Lawyer to Lawyer, NY is a website and corresponding smartphone App that provides subscribers with an exclusive and secure method of communicating with other attorneys in New York.
The web site and smart phone App provide business tools useful to the legal community including direct access and communication to other lawyers, a forum for the exchange of ideas, a referral and per diem data base, editorial content, useful tools including our CLE counter, Court Directories, Statutes of Limitations table and customer service.
Until now, there are only static lawyer databases available to the legal community. Although some of these do offer emailing capabilities, none take full advantage of SMS (Short Message Service) or texting smartphone technology. Realizing that the business day does not truly end at 5:00 p.m. anymore (if indeed it ever did), Lawyer to Lawyer, NY offers the conduit for during and after hours secure communication with other licensed attorneys. A lawyer need not reveal their cell phone number to anyone in order to receive texts. Settings will enable and disable privacy preferences for each User including blocking capabilities and short-cuts such as the “my colleagues” section.
Lawyer to Lawyer supports a User page that will enable an attorney to create what amounts to a customizable “baseball card” to feature that attorney’s stats such as areas of practice, location, year of admission, ratings, state bar admissions, blogs and websites as well as links to social networking sites such as Facebook or LinkedIn. Lawyers may enlist the aid of a sophisticated search engine features to locate other attorneys/law-firms, learn about them, communicate with them and even access the located attorney’s favorite sources of information. For instance, a lawyer’s User Page can feature that lawyer’s own blog, if s/he is writing one, and/or a blog that the attorney finds useful and informative.
The core of the program and the smart phone Apps is the ability to find a colleague and communicate with that colleague instantly. The database contains some 250,000 New York lawyers with, in most cases, contact information. On the website, messages can be stored and read when the user logs on and goes to the “my messages” page. On this page, the user can read their messages and/or archive the messages as well as respond to them directly. On the smart phone application, a user can generate a message to a colleague and send via SMS resulting in a push notification on the receiving attorneys smart phone. This alone can be a huge time-saving feature when an attorney needs to speak to a colleague immediately. Future plans will incorporate the use of GPS technology to determine if a colleague is in the vicinity, for instance in a 6 story courthouse building. This will make the current game of hide and seek among attorneys at least in the litigation arena, obsolete.
The Home Page provides a blog of the day and featured articles of interest to the New York legal community. Our popular Tuesday Ticker feature appears here as well.
Lawyers may indicate that they wish to seek per diem work or that they are seeking referrals from other attorneys making it easier for a lawyer to locate a referral law firm for a client in need. Smart Phone location services will enable a lawyer to locate a per diem attorney in their vicinity.
The Courtroom/Forum is a topic-generated discussion module where the experienced and less experienced can pose and respond to questions. It is a place where lawyers can get answers in a pinch regarding rules of evidence, a specific substantive or procedural inquiry or differing opinions on a variety of legal subjects.
Summary
What Lawyer to Lawyer, NY strives to be is a one-stop platform for New York attorneys on which to search and communicate, discuss and learn, make better use of their work time, increase exposure and obtain employment options under one roof on a secure platform.