Law Office Management
Jun. 2, 2008
The Smartest Secretary in the Room
At its best, practice management software can get everyone in a firm on the same page. But there can be pitfalls. And some attorneys may never be willing to adapt.
Like a lot of things that I come across in the digital world, practice management software is a pricey tool that offers both promise and peril. At its best, it gives attorneys a powerful way to manage client and case information, calendaring, documents, and other day-to-day legal functions. The software is designed to bring all the
necessary information about a case into a single program, eliminating the need to enter the same data multiple times. Practice management software gets everyone in the firm working on the same page, literally. Just think of it as the smartest legal secretary you've ever had.
Ah, but beware the hidden dangers. Practice management software may be more expensive and complicated to implement than you initially expect. And to adapt to the software, you may wind up having to change the way you do some things. Certainly, this is one legal secretary you'll have to get well acquainted with before the two of you can work together effectively.
"I see a lot of firms that don't give adequate thought up front about how they're going to
use the software," says Catherine Ann Miller, a controller for Ryan & Fong who has done technical consulting for other firms. "Some think you just take the software out of the box and it solves your calendaring problems."
In fact, Michele Lyons a Los Angeles based computer consultant, told me, "It's surprising, but a lot of attorneys come to me and say they want to install practice management software for their firm because everyone tells them it's a good thing to have. And they haven't even considered the most basic questions: 'What do I need it for? What problems am I trying to solve?' "
Firms without practice management software usually divide management tasks among several programs. They'll use, say, Microsoft Outlook for calendaring, Excel for tracking deadlines and documents, and Intuit's QuickBooks for billing and accounting. The trouble is, information from one program doesn't always transfer easily into another, so someone ends up getting saddled with the task of keying duplicate information into multiple programs. Besides wasting time, this increases the risk of entering incorrect information that could make an attorney miss a deadline or court appearance. And that, of course, can lead to malpractice claims.
Even so, a surprising number of firms are still in the Bronze Age when it comes to something as basic as calendaring. "Even when people have practice management software, some are still typing out reports manually instead of relying on the software," says Lyons. "I've seen offices where they still do calendaring on paper, and someone is always saying, 'Where's the book? Has anyone seen the book?'"
Ah, the book. Needless to say, practice management software replaces the book with a central database, letting staff view deadlines, tasks, appointments, and meetings by day, week, month, year, or any other designated time frame. Once the dates are in the system, the software can automatically calculate schedules, appointments, and meetings.
Anderson & Kriger, headquartered in La Mesa, has been using practice management software since 1999, relying on a package known as Abacus Law. The firm made the move to practice management software because it was growing, and calendaring was getting too complex.
"We grew from a small firm of 6 to 8 people in an office in San Diego to
one that has 60 people and five branch offices," says Terri Loren, Anderson & Kriger's IT director. "We needed a way to keep track of our master calendar for the courts. So we looked around and ended up going with a practice management system. At the beginning, we really just used it for calendaring-we didn't use many of the other options or features."
Practice management software does much more than calendaring, but firms just getting familiar with it often find they want to master the calendaring function before moving on to other features.
That is, if they move on to other features. Some firms install the software and then wind up using only a fraction of the available functions.
But the software can also serve as a powerful virtual case manager. With the information for all your cases accessible on a central database, the software can create to-do lists, search for possible conflicts of interest with a new client, and check for expiring statues of limitations. Some systems also are designed to handle the entire business side of the profession: They can log and track phone messages, emails, faxes, letters, and documents ported from a word processing program, keep track of billable hours, and even generate client invoices.
Many systems can be customized with a rules package for specific jurisdictions, so that the calendaring feature "knows" the dates associated with a given case. This can be an invaluable time-saver, particularly in California, where a single trial can have as many as 80 dates associated with it. With a rules package for your jurisdiction in place, the software automatically fills in all of the associated dates and upcoming deadlines, even accounting for holidays and local court schedules.
So, practice management software must be for everyone, right? Uh, not quite. "I know of one lawyer a few years from retirement who's running a very successful firm making plenty of money," says Lyons. "He sees no reason to bother to learn new technology."
OK, you have to be at least a willing citizen of the 21st century to buy into practice management software. But even then, it may not be for everybody. Small law firms have been slow to adopt it; industry analysts estimate that only 12 percent of small and solo firms have a practice management software system in place.
Some small firms claim they don't need practice management software because the way they do things is already pretty simple. Adding a complicated computer program to the mix is likely to only screw things up.
In many firms that use software packages, there is just not a great need for a lot of bells and whistles, affirms Barbara Follett, office administrator for Anderson & Kriger. "There are so many small, quick calendar programs out now that might work better for a small firm without getting into something more complicated."
Also, implementing a practice management system requires a significant commitment of time and money. On the money side, software packages cost around $400 per licensed user for a basic system, and two or three times that for something more complex. Those who have implemented such systems say that the money you spend on the software can amount to as little as 10 percent of your total cost; the other 90 percent comes from lost work time in learning the system and the expense of flying in consultants.
Then there are the usual unforeseen technical hurdles. This is software, after all. "We have our practice management software set up as our local database in each of our branch offices," says Anderson & Kriger's Loren. "And the process for synchronizing that database sometimes can be long and tedious. We didn't anticipate that. So we had to upgrade some of our equipment, like installing T1 lines in all our offices. Now the time to synchronize everything is greatly reduced."
Being trained by an experienced consultant can also go a long way in making sure that everyone buys in to the system. This is crucial, because sometimes law firms find they have to reconfigure their own practices-document flow, logging procedures, scheduling-to fit the idiosyncrasies of the software, rather than the other way around.
As Lyons told me, "A lot of small firms do things a certain way because that's how the founding partner always did them. When you bring practice management software into that environment, you've either got to reconfigure the software or reconfigure the partner."
So, if you want to make the leap, how do you choose among the dozens of practice management software programs available? A good place to start is the American Bar Association's website (www.abanet.org), which features a detailed, feature-by-feature comparison of the major practice management software packages. There's also a directory of practice management software vendors at www.capterra.com, from which you can request a quote and a free demo from some of the listed firms. Also, colleagues from other firms already using a system can be an invaluable source of information.
When selecting a software package, you'll first need to make sure that your hardware and operating systems are compatible. Then you'll need to decide what other software you want to use in conjunction with the practice management software, or whether you should just start from scratch.
The software packages present information in different ways, so you may find yourself more comfortable with one method of operation over another. One popular system, Time Matters, uses the metaphor of a timeline to present case information. The timeline displays chronologically all the billing, email, notes, phone calls, documents, legal research, events, and to-do lists associated with a particular case, showing the current status of the work, who performed it, and how long it took. A rival software package, Amicus, presents information in the format of a paper-based calendar and contact book.
Many who've made the switch to practice management software say they would never go back to the old "where's the big book?" days. When this software works, it works big-time. And by lowering the risk of the most common malpractice hazards-missed court deadlines and inaccurate calendars-it might be the rare piece of software that actually helps you sleep at night instead of keeping you awake.
Alexandra Brown
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