The practice of Estate Planning is all about management of information, management of people and management of time. The day is long gone when a single person could juggle all this in his head. Most lawyers now use some form of practice management software, whether it be a "cheap solution" from Microsoft: Outlook calendar, contacts and email; a billing system using Quickbooks or one of the major legal billing software vendors; or an integrated front-office/backoffice solution from LexisNexis, Gavel & Gown, or Westlaw.
The benefits of "legal case management" or "law firm practice management" for a lawyer are direct and immediate. The benefits fall into a few categories: improved client relations, more effective information management, increased worker productivity, higher "bill to collection" ratios.
Take Away my Practice Management and I would lose half my clients
You see the value of a case management system most when either of two things happen: (1) your secretary takes a day off; or (2) your firm's server goes down and you can't access it.
Secretary Takes A Personal Day
With a well-designed practice management system, if your secretary leaves for the day (on short notice), you will see no affect on your practice:
- Your calendar lists all your appointments, who they are with and where to go.
- Your practice management system gives you the ability to find your documents by opening the matter record and looking at the document sublist.
- When a client calls, you can open their contact record and find out everything you need to know at a glance so that you can sound "intelligent" about their problem.
- Your time slips are a matter of selecting items on your calendar and clicking "send to billing".
In short, if your secretary leaves for the day you will be able to continue to work productively and bill time. When he or she returns, he can handle sending out the invoices and following up on the payments.
Your Server Takes a Personal Day
However, if your Server goes down, and takes with it your well-designed practice management system, it will be a disaster. You might as well take the day off. Even if you could get access to all your documents via a backup system, until your legal case management system come back on line:
- You will have no calendar, so you won't know where to go.
- You will have no task list, so that unless you remember all the items you calendared for the day, you are sunk.
- While you would have "access" to your documents, most wouldn't know where to find the document, or which version to resume working on.
- When a client calls, you would remember his or her name, but you will be less likely to remember why you called them or what the status of the work is that you are doing for them. Your secretary might "remember" (but she also uses the case management system).
So, when you miss your appointments, can't find your documents, and the client calls, but you don't know what to say to them. . . some of those clients might take it personally and walk.
Information at Lightning Speed
This is the age of "Google" and the "Internet". Have a question? Just open Google and you have hundred links, one of which will likely have the answer within a few mouse clicks. When it comes to Client information and Case information, you need a similar tool that can give you the answers, when you need them most (when the client is on the phone). The work must get done. The more information about your client and his or her estate plan that you have at your finger tips, the sooner you can get the work done, bill it, and move onto other clients.
An effective case management system centralizes and organizes all your information. Far more than a Calendar and list of Emails, the case management system "self-organizes" all the related information into multiple views:
- The Searchable List: Information can be viewed in lists, organized by name, company, project, matter, date, where such lists can be searched using advance search criteria.
- The Contact-based Related Records: Pull up a Contact record in a practice management system, say Time Matters, and in one view, you can see all emails, all notes, all calls, all documents, all outlines, all calendared events and tasks that in any way involve that particular contact. With a Basha Systems developed "Power View" you can preview the contents of that record instantly, or you can open the record with a single click.
- The Matter-based Related Records: Pull up a Matter record and you can see all the same information, but from the perspective of the open matter. You can also see instantly all contacts who are in any way involved with that matter.
- On any record type you can enter more than just name and address. In Time Matters you can infinitely customize over 150 fields for each Contact record and Matter record . and that is only the beginning.
The value of information at your fingertips only comes if you enter the information in your case management system. Data entry in a well-designed system is easy, so long as the system is customized for "your" type of practice. Even without customization, the building of automatic relationships, allow you to build the contact and matter based related record views.
Productivity Gains
Basha Systems has built an add-on for Time Matters called the Estate Planning Management System that integrates with a HotDocs form set from Interactive Legal Systems. This system illustrates how an effective case management system can give you the information you need at light-speed.
- A prospect calls, and you get their address, phone and email, inquire a bit about their family and schedule an appointment. Add these to a Time Matters contact.
- After the call, a confirming email goes out and the appointment is calendared.
- At the initial client meeting, a matter is opened for the new "client". The outline of the estate plan requirements are discussed and documented as "data records" in your Time Matters. Children, relations, potential beneficiaries and potential trustees and personal representatives are entered as contacts.
- When it comes to creating the documents in Wealth Transfer Planning, simply run the Client Interview, and import the data from Time Matters. No need to enter the data twice.
- Track revisions to the documents as "versions" in Time Matters.
- Later on, after the documents are complete, use Time Matters to schedule the "closing" on the documents, and to follow-up on further estate management issues.
- As the legal and tax environment changes, necessitating changes in the estate plan, be able to quickly identify all affected estate plans to notify those clients of the need to revise their plans.
At each step in the process, there are time savings efficiencies. These improvements in productivity can be:
- passed on to firm in terms of a higher billable hours to collection ratio (i.e. fewer billable hours written off to keep the client happy)
- passed on to the client in terms of lower fees
- benefit to both client and firm in terms of fixed fee schedule that results in a higher effective rate per billable hour, but a lower total rate per estate plan.
How Basha Systems Can Help
The choice is yours. As you will read on these pages, Basha Systems has helped many law firms identify those areas of their estate planning practice that can benefit from automation and information management. We have built commercial document assembly solutions (like Wealth Transfer Planning) and custom document solutions. We have also built the links between these automation solutions to workflow and information management solutions like those embodied in Time Matters. If you want to grow your estate planning practice smartly, give us a call. Maybe we can help.
Basha Off the Shelf Solutions
Increasingly, Basha is moving towards offering resale products and services to compliment our custom client efforts. All too often, we see multiple clients who
want exactly the things done for them and it simply makes sense to apply our efforts to making off the shelf solutions for those needs. Currently, we have two major offerings
in the case management space, both of which are feature packages for Time
Matters Front Office users:
- Office Management System is a
Time Matters Front Office feature package for any law firm wishing to transform their Time Matters data into expandable/collapsible powerviews that provide
a depth and functionality that will put the data from every matter at your fingertips.
- Estate Planning Management System is
an extension of the OMS product, incorporating many estate planning specific features and powerviews to ensure that your estate matters in Front Office are easier,
simpler and run more effectively than ever before.
