Cindy is an attorney who brought blist into her law firm for a mission critical and time-sensitive transition period after learning about blist from her husband who follows new web technologies.

Cindy and her colleagues describe blist as having ‘revolutionized the way our law firm functions’ and ‘opened so many people’s eyes to collaborative software.’ Cindy told me that it took only 5 minutes of teaching a paralegal in her mid-sixties to use blist to turn the paralegal from a skeptic into a firm-wide evangelist for blist.

Here is Cindy describing the way her firm is using blist in her own words:

“Our law firm is splitting, with two groups of attorneys going off to form a total of two new firms, so we are (1) having to figure out how to separate assets, IT infrastructure, library collections, physical space, etc. and (2) building a new firm from the ground up.  My “new” firm has taken on these projects as a collaborative effort among the 22 employees of what will be the new firm, so blist has been absolutely wonderful for us since we have to coordinate 22 people, all serving on several teams each, on a multitude of tasks.

We still have a few who aren’t totally comfortable with blist and are wanting us to export blists into Excel frequently for them to work off of, but I think they’ll come around.

I started using blist to track our firm’s extensive library collection, which is currently kept in an collection of Excel spreadsheets and word documents (with tables!).  We’re using blist to record the current library inventory, as well as keep track of library expenditures on a going-forward basis.  It is proving to be an amazingly powerful tool for our library.

I’m pretty sure it’s going to make a job that previously took 2 full time people into a job that one legal assistant can do in her spare time. The way we have set it up (sorting by title, publisher, area of law, date, type of publication), it almost works like an online card catalogue for our library.  Under the old system, if you wanted to find a publication, you had to look through the myriad of spreadsheets, which were kept in a three ring binder in someone’s office.  Needless to say, blist is a huge improvement on that.

I am also using it to track business development and marketing events for the new firm.  I haven’t done much with that blist yet, but I will.”

If someone that you know works at a law firm, encourage them to try blist – blist is free – by creating an account.