P2P

Fall20

Peer to Peer: ILTA's Quarterly Magazine

Issue link: https://epubs.iltanet.org/i/1293067

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41 I L T A N E T . O R G (ILTA>ON Poll) Have you in the past six months or do you plan to change your method(s) for providing user remote access to your network? • No Change (49%) • Increasing Citrix Licenses and/or Servers (34%) • Moving Citrix Users to VPN (11%) • Adding Always-on VPN (19%) • Other (9%) We saw a lot of firms increase the number of people accessing their networks using Citrix and others trying to move off Citrix to provide a better user experience. In this new reality of more hybrid work locations, deciding what investment you are making in the user experience of remote access will be key to your firm's success. (ILTA>ON Poll) What changes have you made with respect to technology training in the past six months? • No Changes (6%) • Added self-service options - pre- recorded videos and online resources (49%) • Added Virtual Trainer availability (36%) • Replaced in person training classes with virtual classes (66%) • Expanded training topics (ex. video depositions, virtual notary, How to Use MS Teams, RTW) (55%) This is one area where adapting to a new reality may save costs and positively impact your 2021 budget. Firms have done complete rollouts of new software since March and are finding surprising success with using Zoom and Teams instead of in-person training sessions. One model is to have live Teams training sessions, with groups of 10-5 people in each session, interactive, questions, screen-sharing, recording those sessions in Teams, saving the videos in MS Streams, creating a content library in Stream. A suggestion that is being picked up by many firms is to create Zoom rooms for help-desk, people can jump in anytime, a type of Zoom Genius Bar. What projects do you have in your pipeline that you could work through a new training model with? Other Considerations Office Space – firms are rethinking how they use the space, with a paradigm shift from the traditional assignment method. Many now allow flexible use of offices and often anyone is able to use any open office. Others have put office moves on hold or made changes to how they will use the space they have already committed a move to. What's your firm's philosophy on office space in this COVID era and how will 2021 tech budgets be impacted? Technology Projects - Your list of 2020 and 2021 projects also probably looks different than it did in March. While many projects have been deferred or shelved, there are many others going ahead and new ones being added. One difference seems to be in how badly the bottom line has been hit because of COVID and how badly the firm's clients have been hit. Another difference is how the firm is adapting to new realities and how well they are pivoting to providing support for their clients, whatever that might mean. Projects that are getting funding seem mainly to be those that tie back to the business and how the business is adapting to client needs. How are you helping support better collaboration with clients and customers? Are you able to show that proposed projects feed that collaboration and will improve your firm's business prospects? Workflow Changes – we're seeing lots of firms who have focused on going more paperless through the last six months. Most firms are not providing printers to users at home and most are also not wanting to have someone in the office printing everything and distributing it to home offices. There are the exceptions, firms where Prebills are snail mailed to lawyers for review, or someone sits in a parking lot and has drive- up service for lawyers to pick up their packages. Where there is an openness to changing the processes, big strides have been made in an area that many people told us would not have been possible pre-COVID. Many firms are also scanning mail that comes into the firm and distributing it by email. Some firms did this as a temporary measure and aren't yet sure if they'll continue post-COVID. Agile firms are open to all of this on a long term basis and are focusing on finding those places where printing or paper copies can be eliminated. Automation Projects – there are so many manual processes out there that could and should be automated. You can be asking questions around which of those provide your firm with better user 4 5

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