GoDaddy or Network Solutions. After this grace period your domain goes on the open market to be purchased. If someone purchases your domain you will lose it and may lose your website content as well.
Domain Loss Repercussions | When a domain name that has been in use for many years comes up for renewal, various people around the world are aware of this due to public internet record and purchase the domain name as soon as it becomes available. Their ultimate goal is to sell it back to you at a high profit, usually around $2,000. It’s not very nice, but it’s also not illegal. Your domain is connected to your website and email. Lost domains cause lost websites and email stoppages bringing your firm to a crawl. If your web admin did not backup your website, you may have to pay again to redo your website. On top of this you may be forced to to move email hosts to get your email flowing again, we’re talking a full email migration in some cases. These are all very costly repercussions that can easily be avoided by doing the following.
How Can Law Firms Avoid Domain Name Loss?
1. When you buy a domain, buy it for multiple years, 3 – 5. In this way you have confidence that you will not lose your domain name for at least 3 – 5 years.
2. When you purchase your domain, make sure you enable auto-renew. In this way when an domain comes up for renewal, as long as your credit card is good, your domain will auto-renew for a year.
3. Make sure the credit card you use has a long expiration date. If it expires in 6 months, your auto-renew will not work and you may lose your domain when it expires.
4. Make sure and setup a few emails for the domain notification system. People tend to miss email notifications from domain hosts about renewal but if you make it go to 2 or 3 of your email addresses the chance of you missing these emails are lowered, thus the chance of losing your domain is lowered too.
5. Domain expiration dates are setup when you purchase your domain, jot down the expiration date in your Outlook calendar with a 2 week reminder. In this way you will be reminded before the email reminder from your domain host regarding domain expiration.
Law Firm Network Security Considering Subtenants
If your a law firm with a subtenant renting out space within your own firm space there are a few factors to consider regarding your client’s data security and network security as a whole. Rekall works with many firms in New York City where this setup seems to be extremely popular for larger firms renting out to solo practitioners. This article documents a few tips to be aware of if your firm is in this subtenant situation.
Lock Down Your Network | Your IT staff should be able to lock down your network and segment your network both on the hard-wire and WiFi level so that the internet access your tenant is using is segregated from your firm’s internet access & traffic. Having anyone not affiliated with your firm on your firm network is a liability & risk to your client data. On the same network, someone with a little knowledge may be able to get into your workstations or servers. This may not even be the tenant that offers the risk, it may be a tenant’s client that comes onsite for a meeting.
Offer Your Tenant Secure WiFi Access | If your tenant is offered secured private WiFi then there is no reason for them to bring in any hardware that may cause a network issue. There are constant issues that cause havoc with firms when subtenants bring in hardware. They can plug a device into a wrong port and in many cases bring your firm’s network down. On other cases, tenants on your network may bring in their own WiFi hardware and broadcast access to your unsecured network wirelessly, opening up your network to anyone within WiFi range. In the end it’s just easier and more secure to give your tenant the tools they need to work instead of having them try and figure it out on their own and possibly bring down your network in the process.
Multiple Tenant Situations | Rekall supports law firms with 3, 4 and 5 subtenants with networks managed by enterprise level firewalls and 5 way segmented WiFi. For firms who wish to offer printer / scanner / copier services to their subtenants, Rekall has even secured networks while letting all networks have access to a copier device. This is advanced subtenant networking but with the right hardware you can offer your subtenants next level services and shared office resources while keeping your firm completely and 100% secure.
Simple Excel Functions Save Time
The title says it all, simple functions in Excel really save time when calculating a large amount of numbers, creating a proposal or just creating a home budget. Believe it or not it’s not that hard to create an Excel file with functions where you change one number and all the other number update automatically. Today we’ll go over some simple functions that I use daily.
First let’s talk about the sum function. This function does simple addition for any cells you choose. First you have to choose a location where you want you total. Once there click the cell, then hit the Fx function button at the top. The Insert Function window will pop up. Click on Sum in the function list and hit OK. Now the Function Arguments window will pop up. Here you have to highlight the cells you want to calculate. If they are not in a row you may have to hold the Ctrl key and click each cell individually. Alternatively, if the cells are in a row you can always enter the first cell and then a colon : and then the last cell, for example A1:A19. This means that the function will add all the data within the cells together between cells A1 through A19. Once you are done highlighting the cells you wish to calculate, click OK. The Sum should show up in the originally clicked total cell.
Now let’s talk about manual functions. If you remember high school Algebra, Excel works the same way. For example, in the Fx function row at the top of the Excel window, if I click my total cell and type =A1-A2 and hit enter, I’ll get the difference between A1 and A2. You can do the same this for adding, subtracting, multiplication and division just by using the following symbols, +, -, *, /. In this way you can bypass the function wizard and quickly create simple Excel spreadsheets that can track costs, sales, or pretty much anything.
Outlook Categories Increase Firm Productivity
If your like me, you get a ton of email each day. I have found that an easy way to organize my email within Outlook is through the utilization of color categories. With categories I can quickly see my follow up emails based on the color, and I can even create rules having to do with categories. For example, you can make a rule stating that any email coming from a certain address gets a purple color code.
Setting up categories is easy. In Outlook 2013, 2016 on the top bar under the Home tab, look for Tags and then Categorize. Click Categorize and then click All Categories. From this window you will be able to customize your color categories and even name them. I find that deleting the categories I don’t need saves time when I am categorizing my email. Once you are done customizing you should be able to right-click an email, scroll down to Categorize and hit the category that relates to the email.
I generally have a Follow Up category as well as a Potential Client category. Creating categories for important emails having to do with sales and support helps keep me stay on top of potential business and high priority emails. It really does increase productivity and helps stop work from falling between the cracks.
How to Uninstall the May 2016 Windows 10 Forced Update
Microsoft is getting extremely aggressive this week by sending out forcible Windows 10 updates for all Windows 7, 8, 8.1 PC’s. The update is so aggressive it does not offer users a choice to not upgrade, simply an OK button to comply with the upgrade to Windows 10. To explain, this update will automatically update your PC to Windows 10.
10% – 15% of Windows 10 upgrades fail, causing the user for format their PC, the first reason to avoid this update. This is extremely aggressive marketing on the part of Microsoft. Due to security concerns with the operating system we are delaying Windows 10 roll-outs indefinitely and we suggest you do the same. One of the main reasons we are not updating to the latest Windows version is because it is widely known that Microsoft has built-in software that collects end user information, work tracking and other unknown statistics and end user data. The big question for Microsoft is that no one is sure where the spying ends within Windows 10. It is also well known that this data is then sold and used in marketing. Thus the major push for Windows 10 by Microsoft.
Below is a link to a batch file that will uninstall the latest Windows update as of May 15, 2016. You will have to run this file whenever you see the update pop up as it will re-appear as Windows updates naturally. Speak to your IT staff about killing this update on your network once and for all as we are doing this for our law firms. Your IT staff should be able to offer the same service and if not, give us a call.
Simply download, unzip, and run the Remove_MS_Upgrade_To_10.bat file. A black box will pop up and run the uninstallers. You should then restart your PC after 5 minutes to be safe and upon startup you should notice the Windows 10 logo update gone from your time bar at the bottom right of your screen. Please let us know if you have any trouble running this batch file.
5 Reasons Why Law Firms Choose Microsoft Exchange Email
Email is a top priority for law firms. Billing systems can go down, phones can be cut, but when email ceases to flow, this by far causes the most disruption within law firms. There are a lot of email solutions out there, but only one reigns supreme. Below is a list of reasons why Microsoft Exchange / Office 365 email is the number 1 solution for law firms.
Security
The leading competitor to Microsoft email is Google’s Gmail. Microsoft’s security compared to Gmail is simply a joke. Gmail is web based and open to browser hijacking, password phishing scams, and spyware keyloggers looking to steal sensitive personal information, not to mention that Gmail users both corporate and personal are huge targets for hackers. This simply doesn’t happen with Microsoft email because your most likely using Microsoft Outlook instead of the web which is much more secure. In this way security is guaranteed over web based email access.
Email Encryption
Real Estate attorneys must be sending encrypted email when sending sensitive information electronically. This rule is now spilling into more than just real estate law. Encrypted email protects your firm and your client data.
Email Archiving / Journaling
Making an email legal-grade means incorporating solutions that deal with eDiscovery as well. Law firms have the choice to adopt email archiving or email journaling systems which hold all email inbound and outbound for each user in a cloud vault. Users then have the ability to resend old emails or prepare for eDiscovery seamlessly exporting mailboxes with a single click. Emails are secure to the highest degree, offer no deletion options, simply download and forward only. Email is also stored indefinitely or on a 7 year rotation in accordance with firm standards.
Spam / Virus Filtering
While many law firms have spam filtering the more popular spam filtering hosts do not offer virus filtering as well as ransomware prevention. These added layers of security protect your firm and your client data. Another important factor to acknowledge is that spam filtering should be inbound and outbound, not just inbound. In this way email is protected both incoming to your firm and outgoing to other firms or clients.
Migrate Your Firm to Today’s Email Standard
Migrating is easier than you think and for Rekall, this occurs over a weekend with very low downtime. If you interested in organizing your firm email, getting a real domain and stop emailing clients from AOL or GMail, give us a call (800) 554-4166.
PCLaw 15 Review – What’s New?
Over 80% of our clients work with PCLaw traditionally with on-premise servers and with Rekall Cloud. Over the years PCLaw has been plagued with database issues for small to medium firms who utilize the CTREE version as opposed to the more stable SQL version. The stand-out update in this new release of PCLaw 15 is that LexisNexis has totally and 100% switched to the more modern, more stable, SQL database back-end which is excellent for both IT professionals and law firms alike.
PCLaw 15 will be the most stable version of PCLaw that has been released thus far. What does this mean for law firms looking to upgrade? This means that you will have to install a free version of SQL on your server or workstation prior to your install. The same maintenance applies to this new version of PCLaw. You will still have to run monthly VDI’s to keep your database in check and you must make sure that your backup software supports a direct SQL backup otherwise you must contact your IT consultant to organize a manual SQL backup.
While law firms with traditional servers will have a maintenance & backup increase due to new SQL database, clients within the Rekall Cloud will not notice any differences. Law firms on the Rekall Cloud needn’t be worried about these changes as PCLaw maintenance and backups are all organized & automated for all Rekall Cloud clients.
How To Choose the Right Law Firm Cloud Vendor?
There are a lot of cloud companies out there selling cloud services and it can be tough for a “non-techy” person to talk to these companies and actually make the right decision. I thought I would write a quick article outlining a few key points to look for when cloud shopping, some pitfalls to avoid, and what really counts when it comes to securing your law firm data in the cloud.
1. Who Owns & Maintains Your Cloud Server Matters
Typical IT companies offer cloud services but they don’t own their own servers, have never seen their servers, and have no control over the traffic to and from their servers. This becomes problematic when troubleshooting issues on your cloud. Usually this ends up with a lot of finger pointing between the vendor who sold you the cloud an the cloud vendor who maintains the servers, unfortunately the client suffers in the end. Take our advice and go with a company who owns their own servers and offers a private cloud as opposed to reselling public cloud space. Ask if the servers are resold by Azure or Amazon and even ask for a tour of the data facility. It is our experience that is a firm knows where their data is stored they are much more comfortable with the cloud as a whole.
2. Legal Industry Experience Counts
These days there are a lot of cloud companies out there with industry specific experience, don’t be lazy, look for a cloud hosting provider that works in the legal industry. They don’t have to be experts in your software, that’s why you have maintenance contracts with your software vendor, they just need to get you in the cloud with 100% compatibility. They also should know the inner workings of your industry and be able to provide the appropriate support based on the circumstance. Ask for client references within your industry with a similar company size. If you get a glowing reference from a smaller competitor, chances are the vendor can support your karger firm with ease.
3. Ask for a Demo
Demonstrations are important. The vendor should clearly explain to you exactly how the cloud will work if & when you move forward. Test typing in Microsoft Word. Some cloud services suffer from latency and speed issues. Specifically when you type, if you notice a half-second delay, this is not good. It can always be your office internet, but it can also be the cloud. If you notice this, ask your representative how they would go about fixing this.
4. How is Data Protected on the Cloud?
Ask about security, what means and measures are in place to ensure cloud security. How is the cloud secured from the inside & outside. How are clients segregated from each other? Does the cloud support client anonymity? Can other cloud clients find out who you are and what server your using? Is the cloud system monitored? How old is the cloud system altogether? These are all important questions. There are a lot of old cloud companies out there that have been operating since 2007 with very old hardware. This hardware is just not efficient when it comes to today’s speed and efficiency standards. Know the inner workings of your potential cloud vendor.
5. A Backup Plan For the Cloud
Believe it or not, we get this question a lot, “if you go out of business or your company blows up, how can I get access to my data.” It’s a morbid question but serious one none the less. We answer this by offering a free local backup to your office. Every night your cloud data syncs with a local device in your office. The sync offers all firm data in one shot. Int he case of an emergency the firm would need to hire a new cloud vendor or IT company, extract the data and get the firm up and running which would take 1 to 2 days. This is our solution to this question, hopefully other cloud vendors out there have a similar answer. We used to think it was a crazy question, but after being asked over 50 times we started to consider it an extremely valid question.
PCLaw – A Rekall Review
Is your firm established and your thinking about changing billing systems?
PCLaw Overview
Time Tracking, Billing & Accounting in One App is Key
PCLaw Key Features
- Advanced Reporting Capabilities
- Time Tracking
- Expense Tracking
- Batch Invoicing
- Hourly & Flat-Fee Billing
- Split, Project & Contingency Billing
- LEDES Billing
- Trust Accounting
- Accounts Payable (AP)
- Accounts Receivable (AR)
- Banking & Bank Linking
- Document / Case Management
- Firm Calendaring
- Integration with Outlook & Word
- Integration with Amicus Attorney
- Integration with Time Matters
PCLaw – The Good
- All in One Simplicity. As IT people we really prefer the all-in-one model vs. the multiple package model, it makes our lives easier and causes less headache and downtime for our clients. Amicus Attorney is trying to do this but it’s just not there yet, they’re accounting package is simply not as robust as PCLaw plus PCLaw has the experience wither 15 versions of their product.
- Practice Management Features. PCLaw does support limited practice management features that we feel should be utilized by small firms. These features are not as robust as an Amicus Attorney or Time Matters for that matter but we have a few very happy clients that use them successfully. Mainly we’re talking about firm calendar organization, and document management. I feel that firms don’t utilize these functionalities because they are not aware that the application has these capabilities. As a whole, it’s pretty cool that PCLaw can also be a document management system and firm management platform in addition to time, billing & accounting. There is no other application that can perform all these functions.
- Quick Setup & Intuitive. With very limited assistance an attorney or legal admin can setup PCLaw in around 25 minutes. The application itself is intuitive. We have setup PCLaw for firms very quickly and all the info we needed to accomplish this was specific attorney billing rates so attorneys bill out at the right dollar amounts. It’s fast for firms who are new to PCLaw and even faster for new firms who begin with PCLaw experience.
PCLaw – The Bad & The Ugly
- Lexis Support is OK at Best. As IT people we’re in contact with support pretty often. It’s scary when you know more than the person on the other end of the line who is supposed to help you, and this not only happens to PCLaw support but also to Amicus, TimeSlips, iManage & Worldox support. Terrible software support is a problem in the industry in general, not specific to PCLaw. Just expect when you call the first time to get someone who knows next to nothing and push for a level 2 technician ASAP so you can get your issue fixed and move on with your life. Contacting level 3 support for major database corruption issues are not easy. There are a ton of hoops to jump through and you can’t call them, they can only call you. The good thing is that the Level 3 people are PCLaw geniuses and will undoubtedly fix your issues, if you can get a hold to one.
- PCLaw Database Corruption. In the past, versions of PCLaw before v15 are prone to database corruption. There are a few things you can do to combat against this. First a foremost, have a daily backup of your database. Often when you call support with a corrupt database, support tells you to do a restore. Support will ALWAYS tell you to restore from a previous day before fixing anything. They may be able to easily fix the issue but push for a restore. The problem with restoring is when you restore from a previous day you lose all the time billed between today and the restoration day. You then have to remember in detail all that time that was lost, and re-enter it. There is a strong chance you can grab the time from the corrupt database, but sometimes you can’t. This is a worst case scenario that does happen from time to time. The second thing you can do is run a verify data integrity on your PCLaw database every 2 weeks or every month. This reorganizes the database and fights against corruption. We find many new clients that have never run this VDI tool in years. PCLaw has to improve awareness on the importance of running this tool on a regular basis.
- PCLaw Bookkeepers are Scarce. When you go with PCLaw you have two choices. Have your bookkeeper go through the paid LexisNexis training regiment & learn the software, or hire someone from another firm proficient in PCLaw. You may have a hard time finding someone with PCLaw skills. For new firms with smaller budgets, the managing attorney may have to learn the software first and transfer the knowledge due to the overhead cost of hiring a PCLaw bookkeeper guru. What we’re trying to say is that PCLaw bookkeepers are out there, you just have to find them, and it may be a challenging task.
Rekall Finds Judgement in Favor of PCLaw
PCLaw Cloud Hosting – The Next Generation
Related Page Legal Apps in the Cloud
PCLaw™ is a registered trademark of LexisNexis®
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800-554-4166