Throw Back Thursday: Not Your Father's Law Firm

"As lawyers we sell words. Advice and good counsel are certainly prerequisites, but when it comes down to the tangible, visible work product that most clients see, take away the ability to get documents out and a firm is dead in the water."

Good Morning Folks,

Today we're joining the rest of the blogging world with a weekly feature "Throw Back Thursdays."

At FSO our success comes from an uncanny ability to (re)IMAGINE a very different future than what exists today— and to bring those innovations our clients long before their competitors have a clue.

Whether dictated, typed, cut and pasted, the written word remains at the very core of business, especially in legal where documentation may have migrated to digital, but every letter in that documentation still starts with a human being and a keyboard.

As the American Bar Association argued, "As lawyers we sell words. Advice and good counsel are certainly prerequisites, but when it comes down to the tangible, visible work product that most clients see, we’re wordsmiths and wordsellers. A law firm can survive for a time without its automated calendars, without its billing and accounting systems, without its litigation management programs and . . . (gasp) . . . even without Internet access. But take away the ability to get documents out and a firm is dead in the water."

The progress for office productivity in the past ten years has been greater than the entire five decades before it. And there are so many start-ups, so many ideas, we don't see innovation slowing down anytime soon. The pace is fast. There is no time for stragglers to catch up.

Back office history / inventions / progress which I will blog about on Thursdays to include the introductions of the typewriter, Selectric, word processor, postage meter, fax, overnight, copiers, email and cloud— will all show that what we once accepted as productivity changed overnight just as someone came along and imagined a new and different way of doing things. For your office today we are that "someone" and you need such a person in your corner.

Just look at how the legal profession got accustomed to using a "Word Perfect" word processing program that became out of sync with everyone else working with Microsoft Office. That can't afford to happen in 2014. The competition is tougher than ever and you need to leverage every productivity and service booster you can muster.

Have a GREAT day and LOVE LIFE as I look forward to seeing all of you soon.

Mitchell D. Weiner
Chief Happiness Officer

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“Imagination is more powerful than knowledge"
~~ Albert Einstein
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