"The savings in time once the case management system is running can be tremendous."
- Jeffrey Lisson
(Carter Boyd)

What the Experts are Saying

Jim Calloway - "The Case for Case Management Software" (A complete version of this article appears in the Oklahoma Bar's "Law Practice Tips")

"Is looking for a lost file a frequent excercise in your law office? With case management software, the paper files spend more time in the file drawer while several people can access the digitial information on the same file at one time over your network.

While you may not feel that you have been dramatically penalized so far, that time could lie ahead. For those of you who know that all your matters are entered in your computer system, you know that you sleep better at night and work more efficiently during the day."

Mark Goldin - "Travel Lightly & Stop Losing Money!" (Law Technology News)

"If time and expenses can't be tracked immediately, it is a forgone conclusion that some of both will be lost, directly affecting the firm's profitability. A lawyer should be able to instantly and accurately provide a client with an invoice for any services rendered. Lawyers who can quickly process this sort of information and produce a new invoice or statement of account, are lawyers who are simultaneously meeting the needs of the client and the firm's bottom line."

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

"Practice Management software has become the nerve center from which lawyers operate their practices. PM can have a dramatic impact on productivity."

Terri Olson - (Advice to members of the State Bar of Georgia)

"Take advantage of technology. A lawyer with a computer with ...case management software ....can quickly level the playing field."

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."

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".

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 info
Insurance company info
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?" 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. 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.

8. The Timeline/Chronology function to show the progress of work on a case is incredibly useful.

9. Synchronizing with laptop/remote systems.

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