ANSWER: Home-based offices and telecommuting are two of the hottest trends among legal professionals who want more balance between home and professional lives. Indeed, increasing numbers of professionals are making their home office their primary office; trading commuting time for time spent with their family or hobbies. Still others work primarily in a traditional office but bring work home and need to communicate with the office to share files and check e-mail.

Home offices come in two basic varieties: those that are the exclusive office location for the practice and those that serve as an after-hours office. Some of the technical and logistic issues are the same for either type; other issues are specific to home-based offices.

There are a number of peripheral issues to consider in establishing a home office. Will you ever meet clients there? Depending on your practice area and client base, you may meet clients at their office, at the courthouse, by telephone or at a rent-an-office facility. How much space do you have available for a home office? Are you limited by the number of telephone lines you can add? Will you have to share a phone line for your fax or modem activities? Will you have an assistant who needs a computer? Who else will need to use the computer and for what purposes?

To have a fully functioning home office, you will, of course, want a computer. If your home office will be the primary one, you might want to consider a laptop instead of a desktop. If your home office will be your second office, a laptop may be worth the extra expenditure since it will allow you to work with the same information from home or your office. The main advantage of the laptop is you can take it with you when meeting clients at their home or office. If you’re tight for space, a laptop may help keep your work space more manageable.

The disadvantages of a laptop for a home-based office are they are more expensive with less capability and will not be as suitable to share with family members who want to surf the Internet or use CD-ROM programs. Buying a computer that can be used during the day for a law practice and for children’s educational pursuits or personal finance in the evening involves a greater expenditure than a typical computer used solely in a law office. Computers intended for home use come with much more software than those configured for office use. Removing these programs can sometimes be tricky.

Extras

Most new computers will include a CD-ROM drive. More and more, software is being sold on CD-ROMs rather than dozens of diskettes. The convenience cannot be underrated. Newer computers have 32X or faster drives. If your budget is not limited, you might want to look into the new rewriteable CD drives from Sony, Hewlett Packard, Memorex, Ricoh and others. These allow storage of large quantities of information on CD-ROMs you can create yourself. There are some compatibility issues with these new CDs, so be careful when treading into this area. These devices also might serve to backup your system although I find tape units more convenient since I can backup my entire computer overnight onto a single tape. It’s a good idea to get all the options you want in the computer initially so you don’t have the cost of installing them later.

A fax modem is a must for either type of home office. For the primary home office, the convenience of being able to fax documents prepared on your computer as easily as you would print them is well-worth the $100 to $200 investment. For remote offices, you benefit not only from the faxing capability but you also can use the modem to dial into your office system. As of now, you should be purchasing a 56kb model.

If you tend to fax documents to clients that weren’t created on your computer, you have three options. First, you can purchase a scanner and scan the documents into your computer, then fax them with your fax modem. The second choice is to purchase an inexpensive fax machine for outgoing faxes for documents not produced on your computer. The third option is an all-in-one device that can serve as a fax, color ink-jet printer, scanner and photocopier.

Because there isn’t a big price difference between plain faxes and all-in-ones, I’d recommend the latter for fax capability. If your space or budget is limited, the all-in-one could serve all these intended purposes. Be forewarned, however, that most functions it performs are not as well-done as machines intended for those specific purposes. In other words, the scanner isn’t as good as a true scanner, the printer is an ink jet and will be slower and poorer quality than a laser, etc.

Printer

The ideal home office should include an inexpensive laser printer. Starting at $400, it will provide more professional output and more efficiency than all-in-one devices. I have found it preferable to have a laser printer connected to my computer and use the all-in-one fax as an incoming fax machine. It is always there as a backup in case my main printer or photocopier fails.

If your budget and space allow, you should consider a separate photocopier and possibly a scanner. Depending on your work load, you may find it more cost-effective in the long run to splurge on a copier with a document feeder. This will spare the need to stand over the machine while copying several pages.

Scanners have come down in price dramatically over the past five years. Starting at about $250, you can get a scanner that can be used for documents and photographs. Be careful to get software that can do optical character recognition (OCR) that will convert the picture of your document into a useable format that can be edited in your word processor. This software isn’t always included at the low end of the price range although it is not very expensive. Companies like Visioneer (Visioneer Inc., 34800 Campus Drive, Freemont, Calif. 94555 www.visioneer.com) include the Textbridge Pro OCR software from Xerox in its PaperPort Deluxe 6.0 software program. The Paperport software is a superb way to organize scanned documents because you scan, organize, store, OCR, share and publish your documents and images.

Many small law firms are starting to move toward the paperless office. This term, coined by legal technology consultant Ross Kodner in Milwaukee, uses a combination of scanning and document management like Worldox and a case management program like Time Matters to eliminate much of the unnecessary paper that law offices (and others) tend to accumulate. Outgoing documents are tracked in either Worldox or Time Matters as they are created. Incoming documents are scanned. If they don’t need to be edited as documents, you can store the graphic image of the document as an incoming document in either Worldox or Time Matters. This approach eliminates documents such as memos to the file and other status notes about cases and saves time for everyone in the office to find information. They no longer have to go to the physical file to see the documents.

This system would work well for a solo or small firm where some or all the lawyers plan to work from home. The ability to have all the contents of a client file on the computer means you can be more-effective when dialing in from home or on the road.

Phone line

You should have a dedicated telephone line for your home office and a separate number for your fax modem. Even if you have a single line, you should get a telephone with a hold button so you can handle clients’ calls more professionally. If you have a fax board in your computer and a fax machine, you may need a device so you can share the phone line between your fax modem and fax machine. This is important because you will use your fax modem for legal research, checking e-mail and accessing the Internet. You won’t want to be interrupted while you’re determining whether your client is liable for breach of contract.

There are many tools that allow you to attach several communications devices to the same telephone line, such as a telephone, answering machine, fax machine and modem. If you’re on-line with your modem, the fax machine cannot interrupt your work. If you’re tight on funds, you might want to use the fax line occasionally for outgoing phone calls.

Cable modem

One new option more readily available to home computer users than those in an office is a cable modem. For about $40 per month, you have an always-on, high-speed connection to the World Wide Web. The difference in speed between a high-speed modem and a cable modem is dramatic.

First, there is no time required for dial up. The cable modem is always on and ready. This means you won’t have busy signals or delays. Second, the access time is similar to expensive high-speed phone lines available to businesses. Third, if you don’t need a domain name for your e-mail and web site, you can use this service as your sole connection and eliminate the need for an extra telephone line. (Of course, this assumes you don’t need that extra line for faxing.)

Home or small-business users may be able to get an Internet address such as yourname@home.com through a cable provider. With basic service, cable modem providers offer several e-mail addresses as well as storage space for a web site. Obtaining a domain name is analogous to getting your own 800 telephone number in that if you don’t like the service, you can forward it somewhere else while people trying to contact you need only remember your 800 number.

Getting a cable modem requires renting one that connects to a network card inside your computer. The equipment rental is part of the monthly cost of $40. While this is double the cost of a phone-based Internet service provider, the speed difference is more than doubled so you’ll spend much less time waiting for pages to load on your computer, downloading files or viewing graphics.

The two major companies offering cable modems are @Home, primarily owned by AT&T, and Road Runner, a subsidiary of Time-Warner. The battle for control of cable wires into homes is being fiercely fought in the marketplace with AT&T and Comcast, a northeast regional cable company, fighting over Media One’s customers and cable wires. Heavyweights like Microsoft and America Online are getting involved too. The significance of this battle is not only high-speed modem access but the potential to have all communication needs — local and long-distance phone service along with Internet access and television — from a single company.

Phone options

Years ago, it was easy to tell the small law offices from the large ones by how the telephone was answered. Small and home-based offices used answering machines when no one was in. Ironically, the move toward voice mail has levelled the playing field. It is easy to set up an answering machine that can handle more than one outgoing message and handle incoming message mailboxes just like voice-mail systems. Many local telephone companies offer phone answering capabilities. When you’re on the phone, you can have one message saying you’re busy and another message when you’re out.

As an alternative, you can contract with a phone answering service and decide when and how your calls are answered. If you have a high-quality provider, people cannot tell this service is not part of your office. The service can be instructed to contact you when important calls come in, a feat not yet possible with answering machines. Additionally, your clients may think you have a larger office than you do. These companies also can assist with overflow typing and other services for small businesses.

The newest rate plans for cell phones offer yet another interesting option. For $90 per month, you can have 600 minutes of local or long-distance calls on your cell phone. As long as you don’t run out of power during a critical call, you could consider using a cell phone as your main business telephone. This would allow clients to reach you wherever you are, but if you don’t want that, these newer cell phones include voice mail. Similar to the service available for regular phones, callers will hear your voice-mail message when you’re on the phone or you can turn it off to meet a client without interruptions.

Research tools

Home-based lawyers need access to legal research. With the availability of CD-ROMs and on-line resources, it no longer makes economic sense to start a new office with books. While there are tradeoffs in not being able to see two pages at a time and flip through a book, the finances and storage required for books are not justified for a home office.

Choosing between CD-ROMs and on-line options depends in large part on your practice areas. Similarly, choosing between the offerings from Lexis and West depends on your fondness or indifference for key numbers. In the past few years, the Internet has become an additional source for legal and other research. While you have to be more careful about the quality and reliability of the information, you’ll be gratified to know that even the Harvard Blue Book now provides instructions for citing information obtained on the web.

If you have an assistant in your home office, you may want to connect two computers to share a printer. This requires setting up a local area network. The most-affordable option, if you have brand-new equipment, is to use Windows 95 or Windows 98 as your network operating system. If you have some older equipment, you might want to consider LANtastic or one of the other peer-to-peer network operating systems. These programs are relatively inexpensive and allow sharing files and printers.

If you’re working part-time from home or have an office in another location, some of your needs will overlap. However, you will have some special requirements to keep your two offices in sync. There are a number of tools and techniques to keep your information current on computers in both locations. The cheapest and most-commonly used method is to copy updated files onto diskettes and then onto the other computer.

Disk drive

A fancier solution is a high-capacity removable disk drive such as those from Iomega and Syquest. They cost about $100 and the data cartridges cost about $10. The main disadvantage is they require you to know exactly what information you’ll need so you can put it on the diskette or zip drive before leaving the office. Using your modem with remote-access software allows more flexibility, but you still have to do some planning to be sure you can make the connection between the computers while no one is in your office.

Remote access is more convenient than diskettes since you can get anything you need from your office computer while at a remote location. If you travel for business or pleasure and need to be in touch, you also will find a remote-access setup worthwhile. To dial into your office computer from home, you will need modems on each computer. A fax modem handles the faxing capabilities as well as the data transfers discussed here. You’ll also need remote-access software such as pcAnywhere, CloseUp and ReachOut.

If your office has a local area network, you already may have purchased a remote-access program because most network vendors install them to troubleshoot your system without having to send a technician. The differences between the programs are relatively minor and usually a matter of personal preference. In other words, if you have one already, use it; don’t buy another unless you’re unhappy with how it is working. Once you connect, the software makes it seem as if you’re working at your own desk. Anything you can do at your office computer, you can do at the remote station. This includes printing, sending internal e-mail, etc.

Another way to communicate between offices is e-mail. You can send and receive messages to yourself through any Internet service provider or commercial on-line service. Again, this requires more planning than dialing in using a remote access program.

Whether modest or first-class, a home office can help maximize your productivity as well as enhance your free time and improve the quality of your practice and life.

Carol L. Schlein is president of Law Office Systems, a Montclair-based training and consulting firm assisting small- and medium-sized law firms with technology. She formerly chaired the Computer and Technology Division of the ABA’s Law Practice Management Section and is an author of The Lawyer’s Guide to Timeslips, published by the ABA. She can be reached at carol@losinc.com.

Questions for Carol Schlein on law office technology may be faxed to New Jersey Lawyer at (732) 750-0010 or mailed to “Law Technology Questions,” New Jersey Lawyer, Koll Corporate Plaza, 485B Route 1, Suite 100, Iselin, N.J. 08830.