Document Assembly & Case Management Blog

John Heckman in his recent blog post, When Is Ease of Use Counterproductive? raised an interesting issue and one I have struggled with in designing advanced interview systems for document automation.  He posits that making something too easy encourages foolish and stupid behavior.  There is a balance between “constraints on behavior” and making something too simple.

I have just returned from the Amicus 2010 Consultants conference in Banff.  They were kind enough to invite me to speak on document assembly to their consultants and to demonstrate how Amicus Attorney can support and facilitate complex document assembly workflow.  The setting, high in the Canadian Rockies, was nothing short of spectacular.  Some days were sunny and warm (I wore T-shirt and shorts) and other days it snowed.  But what was real exciting was the transformation from Amicus Attorney from the “warm familiar” attorney practice management system that “anyone” can use into a powerful, fully customizable, extensible workflow powerhouse.

Last week, I received a call from London.  An American lawyer, based in London, with clientele in Florida was setting up a firm “in the cloud”.  He was planning to use a Salesforce.com application for lawyers calls AdvologixPM and an accounting service called Xero.com.  After some research, we discovered there was integration between Force.com and Xero, an accounting software package offered as a SaaS model (monthly fee) and hosted out of New Zealand.  After speaking to an accountant in Ackland, New Zealand, we were able to advise the client.  What makes it interesting in the “multinational” nature of this engagement made possible by “The Cloud” and requiring “no software installation”, but rather the engagement of “services.”

It’s live!!!! The new Basha Systems legal technology news site. Come for a visit.  For TOO long, there was no source for news on developments in practice management and document assembly.  And yet, several vendors has started getting savvy about social marketing.  For example, Exari and ContractExpress have launched blogs and twitter feeds of news and development.  And so, rather than hunting everywhere for developments, I created a page for myself to track these latest “feeds” and then set it up for you to enjoy.  Come take a look; bookmark the site, and come back regularly.  If there are OTHER feeds you want to see, please suggest it.  Best of all, check out the new technology.  This is the first consultant website that you can “PERSONALIZE”. Yeah, you can reorder the feeds, change the priorities, and move it around to suit YOUR technology needs.

Every other year I assess our firm’s web-presence and look at the state of technology.  My goal is to build a website that is informative, describes the products we support, and gives useful comparative and illustrative information about those products. Two years ago my interests were wide ranging, but the core of our business was HotDocs, GhostFill and Time Matters.  Since that time, our skill set and product offerings have expanded, as well as our staff.  We now have significant programming and database management capabilities by virtue of the inclusion of Steve Stockstill and Marc Wexler in our virtual offerings, and have engaged our partner Holly Humphreys in several billing engagements. 

We have entered into the web-development business with a new offering coming out in the 4th quarter through our partner businesswebsitedesigners.com.au that addresses the needs of lawyers interested in both social media and document automation. We have diversified our offerings of practice management solutions to include AdvologixPM and Amicus Attorney Premium Edition.  We have built solutions with Exari document assembly and DealBuilder, now offered on a SaaS model as ContractExpress.  And we have partnered with NetDocuments to provide cloud-based document management.  And so, our website, as comprehensive as it is, is hopelessly out of date.

I spend a large amount of time and money each year worrying about “backing up” my data files.  Years ago, I decided to centralize all my files on a File Server.  A peer-to-peer network was good for distributing processing, but a disaster when you are like me, working on multiple PC’s. I do that so that I can test software on different environments.  One I decided on a central file server (realize the decision was not rocket science), the issue came on appropriate backup routines.  I tried tape cartridges, but most were too slow and too small.  I currently am working with a RAID-V server array, removable hard-drive backup, combined with MozyPro.  The system works, but is not ideal. The hard-drive backups are not swapped often enough; MozyPro took forever to get all my data, and afterwords, is quite slow on the restores.  And so, I am now looking into a “cloud” solution, in particular NetDocuments. 

What if you could access your network from ANYWHERE and at ANYTIME?  What if you could check your calendar, check your task list, do your billing and access all your documents? What if you could do this WITHOUT A NETWORK?  What if you could do it WITHOUT a Server, without a terminal server, and without any network infrastructure at all?  What if the entire network was IN THE CLOUDS.  Wouldn’t that be great (for you that is)?  What if this cloud-based system was infinitely customizable, and infinitely expandable?  What if you could purchase “plugins” and other packages to extend the functionality of the database? What if there was a network of consultants who could assist you?  What if there were hooks into Web-based document assembly applications like EXARI? What if I told you this system was already built and opened for business last month.  Take a look at AdvologixPM.

Have you ever considered going truly “PAPERLESS”?  If you do, did you plan on telling your clients?  And what do you do with all their STUFF? The answer may lie in your client engagement letter.  So long as you disclose to your client what you are going to do with the documents in his/her case, and so long as you keep originals of those documents you are legally and ethically required to keep, you should be in a position to go paperless without increasing your risk of malpractice.  Wells Anderson and I have developed some model language that you can you in your engagement letter.  We give it with the caveat that while we are lawyers, we are likely not admitted to practice in your jurisdiction, and second we are not offering this language as legal advice.  We are asking you to consider this language and review it in light of your firm’s document retention procedures and your state’s legal and ethical requirements regarding document retention.

A recent series of posts on Technolawyer, titled “Legal Software and Consultants” troubled me.  In this series, Mark Deal, Ay Uaxe, and Jason Havens spared on the role of legal consultants in implementing case management solutions. There was a touch of resentment on both sides.  On one side, the lawyers (of whom I count myself), look to their extensive education, their extensive domain knowledge and work experience as qualifiers in the world of software design and process.  It should be “easy”; it should be “cheap”; and anyone can do this stuff; it’s not rocket science.  Why don’t those vendors understand?  Why don’t they anticipate and design for my needs. On the other side are the legal technology consultants who have spent years studying the software tools, designing solutions with the software, and implementing and training. Many serve in defacto advisory capacity to software vendors, fielding feature requests and reporting on bugs.

In the next few weeks, my reviews of CLIO and RocketMatter will appear in Technolawyer, with copies on this site.  I don’t want to give away the results, but I want to comment more generally on the development goals of cloud-based offerings versus client-server offerings.  To some degree, I have dealt with that tension in my development and advisory role in the creation of Wealth Transfer Planning and its unique front-end for HotDocs.  It is this balancing act between simplicity and sophistication, between stability and customizability, that marks really good software. CLIO and RocketMatter are following in the footsteps of the two giants of software development.