Information Exchange between Lawyers and Clients

Excellent legal service and competent lawyers is what a successful law firm is made of. But, these are not adequate if there is no proper coordination between lawyers and clients. Day to day process on a law firm usually involves a lot of information exchange and it is important to have a system to quickly access and convey information. It is also crucial to keep information that goes in and out of the firm confidential, organized and secured. All of these can be attained with the use of the following:

• Call Forwarding – clients can easily reach a lawyer by allowing the office phone system to access all of the phone numbers configured on the call forwarding feature.
• Internet Fax – one of the reliable tools not only for law firms but also for every business. Transmitting documents the fast and secure way is more probable with this technology rather than utilizing an old fax machine. Law firms can assure a reliable exchange of information between them and their clients since internet faxing does not rely on PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Networks).
• Voicemail – law firms may not be opened 24 hours a day but their phone system is. Phone calls from clients can be unexpected anytime of the day and even during sleeping hours. But, that does not prevent information from being conveyed since unattended calls are taken care of by allowing callers to leave important messages on the voicemail inbox. Modern phone systems can even notify the user that a new message has arrived via SMS or e-mail alerts.

Internet Fax Service and the User Datagram Protocol

Internet faxing is a telephony innovation that enhances the method of sending and receiving of faxes through the internet. This communication enables the exchanging of faxes globally without incurring the high cost of international phone call charges.

The advantage of this modern service is the ability to use different models when broadcasting a toll free internet fax:

• E-mail to Fax – sending a fax via the e-mail to any fax machines.
• Web to Fax – sending a fax using a webpage GUI (Graphical User Interface) to any fax machines.
• Fax to Fax – sending a fax to and from a traditional fax machine by means of the internet.
• Web to Web – sending a fax to and from a webpage account.

Most of these models either utilize SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) or TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) where faxes can sometimes be delayed due to the design mechanism of these protocols. However, real-time faxing is now being developed using UDP (User Datagram Protocol) instead of the two standard protocols.

However, current UDP developments cannot guarantee the quality and reliability of the transmission due to its on-time delivery orientation and the environment of the internet. High packet and transmission loss of UDP is dependent on the performance of the underlying network. A decline in performance is particularly when it is experiencing too much load. Undesirable results that occur such as data deterioration, duplication and interference will likely have an effect on the quality of the internet fax service.

Further developments like ACR (Adaptive Control and Recovery), buffering, combined rate, control recovering and XOR mechanisms are now being devised to eliminate these problems.