How We Run a Modern Law Practice

The paper problem is the first problem every law firm has to solve. After trying several scanner brands over the years, we settled on Fujitsu ScanSnap as the clear standard — and we haven't looked back. The speed, reliability, and image quality at volume simply aren't matched by anything else in this price category.

What it does for us: New client documents, mail, signed agreements, financial statements — everything physical becomes digital the moment it arrives. The duplex scanning handles two-sided documents in a single pass. The automatic document feeder handles stacks without babysitting. Scans go directly into the right folder in our system, properly named, within seconds.

In elder law, where we routinely receive boxes of financial records for Medicaid look-back audits, a fast and reliable scanner isn't optional — it's infrastructure.

ClickScan is what turns a good scanner into a great workflow. It's the bridge between the physical document in the feeder and the right location in our practice management system. With a single click, a scanned document lands in the correct matter folder — named correctly, date-stamped, and ready to work with.

Why it matters: Most firms scan to a generic folder and then spend time filing documents manually. ClickScan eliminates that step entirely. In a busy practice handling dozens of active matters, the time savings add up to hours per week — and more importantly, it removes a category of human error entirely. A misfiled document in elder law can have real consequences.

Clio is the hub of our practice — the place where every client matter lives, every task is tracked, every bill is generated, and every client communication is logged. We chose Clio after evaluating alternatives including MyCase and practice-specific platforms, and it has proven to be the right choice for a firm of our size and complexity.

Clio Manage handles matter management, document storage, time tracking, billing, and trust accounting. Every member of our team works in Clio throughout the day. When a client calls, anyone on staff can open their matter and see the full history in seconds.

Clio Grow is our intake engine. The questionnaires you see on our website — for estate planning, asset protection, Medicaid planning, and more — are all built and served through Clio Grow. A prospective client completes a form on their phone or computer, and it flows directly into our system. No transcription, no lost faxes, no phone tag to gather basic information.

The client portal — Clio for Clients — means secure document sharing without email. Clients access their matter documents, review invoices, and communicate with us through a secure interface that works on any device. In elder law, where many clients are managing a parent's affairs from a distance, this is not a convenience — it's essential.

We have been ahead of most law firms in adopting artificial intelligence as a genuine working tool, and Claude — developed by Anthropic — is our AI assistant of choice. We use it daily, across multiple categories of work.

Research and synthesis: When a new Medicaid regulation is issued or a state policy changes, Claude helps us understand it quickly, identify implications, and draft an internal summary before we advise clients. It handles complex reading tasks that would otherwise take an attorney an hour in under a minute.

First-draft generation: Letters to clients, explanatory memos, responses to government agencies — Claude produces solid first drafts that our attorneys review and refine. This does not replace attorney judgment. It does eliminate the blank-page problem and cut drafting time significantly.

Client communication: We use Claude to help draft plain-language explanations of complex Medicaid rules, trust structures, and estate plans for clients who need the information in clear terms, not legal terms.

A note on bar compliance: Nothing Claude produces leaves our office without attorney review. We treat AI output the same way we treat a paralegal's draft — as a starting point, not a final product. Every client deliverable is attorney-reviewed and attorney-signed. That discipline is not optional.

Estate planning documents — wills, trusts, powers of attorney, healthcare directives — follow predictable structures with variables that change by client. HotDocs is the industry standard for automating that assembly, and we have invested years in building a comprehensive library of templates that reflect exactly how we practice.

What this means in practice: When a client completes an intake questionnaire, that information flows into HotDocs and populates a complete, customized document set — with client names, asset details, beneficiary designations, agent names, and all other variables inserted accurately throughout. What once took hours of word processing now takes minutes, with a fraction of the transcription error risk.

Our HotDocs templates are not generic. They reflect 30 years of refinement — every clause, every carve-out, every election that we've learned matters for Pennsylvania elder law clients. That library is one of the most valuable assets in our practice.

Microsoft 365 is the operating system of the modern law office, and we are fully committed to it. Word, Excel, Outlook, and Teams handle the daily communication and document work of the firm. But the layer that makes it genuinely powerful for us is SharePoint.

SharePoint as our document backbone: Every document we create lives in SharePoint — organized by matter, accessible from any device, version-controlled, and backed up automatically. When a paralegal creates a Medicaid application in Chalfont and an attorney needs to review it from home, it's there immediately. This is what a truly paperless office looks like.

The integration advantage: Microsoft 365 integrates with Clio, with HotDocs, and with virtually every other platform we use. That interconnection means data flows between systems rather than being re-entered, which is where errors creep in and time gets wasted.

Word is the document production environment for the legal profession, and we use it at every stage of our work. Our HotDocs templates produce Word documents, which attorneys then review, mark up with tracked changes, and finalize. Every letter, memo, and transmittal we send originates in Word.

After many years, we know Word deeply — and that depth matters. Proper use of styles, section breaks, and field codes is what separates a document that behaves well across edits and versions from one that falls apart when someone touches it. We have standardized our document templates firm-wide so that every document we produce looks and behaves consistently.

Excel is not glamorous, but it is indispensable in elder law. Medicaid planning requires precise financial analysis — asset inventories, spend-down calculations, annuity projections, income-to-cost-of-care comparisons. We have built a library of Excel models over the years that do this work quickly and accurately.

For estate administration matters, Excel tracks asset values at date of death, distributions to beneficiaries, and fiduciary accounting. For tax planning, it runs projections. We use it constantly. Any attorney who dismisses Excel as a beginner tool has never tried to do a Medicaid asset spend-down analysis without one.

Yes, WordPerfect. We know what you're thinking — but in legal practice, WordPerfect has never fully gone away, and there are good reasons for that. Its reveal codes feature gives attorneys a level of document control that Word's formatting system simply doesn't match. For certain document types, particularly those requiring complex formatting precision, WordPerfect is still the right tool.

We maintain WordPerfect alongside Word because the legal community has not uniformly moved on from it — courts, agencies, and co-counsel may produce documents in either format — and because our team has decades of proficiency in it. The lesson here is not that every old tool deserves a place; it's that the right tool for a specific job is worth keeping even when the world has moved on.

PDF is the delivery format for virtually every document a law firm sends — to clients, to courts, to agencies, to opposing counsel. Adobe Acrobat Pro is the tool we use to create, manage, and secure those PDFs.

Where it earns its place: Acrobat's ability to combine documents, add Bates numbering, redact sensitive information, apply password protection, and create fillable forms makes it a genuine production tool, not just a viewer. For estate administration, we routinely compile exhibit packages that combine dozens of documents into a single organized PDF — Acrobat does that well.

Electronic signature integration means clients can execute certain documents without printing, signing, scanning, and returning — a process that used to take days and now takes minutes.

Law firm finances are not simple. Billing cycles, trust accounting, payroll, vendor payments, quarterly taxes, and year-end reporting all have to be managed accurately and in compliance with professional responsibility rules. QuickBooks handles our accounting, and it integrates with Clio's billing output so that revenue data flows between systems without manual reconciliation.

For a small firm without a dedicated controller, QuickBooks is what makes clean financial reporting possible. We know our numbers in real time — accounts receivable, trust balances, operating expenses, and profitability by practice area — because the system keeps them current automatically.

Lackner 6-in-1 is purpose-built for Pennsylvania estate administration, and it shows. The software handles the full lifecycle of an estate matter — from the initial inventory through fiduciary accountings, beneficiary schedules, and Pennsylvania Inheritance Tax returns. There is no general-purpose accounting software that handles the fiduciary accounting requirements of Pennsylvania estates as cleanly as Lackner does.

Why it matters for our clients: Estate administration involves a paper trail that must be precise — every asset accounted for, every distribution documented, every tax obligation satisfied before the estate closes. Lackner produces court-ready accountings and PA-specific tax forms in formats that the Register of Wills and the Department of Revenue expect. Our paralegal Alice has deep expertise in this software, which is one reason our estate administration practice runs as efficiently as it does.

For a Pennsylvania estate administration practice, Lackner is not an optional nicety — it is the right tool for the job, and using the right tool is the difference between efficient, accurate work and constant manual adjustment.

Every online presence starts with a domain name, and domain management is one of those invisible infrastructure decisions that matters more than most people realize. We use Namecheap for domain registration and DNS management because of its straightforward pricing, clean control panel, and reliable service over many years.

For a law firm, control of your domain is control of your online identity. We recommend that every firm maintain direct ownership and access to their domain registration — not delegated to a web developer or agency who may come and go. Namecheap makes that control clear and accessible without requiring deep technical knowledge.

Privacy isn't optional in a law practice — attorney-client confidentiality extends to how data travels across the internet, not just how it's stored. We run WireGuard, a modern open-source VPN protocol, on our Ubiquiti UniFi Dream Machine Pro at the office. The Windows client on any staff machine connects back to that server, meaning traffic from outside the office travels through an encrypted tunnel rather than exposed over whatever network happens to be available.

WireGuard is technically elegant — faster and leaner than older VPN protocols like OpenVPN, with a much smaller attack surface. But the practical benefit is simple: whether I'm at a courthouse, a client's home, or a hotel, the connection behaves as if I'm sitting in the office. For a firm handling sensitive estate and Medicaid matters, that's not a luxury — it's basic professional hygiene.

Every office generates a steady stream of internal paperwork — invoices, vendor statements, utility bills, insurance documents, bank statements, and the dozens of other records that accumulate in a functioning business. For years, managing those meant creating folders manually and copying each document into the right place. Paperless-NGX eliminates that entirely. Documents come in, get scanned, and the system automatically OCR's them (making every word searchable), tags them, and files them — no human decision required about where something goes.

When we need something — an invoice from eight months ago, last quarter's statement — it's there in seconds. No digging through folders, no wondering which subfolder it landed in. And because Paperless-NGX runs on our own hardware with an automatic backup copy going to the NAS, the archive is always available and always protected. This is how office document management should work, and I think it represents where computing is headed for small professional offices: automation handling the mechanical work so people can focus on the work that actually requires them.

Email has a size limit, and estate planning documents — deed packages, Medicaid application bundles, trust drafts with exhibits — routinely exceed it. We use Google Drive as a secure, friction-free channel for delivering large document sets to clients. A shared link goes out by email; the client opens it in any browser, on any device, with no software to install and no account required to view.

We keep Google Drive scoped specifically to client document sharing rather than using it as general internal storage. That clarity matters — clients get a clean, professional handoff, and we maintain a clear separation between client-facing document delivery and our internal file systems. It does one job and does it well.

Not everything lives in the cloud, and not everything should. For local files that aren't cloud-synced — working documents, archived records, software installers, system files — we use Robocopy, Windows' built-in robust file copy utility, to mirror those files to a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device on the office network. Robocopy handles large file sets efficiently, skips files that haven't changed, and logs what it copies — making it a reliable, auditable backup tool that doesn't require a subscription or a third-party service.

The NAS sits on the office network as a always-available local backup — fast to restore from if something goes wrong, and completely under our control. Paired with our cloud-based backups for Clio and Microsoft 365, this gives us a layered backup posture: cloud for collaboration, local for speed and independence.

Recurring tasks are a tax on attention — every time a human has to remember to run a backup, generate a report, or kick off a sync, there's an opportunity for it to be forgotten or delayed. Windows Task Scheduler eliminates that category of error by running those jobs automatically on a defined schedule, whether or not anyone is in the office.

We use Task Scheduler to trigger our Robocopy backup jobs, run maintenance scripts, and automate other routine operations that would otherwise require manual intervention. It's one of Windows' most underused built-in tools — no additional software, no cost, and it simply runs in the background without drawing attention to itself. The best automation is the kind you forget is there because it never fails.

Managing credentials across a law practice — and the nine organizations we support — is a genuine security challenge. Weak passwords and password reuse are among the most common vectors for a data breach, and a firm handling sensitive elder law matters cannot afford that exposure. RoboForm is our web-based password manager, used across all staff, that generates strong unique passwords for every account, stores them securely, and makes them available across devices without anyone having to remember or write them down.

The multi-user capability is what makes RoboForm practical for a firm rather than just an individual tool. Shared credentials — for systems that staff access collectively — can be stored and accessed without ever exposing the underlying password. When a staff member leaves, access is revoked centrally rather than requiring a password change cascade across dozens of systems. For nine organizations with distinct Microsoft 365 tenants, DNS configurations, and hosting accounts, that kind of credential discipline isn't optional — it's the foundation everything else is built on.

Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) gives us a full Linux command-line environment running natively inside Windows — no virtual machine, no dual boot. That means the same scripting tools available to a developer running Linux or macOS are available from within our Windows workflow. For a firm that maintains a 25-page static website, manages DNS for nine organizations, and generates custom legal documents, that capability has real practical value.

Python scripts running in WSL handle tasks that would otherwise require repetitive manual effort: bulk navigation updates across all 25 website pages in a single pass, automated generation of fillable PDF intake questionnaires, and production of referral card print files. What once took hours of careful manual HTML editing now runs in seconds with a verified, repeatable script. The time saved goes back into client work — which is where attorney time belongs.