Out here in the little law office on the prairie, horsepower and hydraulics rule, so the term mobile is very, very broad; this is farm country where 1200 pound hay bales are stacked in the barn like Lego™blocks, and 2000 pound cows are lifted to table height to save the farrier’s back. Folks out here are much more impressed by the technology that makes large things mobile than they are in lightweight mobile technology – after all, it is far more awe inspiring to watch a 4 man crew lift a house and move it 60 feet to the right than it is to watch one guy pick up a laptop and walk down the street.
Now, don’t get me wrong – I dearly love those dainty bits of battery sucking silicon that keep me tethered to the outside world. The fact is, I was mobile when being mobile was all about lead/acid batteries and 9 inch black and white screens. It was an era when laptops the size of a suitcase weighing in at 16 pounds were considered sexy enough to rate a swimsuit models for their magazine cover shots. It seems that, back in the day, courting a hernia was a sure path to the halls of übergeekdom and god-like sex appeal. While there were obvious strength-training benefits to those early luggable computers, today’s flyweight devices do wonders for encouraging the road warrior’s cardio-fitness as they allow facile movement between car and coffeehouse, coffeehouse and gym without the need to ever cut that etheric umbilicus cord that links us to our data.
For the rural lawyer, mobile technology’s promise of 24/7 access is but a siren’s song; luring us ever forward in the hopes of finding true connectivity only to dash all hopes upon the rocks of rural realities. For all that rural life offers – bucolic vistas, the tranquil peace of a meandering brook, the intoxicating smell of newly mown hay – the reality is that all this rural beauty comes at a price. The one thing those vistas, brooks, and hay fields have in common is that they are usually found at some distance from areas of high population density and all of the wonderful infrastructure that blesses modern suburbia. So, as one travels those scenic country roads that wind their way through woods and over hills on your way to meet a client, you will find your path to be strewn with potholes both in the road and in the ether and its even odds that your destination will lie in one of those areas that cellular cover maps label terra incognita and warn travelers that hic sunt dracones.
There are tricks to going mobile out here in the hinterlands of technology, this inconsistent connectivity is, after all, the mother of, if not innovation, at least creativity. From the rather primitive concept of storing active files on encrypted flash drives to exotic solutions like revision control systems, the rural lawyer can take his office to go.
The mobile rural lawyer may still cart around a 16 pound briefcase, this weight being distributed across an array of technology from ultra-lightweight laptops to slim, compact projectors and their concomitant silicon, but the goal is more about efficiency than it is about achieving demigod status amongst one’s peers.
When considering investing in law firm technology, the lawyer needs remember that small town and rural clients really don’t care about the technology their lawyer uses; frankly, I’ve not met a client yet, big town or small that cared one whit whether I used a typewriter or a laptop. Clients are solely interested in outcomes; specifically, they are interested in a solution to their immediate problem and, if pushed, are willing to pay for it. Its a bit like the attitude most folks have about sausage, they want something that tastes good, but don’t care to know about the journey from pig to table. So, the technology we choose needs to have a positive impact on outcomes; it needs to make us more efficient, to allow us to provide faster, more accurate, or more comprehensive services. It needs to improve our ability to communicate with our clients, to reduce our overhead, or improve our ability to stay focused on the tasks that pay the bills.
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