License Suspension: Pay for Software Access for Your Whole Team

It’s the oldest trick in the lawyer’s technology arsenal: You save money by buying one software license that everybody shares.  It’s kind of like how you bring on a law clerk, and everybody starts accessing his Westlaw password.  Not that that happens . . .  (See, I’ve got your back.)

If it’s not one software license that gets shared, it’s that law firms are buying fewer licenses that they actually need, forcing users to double up.  Maybe there’s a shared log-in for staff.

Of course, this is less of a problem than it used to be.  Modern software allows for simultaneous log-ins, so no one’s getting booted anymore.

However, there’s one big problem with shared log-ins: it’s so much harder to manage tasks.  If there is a shared license, the name of the user to which that license is associated is irrelevant.  That ‘person’ has become a ‘group’ of people, by definition.  Let’s take that simple example of a shared staff log-in.  If three staffpersons are sharing a license, you’ve essentially made it impossible to assign specific tasks to any one of them, because you’re required to assign those tasks to the group, due to the way you’ve set up your system.  If you want to assign specific tasks to specific staffpersons, and to more effectively manage workflows, you must acquire a license for each of those staffpersons.

Lawyers who want to practice at the top of their law licenses need to delegate effectively.  Only then can you spend the most time performing those creative tasks that lawyers get paid the most to do.  To effectively delegate to individuals, lawyers must provide those individuals with their own software licenses.

The good news is that the cloud has brought down the price of software to such an extent that individual licenses are less costly than ever.

See what I did there: Don’t be cheap up-front, and you’ll make more in the long run.  That’s a beautiful thing.

. . .

Liner Notes

Speaking of which . . .

‘The Long Run’ by the Eagles

This is my jam, actually.

R.I.P. Glenn Frey.