A hearty greeting to the Law Practice Technology blog audience. I am your host for the day (and hopefully the foreseeable future), and I can't wait to get started.
By way of introduction, my name is Jude Travers-Frazier, and I have been asked by Pam McDevitt and Barbara Beauchamp to moderate this forum. I know Pam through my involvement with the NYSBA Law Practice Management Committee, and as one of the "technology" representatives for the group, it seemed like a good fit.
I won't bore you with additional details about myself (although anyone keen to learn about me is welcome to reach out - I am available through e-mail at travers-frazier@kraftkennedy.com). Rather, I'll set about doing what I've been tasked to do: generate some discussion about tech-related topics that should hopefully prove to be of interest to our readership. So let's get started, shall we?
While tech topics du jour come and go, there's a good one that's been around since the first day someone attached a piece of paper to a floppy disk with a magnetized paper clip and lost the data on the disk: backups.
Since I'm not yet sure who the audience for the LPT is going to prove to be, I'll toss this out to the masses: do you backup your data? If so, how? If not, why not?
There are too many different options out there to list them all: some people use external hard drives and some have offices with server rooms and tape backups; some people use online backup services while others use online document management services and don't store any data locally.
So let's hear it. How do you backup your data? If you are a partner or associate in a firm, what's your perception of how the firm handles its backup requirements? (Yes, that question is very deliberately phrased - far too often there is a significant discrepancy between what partners believe their firm is doing to protect critical data and what the actual IT backup systems are providing).
I'll let everyone go with a parting comment: I expect that my blogging to this forum will follow the same pattern that my CLE presentations follow (if you have ever attended one of my sessions you'll likely know what I mean). The greatest gain will be through the give-and-take of the questions and answers (I think the blog equivalent will be to use the 'comments' function). While I will strive to make my posts be informative and useful, I hope and expect active participation from the readership: comments, questions, ideas, objections, concerns... there is too much "technology" out there for any one person to be aware of it all. Your input is what will help flesh out the detail for the topics that get started here. Hopefully through active involvement, we can turn this into something of value to everyone.
Thanks for your time, have a great day, hope to hear from you soon, and welcome to the LPT!
-Jude