To Mr. Smith,
The Law Offices of Mr. Robert
Smith should consider a transition from the traditional Microsoft Office suite
to a system that operates on Google Drive. Currently the administrative staff and attorneys are using the
Microsoft Office 2007 version, which was acquired at a cost of approximately
$250 per license. The training
costs and productivity lost in adopting Microsoft Office was minimal, and
likely would be similar if we were to implement the forthcoming Microsoft
Office 2013 that the firm is planning to purchase at a cost of $400 per
license. The cost for Google Apps
for Business is either $5 or $10 per user, depending on if we opt for the more
expensive option with data retrieval and archiving services.
There are definite benefits
the firm would derive from adopting Google Drive. Since you are already well versed in the features of Google
Drive I will not bore you with any explanations of the technology but rather
just how some of the product’s aspects can improve the efficiency of the
firm. Currently, when an attorney
is on the road between clients or the courthouse, they are able to receive
emails through Outlook on their smartphones. However, inboxes are cluttered and some attorneys have found
it difficult to search for a document while in transit. The Google Drive application for
Android and iPhone is both free and straightforward. Documents are stored alphabetically or by date and can be
easily accessed. Additionally, a
secretary can be editing the document in real time while the attorney is
viewing it on his phone. If for
any reason the lawyer needs to save a picture (for example if our criminal law
specialist wanted to capture some detail of a location), the Google Drive App
has a very simple “take a photo” feature that will store the picture for later
recall. Considering that most of
our lawyers are over the age of 55, the ease of use of Google Drive’s
smartphone application is essential.
One of the reasons we
should consider a move to Google Drive is the benefit of centralization. Significant productivity is lost when
an attorney or administrative staff member wastes time poring over file folders
to find the specific version of a brief or letter they are looking for. Currently when a secretary edits a
document multiple times in Microsoft Office, there does exist a trail of these
changes in the different copies of the file that is saved. However, as a document is updated over
the course of months or years, the tens or hundreds of revisions can be very
hard to trace. In Google Docs, the
revision history shows exactly the time and date of each change and offers the
option to restore the document to the original state prior to the
modification. At an average salary
for our administrative staff of $17/hour and an average billable rate for our
attorneys at $250/hour, if this technology were to save 100 hours a year for
administrators and 100 hours a year for attorneys, that would be a net savings
of almost $27,000. Although these
numbers are an estimate and relatively arbitrary, you can see how Google Drive
could provide tangible results.
Considering that the
learning curve for Google Drive is not steep and that centralization would
allow emails, private messaging, and document storage to occur all within the
same system, I would recommend that the firm on a trial basis transition to
Google Drive. I do understand that
our firm maintains sensitive information in our database and some critics of
the technology have suggested that Google Drive is insecure and susceptible to
hacking. However, Google does
encrypt the data between its clients computers and its servers to prevent any
data interception1 and government agencies in 44 states and
Washington D.C. have placed enough faith in the safety of Google Drive to
secure internal documents on their servers. Satisfied with the integrity of Google’s protection for its
users files, I suggest that Google Drive would be an improvement for our firm’s
IT system.
