Since the advent of email, our lives and the way we communicate with all our clients and business associates have changed. Our inboxes and PDAs, are bombarded with emails that sometimes get ignored simply because we don’t have time to shift through each and every one of them.

This impacts our ability to communicate with the client when we need to provide them with crucial information leading to client dissatisfaction. This is not just an issue with a client but also our peers and associates.

Big corporations embraced the concept of internal web portals or intranets to address effective collaboration with peers and associates. Then came client and partner portals to have just as efficient and effective collaboration with clients and outside personnel.

That same concept is now accessible to small businesses and lawyers through technologies like NetDocuments client portal, AdvologixPM customer portal and Google Apps where you have the power to share critical information and documents.

Imagine a scenario where you require a client to review a document that is emailed on Monday. The document needs to be filed with the court on Wednesday. Client sends the document back to you on Tuesday but you missed the email and it is sitting in your inbox. Wednesday deadline passes and on Friday, you discover you have completely missed the boat. Possibility of Sanctions?

Now imagine the scenario with a client portal. You place the document on the portal which notifies the client automatically that a document needs their attention. A task is added to your assistant’s calendar to follow up. The client reviews it and either approves it or suggests changes. After relevant exchange of instructions, the assistant has the approved document ready to be filed on Wednesday and you don’t have to carry that burden on your shoulders.

How incredibly valuable is that? You have a satisfied client who is going to brag about the efficiency and superior level of customer service your firm provided giving you the opportunity to bring in new business via word of mouth. Get the same level of satisfaction with your peers and outside counsel.

Differentiate yourself from the attorney next door with a new and innovative way of communicating with your clients. Go beyond email for client collaboration.

Lexis Nexis introduced user defined record type in version 9 of Time Matters. There are multiple uses of user defined record types. These are just a few examples that come to mind:

• Parties associated with a case
• Asset form to capture individual asset information for a client for an estate planning practice
• Percentage allocation model for a particular asset
• Budget allocation

We are going to look at parties associated with a case. We defined a Name type user defined record type and called it parties.

We then customized the form to link to the contact record and grab all the pertinent information. The memo/notes area gives the user the ability to make very specific notes for that party as relate to that specific case.

Here is a screen shot of what a list of all the parties associated with the case looks like. Note how the roles of the parties are segregated into the sub tabs on the parties sub list. This gives you the flexibility of Time Matters sub lists to sort on any of the fields and search on any of the fields that are in the parties form.

The other benefit of using user defined record types is you can have access to the normal add and list buttons on the main toolbar that will show you a full list of all the parties records.

On the parties list, it is easy to view how many different cases a particular person has been associated with.

Have you just started your law practice and wondering how am I going to manage my caseload? What kind of applications do I need to run my law practice? Is Outlook and QuickBooks enough for running my practice efficiently? I don’t have the money to spend on hardware and software, what do I do and how do I get my practice going? I need to collaborate with my clients and other attorneys, how do I make that work?

We get these questions from a lot of our clients and lawyers who are just starting out. We have a cost effective solution for them.

Introduction

AdvologixPM is a SaaS based solution built on SalesForce.com platform. Salesforce.com is the most successful cloud-based application. It’s the gold standard. The company, Salesforce.com, has a market capitalization of $8.23 billion and revenue of $1.24 billion. It has over 67,900 customers. The company claims that 200,000+ developers have created over 135,000 custom applications with over 1,000 applications and service listings on its AppExchange. The benefit here is there is no need to prove stability, or establish security, or prove scalability. AdvologixPM has the power of the “Force.com” behind it.

AdvologixPM is licensed for $70.00 per user per month which includes complete practice management, document automation and management, account management and billing, mobile access, workflow customization, web intake forms, mobile access to contacts, tasks and events and synchronization with Outlook. You can also add third party applications including NetDocuments and QuickBooks synchronization.

Product Highlights

AdvologixPM primary records are Accounts, Contacts and Matters. The secondary record types include events, tasks, calls, messages, notes and attachments, emails and alerts, issues, and research, billings and invoices.

Accounts are your main client record that you are going to bill to. Matters are linked to an Account and Contacts are linked to multiple Accounts and multiple Matters.

When you log in, the reminders window shows reminders for all scheduled activity that is due today and past. The Home Page shows the calendar with all your events and tasks. The past due tasks will be in red. On the calendar you will be able to see the event details when you move your cursor over the client name or the description.

The system has a customizable tab navigation which makes it easy to look at all your matters, contacts, billings, invoices, payments and the system has robust reports. When you open the matter record, you will see a quick view of all the record types and the number of records in each type. When you hover over the record type, you will see a quick view of all the records in that list. You can open an existing record or add a new record right from this view mode.

Every record type is customizable giving the developer the flexibility to customize the interface to a particular law practice area allowing the lawyer to capture information to their specific need.

AdvologixPM uses DDP (Dynamic Document Processing) for document automation. The data stored in the system is integrated into word document templates that are then converted to PDFs. Templates can be setup for mail merge and these documents can then be stored as attachments to matters. DDPS can output to PDF or the original document format (.doc, .xls, etc.) In this examples yellow fields are merged from the matter record and pink fields are merged from the related contact records.

AdvologixPM is tightly integrated with NetDocuments giving the end user the full capabilities of a fully functional document management system. NetDocuments will allow firms to take their document and data sharing at a much higher level giving the firms the power to share their information with their clients.

AdvologixPM integrates seamlessly with Outlook with AdvologixPM Connect Toolbar for Outlook 2007.

This tool bar gives the user the ability to sync their data with outlook. The user can download contacts, events, tasks, and also bill from Outlook while browsing emails and sending out emails as well.

StopLoss Billing View allows the user to capture time that they have not billed for yet. This view shows unbilled events and tasks, making it easy to look at all unbilled items and create billing items for them.

On the matter tab the user can see all the billings by viewing the billing tab, all the expenses and invoice activity.

AdvologixPM has a very comprehensive reporting package with 100s of reports to analyze information from different perspectives due to the ability to filter and sort on multiple criteria.

Conclusion

AdvologixPM is a comprehensive and powerful, extremely configurable practice management system giving you a wealth of information. The views of the records are clear and easy to navigate. There is comprehensive security, offline backup of the entire database is available, and there is import and export capability. AdvologixPM offers an offline client which allows a user to access major practice management functions without being connected to the internet. The offline client syncs with the main system when the user reconnects. The system syncs with Outlook and integrates with other web based applications like NetDocuments. MobileLite for AdvologixPM is a full featured application for Blackberry, iPhone, Windows Mobile. AdvologixPM on force.com platform is for the new breed of “Virtual Law Offices” who seek freedom.

Most Law Firms that work on contingency cases or flat fee services believe that they do not need to track how much time an employee is spending on a particular task. The hourly fee firms track time for billing purposes only. A lot of time firms will track time just so that they can produce a statement for the courts. Is it really true that Law Firms do not need to track employee performance?

That is not true. Any firm that is in business needs to track employee performance as it impacts their bottom line. Here is a simple example. Let’s say it takes an employee an hour to produce a document when it should normally take half an hour. If you don’t track that time, how are you going to know that you just lost half an hour of your employee’s time which could have been utilized for a different task? You will also have no idea that this employee is struggling with that task or needs more training to do their job better.

Obviously, you do not want to micro manage your employees. So why not setup a system where you capture all the time the employee spends working on different tasks and then at the end of the day evaluate what was done with reports.

This leads into conformance issues. Office managers tell us that the employees don’t have time to capture how much time they have put in on a task and some employees won’t put their time in as they are an attorney. Are attorney’s exempt for performance evaluations? The bottom line is no. A law practice is just like a traditional business where lack of performance becomes a huge overhead that is not recoverable and affects the bottom profit line for each and every law practice. It surely cuts into the partner’s profits.

So how do you get employee conformance? By simply designing an incentive plan, that has points for conformance and negative points for non-conformance. Employee performance evaluations and raises can be based on those points or even design bonus plans based on that.

Have you ever sat down and evaluated what is your true employee overhead? Something to think about…