Today’s post will revolve around the topic of lawyers. The famous US entrepreneur Andrew Yang states that billing time is a major pain point for him as a lawyer. The message behind this comment is open for discussion. Our interpretation is outlined in the article.

One thing I disliked about being a
lawyer was billing for my time.

– Andrew Yang

Lawyers are at your side in times of need. In such moments, you are really grateful that there is someone on your side. Nevertheless, lawyers can burn a big hole in your pocket; they are not cheap at all.

With large amounts of money at stake for clients, the firm and the lawyers themselves make it essential that they perform at the highest level to justify their cost, avoiding any needless waste of time for clients. The two avoidable tasks we will focus on in this article are:

1. The need to continuously log in to company services and applications when using the mobile device.
2. Resetting expired passwords. This does not pose an issue on a computer, then why has it become an issue on a mobile device?

Seamless access is needed

Information is power to the lawyer, so it is critical that they can access information from anywhere at any time. This is why mobile devices like phones and tablets have added great value to working efficiently by allowing them to access critical banks of information from wherever they are.
Given that, as we pointed out above, time can be a lot of money to a lawyer, it is very important this access is simple and fast on both their computer and mobile devices.

It adds up

However, this value is diminished considerably when they have to log in multiple times throughout the day to access essential data and applications. From our understanding, Andrew Yang found it hard to bill his clients because it is hard to distinguish between billable and non billable time. Is the time a lawyer spends on his cell phone completing and accessing tasks billable?

We are not speaking about the research the lawyers need to do in order to win cases; we are talking about signing in to corporate applications which can take as long as 60 seconds. You can do the math yourself. If the lawyer bills $400 per hour, one minute costs approximately $6.

Now, if this task is repeated six to eight times a day, a lot of cost is generated by non-productive tasks.

What about resetting expired passwords?

This might seem like a small issue, but not when you take a lawyer and his mobile phone into consideration.

Every company needs a password expiry policy that can be in form of a required password reset every 30 to 90 days. Such a policy is important to help improve security by reducing the chance of data breaches due to compromised credentials. Regularly changing your password to one that is not similar to the previous one is security 101. This is highly important because 80% of all data breaches still originate from weak credentials (Verizon data breach report 2019).

Little flexibility

As it stands today, many mobile users don’t have the ability to reset that expired password on their device, they still need access to a computer with network connectivity. Just about the options of the lawyer that is travelling and does not have that access. They have two options and both waste time and cost money; first, call the help desk to reset it or second, wait until they have access to a computer.

Today, we have technology optimizing such tasks. However, up until now, there has always been the need to log in repeatedly. This is not a bad practice; nevertheless, there is a solution which removes the need for repeated sign-in without compromising security.

We will illustrate how Hypergate can help a lawyer’s life and cut cost for the firm.

How can Hypergate help law firms, lawyers and customers at the same time?

Let’s take Rob as an example. He is a 50 years old lawyer working for a large law firm. He doesn’t have a normal 9-5 Job with a one-hour lunch break. Quite on the contrary, 60 hours work weeks are standard for him. Rob is very famous and has a proven track record, and because of that, is in high demand and generates a lot of revenue for the law firm.

The firm has implemented Android Enterprise which provides a work environment on his phone. As Rob is not a tech-savvy person, he lives with the concept “if it still works I am ok with it”. Despite this upgrade, Rob keeps going about his business. He is very busy everyday from meeting to meeting and does not have time to sit down in the office as clients are waiting for him. Now, the corporate access to SharePoint and other applications was denied because he needs to reset his password every 30 days as it is corporate policy.

Rob is on the move and has a flight to catch for a meeting and has no computer within reach. He cannot do this with his mobile phone or tablet and is annoyed he has to call the law firms’ tech support. Waiting while on hold, the flight departs and he does not have the chance to access any data to go over the case and wastes valuable preparation time. After landing at his destination, he manages to get through to tech support and get his password reset.

He hastily prepares on the way to see the client. Once he arrived at the client’s, Rob wants to show details about the case on the large screen with his mobile phone. He cannot believe his eyes. He has to log in once again!

Remove these pain points

With Hypergate, these pain points can be completely removed! Law firms can continue to provide seamless and secure certificate-based Single Sign-On on mobile devices and allow Rob to reset or change their Active Directory password directly from their mobile phone in a fully compliant way. This can be achieved just by installing the Hypergate mobile application. No servers to manage or changes to make.

Large hidden costs

What a nightmare Rob has been through. Sadly, this issue affects many lawyers. They do not have the power to change this as it is usually the corporate body deciding the tools lawyers can use. A lawyer’s role is not to spend time and waste resources with tasks such as password reset or password inputs. Their role is to have great knowledge in their field and access to this knowledge easily!

Businesses may sometimes not fully understand and realize that there are costs associated with such inconveniences. Just think about the tech support or the time spent by the lawyer to enter his password many times a day.

Hypergate can eliminate these costs by authenticating the device with certificates instead of password. But you don’t have to worry about that. As an end-user, you will enjoy seamless Single Sign-On, password resets on your mobile device and seamless access to on-premise network shares.

Your company will love Hypergate

From a company perspective, you can expect your business to streamline processes and maximize efficiencies. It has no impact on infrastructure as there are no additional servers to set up, manage or repair, just a lightweight, fully managed application.

Your employees will spend more productive time on clients, waste zero time on logins into servers to show their clients the work or documents.

No matter how big you are, Hypergate can also help you save your image and costs, that’s why we took the time to create our cost calculator. If you have an EMM (Enterprise Mobility Management) in place, Hypergate works as an addon. Hence, no infrastructure changes needed. Just a couple of hours and one of our partners will install your new cost-saving software.

Our partner Appurity has developed the perfect tool for lawyers that works seamlessly with Hypergate

With Rubus for Android and Re:Work for Rubus on iOS, users of iManage have the ability to send & file, open NRL and file from inbox from their smartphones. Everything is in sync, increasing productivity for fee earners, partners and users therefore freeing up time for billable tasks. Learn more