Lawyers, perhaps more than any other business professionals, spend a lot of time on conference calls. And as they so often deal with sensitive, confidential subject matter, they have a specific set of requirements above and beyond those of many everyday conference callers. To consider whether their needs are being best looked after, here are 6 conferencing essentials for lawyers – with some thoughts on how LoopUp can help.
1. Security, Security, Security
Security surely ought to be the cornerstone of legal conference calls and yet it’s all too common to hear a series of ‘boodoops’ on regular dial-in conference calls and not know exactly who’s joined. At best, your call is disturbed as you ask the classic question, “Who just joined?” At worst, nobody replies and your call is now arguably insecure. Then what to do? Carrying on would seem an unacceptable risk if you’re discussing sensitive information. Getting everyone to drop and rejoin is flawed as there’s nothing to stop them simply staying on and staying quiet. Even with roll call switched on – whereby everyone is prompted to say their name when they join – there’s nothing to stop someone ignoring the prompt.
“The mobile workforce can compound this problem,” says our General Counsel, Robert Baugh. “So many times I’ve heard conference access details shouted out by someone taking a call on a train or in a café – hardly secure but, from a human point of view, understandable. One executive even told us he’d joined some random call that way just to relieve the boredom of his journey! You need a way to counter this risk.”
How LoopUp can help
LoopUp gives lawyers an easy and real-time way of knowing who’s on their conference calls at all times. As host, you receive an alert to your smartphone and desktop as soon as your first guest joins, and with one click, you’re guided you to a live readout of who’s on and who’s speaking.
2. Effective Scheduling Tool for Assistants
Lawyers often have their conference calls scheduled on their behalf by their assistants. All too often, however, assistants have no easy way to manage this and end up storing invitation details in spreadsheets or copying and pasting old invitations for each new meeting.
How LoopUp can help
LoopUp’s add-in for Outlook – and our browser invite tool for customers who don’t use Outlook- gives assistants a quick and easy way to select one of the lawyers whose calendars they manage and automatically insert their conference details into a calendar invite, all in a couple of clicks.
3. Value-added LinkedIn Context of Your Clients and Counterparties
While it’s all too common not to know who’s on your conference calls at any given moment, it’s even less common that you have further contextual information about your guests. Legal conference calls are very often external in nature with clients, counterparties, and counterparties’ lawyers. The traditional round of introductions at the start of the call is the most common practical means for gaining some context for the meeting ahead, but this can often get lost during the call as further people join or as you lose track of exactly who’s speaking from time to time.
How LoopUp can help
With LoopUp, in addition to always knowing who’s on the call and who’s speaking, you’re also able to view guests’ LinkedIn profiles (on an opt-in basis), which provides valuable contextual information about their roles, experience and responsibilities.
4. Visual Confirmation That You Are Indeed Muted!
We’ve heard so many horror stories about inappropriate remarks on conference calls, where the person is under the false impression that their line is muted. This can be particularly important for lawyers, who may be in the same room as a colleague or client and want to discuss the progress of the meeting or a particular negotiation point.
How LoopUp can help
LoopUp not only gives participants the ability to mute their lines, but critically gives them visual confirmation that they are indeed successfully on mute and therefore reassurance that their offline conversation is not being overheard.
5. A Simple Means to Share Visuals
There are a number of web conferencing tools on the market – products such as WebEx and GoToMeeting for example. However, all too often, lawyers (and many other professionals alike) feel uncomfortable using them, as they can be quite complex, and there’s apprehension that they may be responsible for ‘user error’ in the middle of an important client meeting. User training on these tools may solve these issues, but generally lawyers have neither the time nor the inclination to attend training on a conferencing product. An additional issue can be that certain web conferencing tools require downloads. With external client participants, you can’t necessarily be sure that they’ll be permitted to do so on their company-issue machines. A common response can be to ‘email out the document’, but this may lead to loss of control of the meeting and, indeed, materials being out in the open that the lawyer would prefer were not.
How LoopUp can help
LoopUp facilitates simple screen sharing without the need for any user training. During any conference call – with just one clear, unambiguous click – the call host can share their screen with guests. Our General Counsel recently wrote a post on how he uses screen sharing as a lawyer. He uses it to draft ‘live’ on the call, allowing everyone to see contract markups in real time, and share background material, spreadsheets and relevant websites to bring people onto the same page, all while retaining control of the flow of the meeting.
6. Tracking Matter Codes
Most laws firm like to – or indeed insist upon – allocating matter codes to a conference calls for client time sheets and/or disbursements.
How LoopUp can help
Like some other remote meetings products, LoopUp enables the host to allocate a matter code after entering the conference access code. However, LoopUp also offers other flexible ways to achieve the same end. At the end of every conference, the host and their assistant each receive a conference call summary by email, letting them know who was on the call and for how long. This email also contains a matter code link, which lets the assistant assign the matter code post call. Furthermore, if appropriate, LoopUp allows the assistant to set up dedicated ‘meeting rooms’ for each client matter. In that way, the matter code can be pre-assigned to the conference and there’s no need to worry about matter codes during the course of that client engagement. This is also integrated into the Outlook add-in tool for invitations, as mentioned above.
That’s it – 6 ways that LoopUp helps its many legal clients. If your conferencing service is missing any – or perhaps most – of these capabilities, it may not be the best fit as a remote meetings service for your lawyers. Please do get in touch if you would like to learn more about how LoopUp can help.
