Legal Practice Management for Linux - a guest post.

Hi, my name is Larry Port, Founding Partner and Chief Software Architect of Rocket Matter, LLC. Rocket Matter is a web-based, hosted legal practice management and time and billing solution.

I'm a fan of Linux. As a budding software developer, I honed my skills in the Bash shell and in the Emacs editor. When I worked on Wall Street, I saw firsthand how Linux was making a huge impact on enterprise software. Our expensive Sun SPARC workstations were gradually being replaced with commodity Linux machines, and all the developers were psyched when their penguin box arrived. The speed of the new machines was astounding compared to what we were used to.

Fast forward a few years. Over lunch recently, I installed Ubuntu for a test drive. Over lunch! My, how Linux times have changed. Within 5 minutes I was able to pull up Rocket Matter with Firefox and create an invoice.

It was quite an experience to install Linux over the course of an hour and have an instant law practice ready to go. OpenOffice is installed. Acrobat's available. Firefox is there. Hookup a printer and you can manage your entire practice now with Linux: to-do's, calendaring, matters, clients, time, and billing.

If you have an iPhone, you can go mobile as well. We are delivering Rocket Matter to handheld devices via the mobile web, so you don't have to worry about synching. For a Linux lawyer, not having to deal with cradles and device drivers will eliminate some headaches.

I suspect that Rocket Matter may be one of the only available options for a Linux lawyer. It also makes for a good Linux migration strategy, as you can use a PC or Macintosh in conjunction with your Linux machine.

Regards,

Larry Port

Rocket Matter, LLC