If you're heading out to Orlando next week for the ALA Conference, make sure to come swing by and say hi to the NetDocuments folks at booth #311 . Aside from the normal booth stuff, we'll be giving away an iPad.

A number of our partners and customers will be speaking at the conference including Rajiv Mukerji, of Smart Solutions, who is speaking on cloud computing for law firms on Tuesday, May 24th at 12:15 PM. For those of you not attending the conference, you can follow the #ALAConf hashtag and the @NetDocuments Twitter stream for real time updates. Other notable Twitteratti to be sure to follow include @RL_Wood, @MonnicaWofford and @Vic_Maurer.

Nothing in life is certain, except death, taxes, and the T3 Technology Conference being the the go-to spot for financial services technology.

David Drucker and Joel Bruckenstein are the brainchildren behind the T3 conference and will be taking their talents to Weston, FL for the 2011 event being held February 16-19. This is the sixth year that the duo has been running the conference and they are extremely excited to see what new innovations will be discussed during this year's show.

This week in our ongoing Q&A series, we are joined by Tom Lee of Quintec International. Quintec is a leading cloud based technology company based in the UK that is aimed primarily at the Legal, Insurance and Finance markets.

Q: First off Tom, tell our readers a bit about you and your company?

Tom: Great. I have been in I.T. for over 33 years and have witnessed many changes in technology from the early Mainframes to Super- Mini's, Client/Server and now to the Cloud! At Quintec, we provide our clients with business advice, consultancy, software, training and technical support. These services are delivered by an experienced team of consultants, a rapid support team and a plethora of technical guys who never seem to stop working! I wished I had their energy!

Do your friends call you a "techno nomad" or a "21^st century minimalist"? If all you need to run your legal practice is any web enabled device, than you've probably been labeled by one of these terms.

You see, in the 90s, the prevailing trend was bigger is better: bigger cars, bigger hamburgers, bigger houses and bigger technology. But with a downturn in the economy, more fuel conscience consumers and the rise cloud computing, consumers and businesses alike are learning how to do more with less, including their technology needs.

Consider how technology has really made us more efficient over time. In 1986 I went to Europe and managed the european operation of a computer company. I remember around 1987 we got a fax machine….wow….it changed our lives. Then about 1992 we got email…. What a savings in time instead of printing and faxing, we simply typed and sent… I worked at WordPerfect and Novell with Groupwise in its early stages and now we all recognize how email has truly changed the way we do business and how we communicate. Its drastically helped us reduce paper…. (now of course I hear how many attorneys tell their secretaries to print their inbox for them….) Isn’t it sad to run across this item on the ABA's Site-Tation that states: " According to the 2006 Legal Technology Survey Report, 61% of attorneys save email related to a case or client matter by printing out a hard copy." Actually, it's probably a good thing that we didn't find the percentage of lawyers who later scan those printouts of emails as TIFFs to reconvert them to digital form. This isn't even a step toward a paperless office - it's a move toward a "papermore" office. OLD WAYS DIE HARD! By the way, one of the major lessons from the Katrina and Rita disasters was the vulnerability of paper records in disasters. The fetish for paper runs against technology and business trends. It places law firms and their clients at an unnecessary risk. Paper is not the most efficient mode of communication and it is no longer the most secure method of retaining informationâ€"but you CANNOT protect paper. BUT it sure a lot easier to READ!! Right?