When Tom Twomey founded his law practice on the eastern end of New York’s Long Island, his neighbors were mostly farmers and fishermen. And his favorite labor-saving device was the steno pad operated by his only secretary.
Three decades later, the area’s economy has blossomed, encompassing everything from award-winning vineyards, to velvet-roped nightspots, to the booming beachfront real estate of the star-studded Hamptons. Tom Twomey’s cozy little practice has become Twomey, Latham, Shea, Kelley, Dubin, Reale & Quartararo, LLP — a Martindale-Hubbell A-rated firm with 60 attorneys and staff, and $7 million in annual revenue. In their six offices, scores of Mac computers keep the firm communicating, collaborating, and serving an enviably diverse clientele at maximum efficiency.
Managing Change, Saving Money
“A key to our success has been our ability to diversify as Suffolk County has grown and changed,” says Twomey. “Without a doubt, that could never have happened so painlessly without our early commitment to Mac technology.” After wrestling with PCs for a few years in the mid-eighties, Twomey bucked the prevailing wisdom and embraced Mac as a better business tool. He’s never once looked back.
Like most firms in their infancy, we were undercapitalized. We ran the numbers, and even back then, we calculated we’d save $50,000 a year by using Mac,” says Twomey. “In today’s dollars, that number is several times higher.”
Putting IT in Perspective
“As soon as we realized we could go from a one-week learning curve to a one-morning learning curve, we brought Macs onboard as quickly as we could,” adds the firm’s office manager, Lynda Swike. “Definitely, the ease of training attorneys and employees on Mac, and the ease of administration, allowed the firm to grow without the burden of needing an IT staff.” Swike should know. She began as the practice’s second legal secretary, but — without any formal technical training — evolved to become the firm’s office manager and, until very recently, its de facto one-woman IT department.
Today, the firm practices across virtually every field of civil law, from trusts and estates to real estate, from complex business litigation to environmental advocacy. Though documents flow in great profusion, “we stay organized because our teams store documents on our Xserve system,” says Twomey. The Xserve at the firm has multiple drives that house the firm’s data, and these drives constantly mirror each other for optimum redundancy. In addition, a second Xserve stands ready as an emergency back up.
Tapping Tiger’s Power
Thanks to Mac OS X Tiger, no one at the firm’s Riverhead, New York, headquarters has to re-create the same document twice, or miss a beat in their research. “We use Spotlight to search by keyword or article number,” says Twomey, “to comb the contents for, say, a particular zoning or environmental issue.”
By using the Virtual Private Network powers built into Tiger, the firm hopes to set up a system giving all its satellite offices the same invaluable search and access powers. “The remote Riverhead document server will appear and function on their desktops like any local hard drive — so everyone has the same information and the same knowledge, at their fingertips,” says Swike.
Speaking from Experience
With the firm connected so seamlessly by the latest Mac technology, it’s interesting to note that they still rely on a time-honored tool for capturing their thoughts — the spoken word. “A tremendous amount of the work we do is dictation-based,” says John Shea, a senior partner in the firm. “Whether I’m drafting a letter on the train, recording thoughts in my car after a meeting, working at home, or in the office, it’s always been the first step towards putting things on paper. Only now we’ve found a fantastic way our Macs help make it even easier.”
