Mac-Using Home Office Lawyer

Mac-using lawyer Ed Siebel has written an article, “Tech Counsel: Solo on a Mac,” which explains how he integrates techology into his home-based practice. Mr. Siebel details how his network is set up and also what hardware and software he uses in his practice. His article was recently published in Law Technology News, and it’s worth checking out.

Some highlights from his article:

• I’ve stayed with Macs for a single reason — they just work. Simply, consistently and at a high quality. They help me work solo or in a small office without worrying about my computer, essentially without the need for tech support.

• The server in my office is a 12-year-old 120 MHz PowerMac with 80MB of RAM and a 500MB hard disk running server software… I would venture to guess that not many law offices could survive with a 12-year-old server at the center their operations.
• I haven’t had a system crash in perhaps a year on my desktop machine. Oh, occasionally one of the applications will crash, but it doesn’t affect the others.
• Any document from any application can be saved into Adobe’s PDF format. You print to a PDF file, instead of a printer, using a drop-down menu — just like selecting different paper trays. Makes electronic filing or eliminating metadata a snap.
• Because Apple controls both the hardware and the software, all applications use the same conventions. For instance, access to the Print dialog window is always in the File menu of every application, which is always the second menu from the left edge of the menu bar at the top of the screen. The same keystrokes bring up the Print dialog in all applications. So when you learn one application, you already know the basic functions in every other program.
• One of the best advantages of using Apple is that you can just about forget about viruses, because there aren’t many that can penetrate Macs.

Thanks to Grant Griffiths of the Home Office Lawyer blog for his post about this article.