Technology your law department needs to enable telecommuting

Every law department that allows its lawyers to work from home has to consider how it should deploy technology to permit that telecommuting to be productive (See my post of May 30, 2006: telecommuting with 5 references.). An item in 8-K, Vol. 4, Fall 2008 at 32, lists nine technologies that contribute to off-site worker productivity. The tools come from “Web Commuting and the American Workforce,” by Citrix Online 2008. The percentages state the share of remote workers the study found who use the tool:

Mobile phone (84%)
Email (72%)
Internet (71%)
Landline phone (65%)
Laptop computer (53%)
Desktop computer (52%)
Program to access office PC (44%) [I assume this includes the office network]
Fax machine (42%)
Handheld device (e.g., BlackBerry) (24%)

To this list I would add high-speed cable, scanning capability, some encryption protections (See my post of Nov. 30, 2008: encryption by law departments *9), and good headphones.