It’s possible that your office phone system is five years old and you’re paying for plain, old-fashioned phone service. If that’s the case, you’re probably paying more than $60 per line, per month for each business line.

Are there many lawyers who haven’t updated their phones since 2008? You bet. There are tons of lawyers so busy with practicing law that they’ve taken an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” approach to these issues. It’s time consuming and complicated to update, so they just leave things as they are and try to keep from getting buried by client work.

If I roll back the clock to 2008 and look at my phones and Internet, I’d find a bunch of handsets wired to a central phone server in our closet. The server had never-ending issues with some kind of card crashing. We had a steady stream of visits from the repair guy.

We were paying for about 15 lines, and our bill exceeded $1,000 per month. We paid for a service contract for our phone system, and we paid for replacement parts on top of the contract.

Are you still living with a deal like that?

You don’t have to. If you’ve been neglecting your phones, it’s time to look at what’s available.

We moved to an Internet-based VOIP phone system. We no longer have a phone server (so no service contract, hardware, etc.), and our phones can be plugged into an Internet connection inside or outside of the office.

We’re paying about a third of what we were paying, and we have more features than we had before.

We don’t have a contract, so we’re free to switch providers at a moment’s notice, and our phones are consistently up and running.

The call quality is very good, but it’s totally dependent on the quality of the Internet connection we’re using. It’s terrific in our office, and it’s marginal in a coffee shop on an island off the coast of Thailand. It’s excellent from my home and most hotels.

Is our system the best system around? I don’t know. We’ve been with our provider for over a year and had great success. It keeps adding features, so we’re happy. Has something better come along since we made our move? Possibly, although my impression is that these providers are fiercely competitive and keep leapfrogging each other with more and more features.

Should you revisit your phone choices? Yes, if you haven’t changed in a few years. The technology is moving fast, and you’ll save yourself time and money if you invest some energy in exploring your options.