National Magazine, the CBA’s journal, recently wrote an article about online legal products entitled “Practicing Law with SaaS“.  Luigi Benetton, the writer for the article, interviewed Larry Port (me) from Rocket Matter, for some information about the emergent technology trend of Software-as-a-Service for legal.

For the Legal SaaS curious, it’s a must read.  Luigi does a great job of describing what SaaS is and some of the major benefits of using online practice magament and time and billing software:

What is Saas? It’s been described as software that doesn’t reside on your hard drive or office network, like Microsoft Word or Outlook. It’s software that you access through the Internet from a third-party provider outside your office, which hosts and operates the software. You pay that provider for it (on a one-time or subscription basis) just as you’d pay a traditional software provider for the program that resides on your own system…

Most strikingly, all you need to do this is a standard web browser like Internet Explorer or Firefox: SaaS users don’t install any software on their computers. Each application is “hosted” on another computer in the “cloud,” the symbol on computer network architecture diagrams that represents the Internet.

He mentions a maxim to consider for those of you who do not use a SaaS solution for your law firm:

There are two types of computer hard drives: those that have failed, and those that will.

Thanks Luigi, we are happy to be a part to educate and spread the word about web-based solutions for law firms!