Our Experience Using Google Calendar for Law Practice Management

As you might recall, we started using Google Calendar about six months ago for our case management calendaring system.  The advantages of Google Calendar are many.  It exists in the cloud.  You can add or subtract other team members’ calendars easily.  It synchs automatically with your iPhone and other devices.  You can request availability for particular dates and months to team members. 

The one potential negative aspect of Google Calendar is that there is no field for “client – matter.” We were a little worried about this particular item when we first moved to Google Calendar.  In retrospect, it was not nearly as big a deal as we thought.  Because we keep an extranet system which keeps all calendared items by client matter, we simply rely on that particular system if you need to see a total schedule of calendar items for a particular case.  Otherwise, we couldn’t be happier with Google Calendar. 

Comments

[Adrianos Facchetti]

There's a fairly straightforward way around that problem. Just put down the name of the client matter in the title of each event. Then, when you want to look at all the calendared items for a case you can use the "search my calendars" function. Problem solved. To illustrate, if I have a case called Jones v. Doe, I would create a calendar event as follows: "JONES: Discovery cut-off date." I would denominate all subsequent events in the same fashion and then do a search for JONES to see all upcoming calendar events.

[Enrico S.]

Nice Adrianos! We do add that information but never thought that search would be powerful enough to pull only the good stuff!