What the Experts are Saying

Dennis Kennedy - Legal Technology Primer "The Coming Battle for Control: Predictions for Legal Technology" (A complete version of this article appeared in the January 2003 issue of ABA Law Practice Management)

"Old software raises questions of compatibility, security and lack of support. Newer software tends to have many improvements, better usability and important features geared to lawyers. Attorneys are increasingly aware of highly useful and valuable programs. Firms need to learn about the current software products for lawyers that can improve productivity."

David Bilinsky - "Evolution to Practice Management" (A complete version of this article appeared in the Dec/Jan 2003 issue of in Law Office Computing)

"The primary difference between Microsoft Outlook and case management (CM) software is Outlook is centralized on contacts, while CM builds on its file orientation by integrating itself with other essential systems in a law office.

CM software's role is to allow people to peform their duties faster and more accurately. The adoption of CM often results in increased accuracy and decreased malpractice risks for attorneys. CM software monitors dates, files, To-Dos, events, clients and a myriad of other details that impact malpractice risks, which can get lost in the daily rush of the office."

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Ross Kodner - "The Perennial Case Management Questions"

A reader asks: "We are wrestling with whether to install case management or Outlook on our new network. Can't we get "close enough" (in terms of calendar management, contacts, and so forth) with sufficient tweaking using Outlook?"

Dear Reader: Using the mainstream feature-set model used by products like Amicus, Abacus, Time Matters, etc, I'll proceed.

1. A key issue -- case calendaring v. people calendaring. Outlook and most PIM-like (Personal Information Manager) systems can easily only do the latter--calendaring dates by individual people. They are simply not oriented to tracking multiple people who may be together working on a case and want to see a "case calendar" - this can be an enormous issue that can waste huge amounts of people time in the office having to look at multiple calendars and jump back and forth.
2. Case information tracking - Outlook doesn't track much - legal case managers track enormous amounts of information. This ranges the spectrum from:
   • Related party contact information
   • Court/administrative body info
   • Insurance company info including claims adjustor contacts
   • Opposing counsel info
   • Facts of the case
   • A chronology of case-related events
   • A case to-do list with a system of sophisticated and impossible to ignore "alerts" (malpractice carriers LOVE this!)
   • "Date chaining" capabilities that permits series of related events to be tied together and automatically counted and posted (i.e. using a Statute of Limitations date as a key date and automatically counting back and posting 1, 7, 30, 60, 90, 180, and 365 day ticklers, or alternatively, a trial date and counting back all the dates on a typical trial court scheduling order and three ticklers for each) - these can save literally hours of posting time and reduce manual date miscounting errors, not to mention the ability to move the entire "chain" if a trial gets bumped.
   • Conflicts related items for conflicts searching
   • You may want to see onscreen fields tagged for tracking the Hearing Examiner, the case's assigned Claim Number, the Case Number assigned by the Worker's Comp division, etc. And all this information is very easily searchable, printable, Palm-able, etc.
3. There are helpful capabilities for attaching documents to cases and being able to launch them while looking at the case being worked on.
4. Conflicts checking - how many small firms have a system for checking for conflicts of interest when a new case is opened that is about as sophisticated as standing out in the hall and yelling "Anyone ever heard of ABC Corporation?" If there's no answer, the case is accepted because the "conflicts check" is done. The problem of course is that is the day that the partner who just finished a suit against ABC Corp.'s holding company is out fly fishing sans pager and cell phone ... thus ... silence from the end of the hall. Malpractice carriers HATE that method . . . they really, really do. In legal case managers, conflicts checking is actually an incredibly powerful text search system, scouring every scrap of case information in your system!
5. Integration with billing systems for passing client/matter information back and forth and also for passing time entries from the case manager to the billing system. Typically a couple of months of captured time that would otherwise fall between the cracks should pay for the ENTIRE case management implementation ... easily in many cases. And this doesn't even begin to consider the efficiencies gained by the reduction of duplicative information entry.
6. Easy integration of contact info with your word processor.
7. Document assembly-building "smart documents" - treating the mass of information stored and track by a legal case manager as the perfect repository for assembling routinized documents, you can integrate with Word or WordPerfect.
8. The Timeline/Chronology function to show the progress of work on a case is incredibly useful.
9. Synchronizing with laptop/remote systems far more easily than Outlook ... the ability to send a remote update file to a branch office PC, a mobile lawyer's laptop or a partner's home PC system is nothing short of ingenious.

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[Excerpts © 2004 Ross Kodner, attorney and founder of MicroLaw, Inc., www.microlaw.com, used with permission.]

Don't loose sleep over it!

"I would wake up in the middle of the night thinking "When is my answer due? Am I about to get defaulted? Did I miss a hearing? When is the trial in the Smith case? Did I blow the statute of limitation? ...(Case management software's) time savings, organization and peace of mind make it well worth it." - Jeffrey Lisson (Carter Boyd)