In Las Vegas, high-stakes showdowns don’t just take place on the gaming tables — they also happen across the tables in conference rooms every time lawyers go head-to-head.
Attorney Renée Mancino recently prevailed in a $2.5 million dollar Las Vegas construction dispute by keeping a poker face and a confident low-key cool. She claims that the winning hand she held wasn’t due to luck, but to the way she organizes her cases — and her entire home-based law practice — using Macs.
No Place Like a Home Office
Mancino chose to hang out a private-practice shingle in 2002 after several years of working as a consultant for a casino gaming organization. In 2004, seeking a lifestyle change — including more room to start a family and train racehorses — she and her husband traded big-city glitz for a farm in the small rural community of Logandale, 50 miles outside Las Vegas.
Despite the fact that most of her clients and the county court system are an hour’s drive away, Mancino efficiently bridges the distance using her Macs and the Internet from the 800-square-foot home office she shares with three paralegals.
A Staggering Productivity Difference
For her casework, Mancino says the number of hours she saves using Macs instead of a traditional manual legal system — and the productivity gained as a result — is staggering. She cites the construction dispute case as an example: “It was a complex litigation case with an enormous amount of paper and an enormously confusing fact pattern,” she explains. “For the normal small office like mine, we’d have been buried if we’d used a manual process.”
According to Mancino, the Plaintiff and Third-Party Defendant each brought no fewer than two attorneys and at least one paralegal to the depositions, along with several bankers’ boxes full of materials. But because she was electronically organized, she was able to travel quite a bit lighter. “I just sat there with my MacBook, no paralegals, with just my over-the-shoulder briefcase, and maybe one or two file folders of documents to introduce and distribute as exhibits during the deposition,” she says.
Outperforming the Opposition
Mancino observed that the opposing counsel’s depositions were taking a long time because they kept rummaging through boxes for documents or running to the office for files they’d forgotten. “I mean eight, nine, ten-hour depositions — which isn’t even permitted under our local rules — were not uncommon,” she says.
But with everything organized on her MacBook, Mancino’s depositions moved faster — which didn’t go unnoticed by the opposing counsel. “It’s typical during complex depositions like this one to have questions about what was in the record, who supplied it and whether it had been introduced previously in a deposition,” she adds. “And I could pull it all right up and say, ‘Yes, Plaintiff supplied it on X date,’ or ‘It was introduced in X’s deposition two months ago, and it’s identified by Bates number 12345.’”
”I’d catch the partner in the other firm glancing at my computer screen,” Mancino says. “She kept making comments like, ’You have all that on your computer?’ I said, ‘Yes, it’s all right here, come on over and take a look.’”
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One System Fits All
Despite the heavy caseload Reneé Mancino routinely handles, she has an active family life, and being home-based is a big plus in making that possible. “I take for granted the amount of work I can actually do, but I also have a life,” she says. “I had a daughter 15 months ago, and she’s in the digital library from day one. I had the iSight camera hooked up so that Grandma and Grandpa in Ohio could watch her over the Internet in real-time video.”
Mancino says that the nicest aspect of having her portable MacBook Pro computers and wireless DSL network is that she can use the same system for work, home and play, moving seamlessly between one and the other, whether she’s in the house, in her office, or in the barn that houses the racehorses that she and her husband train as a side business. “Every time we have a winner in a race, I’ll download a live feed or get a DVD from the race track, modify it with iMovie and iDVD, and send it to people who have an interest, like our local blacksmith or veterinarian,” she says.
”I can plug into my office network, my home network, or a hotspot in the community and conduct business as if I am in my office,” she adds. ”And when I do switch gears, the same applications I use in the professional world are just as easy and intuitive to make use of in my personal life.”
