Newsletter. Document & Management. Practice Better. 11 Reasons Your Law Firm Needs. In This Issue. Basic cloud storage isn t good enough.

(1)

In This Issue

•

11 Reasons Your Law Firm

Needs Document & Email

Management

•

Should Your Firm Use

Tabs3™?

•

Thomson Reuters Partners

with Uptime to deliver

ProLaw in the Cloud.

Welcome to the Practice Better™ Newsletter, where you’ll ﬁnd

company news, legal technology news, trends, tips and other

resources for law ﬁrms.

11 Reasons Your Law Firm Needs

Document &Email Management

In this article we explore the reasons that a simple ﬁle and folder

system--be it on your local ﬁle server or cloud storage service--isn't

good enough for law ﬁrms.

Must-have Features

We also take a look at 11 features that a legal-centric document &

email management system should have.

(Full article on page 2.)

Legal Technology Tips & Trends February 2015

Basic cloud storage

isn’t good enough.

Newsletter

Practice Better

™

(2)

11 Reasons Your Law Firm Needs

Document &Email Management

Traditionally when we speak of documents in a law practice we’re referring to pleadings, discovery documents, forms, and letters. Today, add email to that list. Email is not only the most common form of communication between parties in a legal matter, but each email can (and should) be thought of as a document. So it should go without saying that managing documents and email is important to lawyers in every type of practice.

Enter Document Management. For those that ﬁnd the term fuzzy: let’s deﬁne a Document Management System (DMS) as storage, organization, categorization, annotation, and retrieval of documents related to a client and/or a matter.

Storage vs. Management

(A simple cloud drive is not good enough)

To really dig into what a Document & Email Management system does and why it’s critical to law practices of all sizes, we should contrast storage with management.

Document or ﬁle storage is just that–a place to put documents. Your PC or laptop is a document storage system. Your company’s shared network drive (IE: “the G:\ drive”) is storage. DropBox and Google Drive are both storage. You can store ﬁles there, organize them into folders, open them later, and share them with others. Nothing more, nothing less.

Document management is the storage of documents and files plus meaningful and useful tools to help you use the documents. Document & Email management systems help law firms organize, annotate, search, retrieve, and share documents; they keep lawyers efficient and effective.

Document & Email Management Must-haves

for Attorneys

When evaluating a document & email management system, it’s important to note that not all are created equal or speciﬁcally for law ﬁrms.

A document & email management system for your law ﬁrm should include the

following functionality:

1. Cloud-based. Unless you’re a very large ﬁ rm, the cost and burden of an on-premise document management system is unnecessary. The cloud is eco-nomical, ﬂexible, and scalable.

2. Matter-centric. As a law ﬁ rm your document management system should be matter-centric: All documents, emails, and ﬁles related to a client and matter, organized and retrievable in one place.

Everything for a

Matter in One

Place

One of the major reasons every law ﬁrm ought to have a docu-ment & email managedocu-ment system is matter-centricity. Without a proper management system, case information, doc-uments, email, and other data is likely scattered throughout several disjointed systems. For example: case data in your legal software, documents in DropBox or a network share, email in Outlook or Gmail. A legal-centric document & email management system organizes everything for a particular case or client– documents, email, case information, notes– in one place.

(3)

Legal

Works

™

Uptime LegalWorks™ is a cloud-based document, email & case management solution built just for law ﬁrms. LegalWorks will bring your documents, email, matters and more, together in a single cloud-based solution.

“LegalWorks

streamlined

our process of

managing our

ﬁrm’s

documents,

email and

matters. It

ﬂows and

functions

exactly the way

a law ﬁrm

needs. I

haven’t seen

anything like

it.”

Brad Thies Thies, Lihn & Simpson

11 Must-have Features

3. Email Management + Outlook Integration. A good document management system should also be an email management system. It should include the ability to save emails to your database, allowing you to search email messages and attachments, and capture data such as sender, recipient, and timestamp. Ideally, your email management system integrates directly with Outlook, allowing you to drag and drop emails to a speciﬁc matter without leaving your Outlook inbox.

4. Versioning. A good document & email management system will k eep a copy of each document’s version every time a change is made, so you can quickly review previous versions. The system should also keep a history of who made each change, and when.

5. Check-In/Check-Out. A staple of any document management system is check-in-/out functionality. Checking out a document marks it as “in use”, if you plan to work with a document for an extended period of time, and don’t want others to modify it. Checking a document out/in also creates a history of who did what with a document, and when.

6. Scan & Fax Integration. You should be able to scan directly into your DMS, saving you extra steps of scanning, uploading, and then categorizing scanned documents. Ideally, your DMS can also serve as your fax inbox, so new incoming faxes are stored directly in the proper folders.

7. Deadlines. Every practice must deal with some form of deadlines. A good, legal-centric document & email management system will allow you to assign deadlines to any document you store anywhere in the system, then see an aggregate of upcoming document-speciﬁc deadlines in a single report or dashboard.

8. Notes & Metadata. Two fundamental DMS components are notes and metadata. Metadata is additional information stored not in a document, but rather about a document. This gives you and your team the ability to make private, internal notes, comments, and categorization entries on any document.

9. Audit Trail. Who last changed this document? What did they update? When did they do it? A good document management system will keep a detailed audit trail of every change to every document in the system, should you need to review it.

10. Fast Index & Search. For many law ﬁ rms the most important factor of a document & email man-agement system is the ability to quickly search (and ﬁnd) important documents. A good DMS will index every document and email–including the contents–and return search results in seconds.

11. Case & Client info. While not part of DMS by its strict deﬁ nition, a great document & email management system will also have a place for you to enter case and client information, so that documents, emails, contact, and case info is easily accessible in a single place.

The Verdict

With so much at stake it’s easy to see why a document & email management system is crucial for law firms large and small. And finding the right legal-centric solution can be difficult. We recommend reviewing Up-time LeaglWorks, a cloud-based document, email & case management solution built exclusively for law firms.

(4)

Practice Better:

Should Your Firm Use Tabs3?

In the last several years, selecting a solution to manage your law practice has gotten considerably more complex. You have on-premise solutions. Web-based solutions. Hosted Practice Management. With such a crowded marketplace, it can be diﬃcult to know which solution is best for your ﬁrm (or: if another solution is better suited to mange your practice than what you use currently).

Tabs3 Overview

Tabs3, made by Software Technology Inc., is a legal billing and accounting solution made for law firms. It’s a highly robust back-office solution for law firms that includes billing, AR/AP, general ledger and more. Tabs3 can be complemented by its front-office counterpart: PracticeMaster to add case management, calendaring, workflows and more. Tabs3 has been around for over 35 years.

What We Like about Tabs3

In our experience, we ﬁnd Tabs3 a very popular legal billing & accounting solution for ﬁrms that have grown past the solo or solo-plus-one size, and we think we know why.

1. Tabs3 is a complete billing & accounting solution: its users will not have to bolt-on another piece of software such as QuickBooks to facilitate the rest of their accounting (trust accounting, payroll, AR, AP, payroll and ﬁnancial statements.)

2. If your firm needs more sophisticated practice management) functionality, Tabs3 is complemented well by PracticeMaster. PracticeMaster includes workflows to automate repeat processes, calendaring, conflict search and more.

The Verdict

In our experience your firm should use Tabs3 if it needs a robust billing, accounting and reporting platform. And if your firm needs workflow management to streamline and automate processes (such as intake), conflict-of-interest-search, calendaring or other front-office functionality, we advise you take a serious look at PracticeMaster as well. All considered, Tabs3 (and PracticeMaster) will grow with your firm.

Better in the Cloud

Leverage Tabs3 for your practice anywhere, without the need for on-premise servers and expensive IT support with a legal cloud platform such as Uptime Practice™. Tabs3 , along with the right cloud solution, will give you access to your entire practice including your case management and billing software, your ﬁles, documents & email, anytime, anywhere.

Key Features

• Flexible Billing. We’ve

found Tabs3 billing plat-form to be incredibly robust and ﬂexible, with options including contingency, split fee, retainer, ﬂat fee and progress billing.

• Faster Billing. You can

print or e-mail your statements as PDFs. You can automatically generate all of the e-mails and PDFs at once.

• Workﬂow & Automation.

(PracticeMaster) Use Workﬂows to automatically start tasks or give you and your staff reminders after you perform a particular action.

• Conﬂict Search. Quickly

identify possible conﬂicts for everyone in your ﬁrm. Search clients, contacts, documents, e-mails, and attachments.

• Complete Accounting.

Tabs3 is a complete accounting solution, and includes back-oﬃce functionality such as reporting, Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, Trust Account-ing and General Ledger.

(5)

Contact

Uptime

888-878-4632 [email protected] [email protected] www.uptimesystems.net

Thomson Reuters Press Release

Leading Legal Industry Cloud Provider Beneﬁts ProLaw Clients with a Suite of Hosted Services

Thomson Reuters Elite, a leading global provider of enterprise business management solutions to professional services ﬁrms, today announced that Uptime Legal Systems has joined as an Alliance partner to help ProLaw clients securely host their practices in the cloud. Hundreds of ﬁrms around the world rely on Uptime to provide industry-leading cloud services, which in-clude hosted practice management, cloud-based document and email management, legal-grade email, cloud-based phone service, and IT management.

Uptime Practice™ is a complete cloud solution that supports the entirety of ProLaw, as well as unlimited email storage. With this service, clients are able to access all crucial practice infor-mation from any device, without any on-site servers or additional IT support necessary.

Uptime’s cloud services are built on world-class, US-based data centers that deliver a superior level of security and client privacy. All of the company’s cloud service plans include multiple independent backup systems to ensure full data recovery.

“With Uptime, ProLaw clients are able to leverage the cloud to manage their practices anytime, anywhere, and without the burden of in-house or outsourced IT support,” said Dennis Dimka, managing director of Uptime. “Uptime simpliﬁes the way clients store and access ProLaw data, while also providing the same reliability and security expected for a Fortune 500 company.”

The Thomson Reuters Elite Global Strategic Alliance Program provides a one-stop global mar-ketplace that fosters cooperation, streamlines the buy-sell cycle and helps all involved achieve a competitive edge. Elite partners are experienced technology, services and consulting organi-zations ready to innovate, collaborate and help our clients solve their most pressing business challenges. Visit the Global Strategic Alliance Program to learn more about the beneﬁts of part-nering with Thomson Reuters Elite.

Elite is the leading global provider of an end-to-end enterprise business management solution, which allows law firms and professional services organizations to run all operational aspects of their firms, including business development, risk management, client and matter management, and financial management. For additional information, visit www.elite.com.

Uptime was founded in 2005 as an IT consultancy to law firms and other small and mid-size businesses. Throughout the past decade Uptime has pioneered cloud computing, expanded its footprint nationally, and refined its focus to the legal industry. Today Uptime provides cloud services to hundreds of firms and thousands of attorneys across the US and Canada. For more information, visit www.uptimesystems.net.