TechnoLawyer: Accounting/Billing/Time Capture

Today's issue of TechnoLawyer NewsWire covers a practice management system (see article below), a miniature Linux-based server, OCR software, an eBook reader and bookstore, and an iPhone app for streaming television shows. Don't miss the next issue.

Need to Manage Your Practice? There's an App for That.

The practice management software market has seen its share of ambitious products over the years, many of which don't survive beyond version 1 or 2 thanks to a misreading of the market, inadequate capital, poor management, version inflation (too many upgrades), or all of the above. Interestingly, several of the companies that gave birth to this market have survived and remain independent thanks to their customer focus. We've been remiss in covering one such product.

Needles Case Management Software Version 4.8 … in One Sentence
Needles Case Management Software Version 4.8 (Needles) is a practice management system designed to help law firms optimize their workflow and reduce errors.

The Killer Feature
When software like Needles first cropped up in the early days of the PC, the ability to generate mailing labels was a revelation.

But thanks to the business intelligence movement, law firms want to slice and dice their data in ways never before imagined. To meet this demand, Needles now provides more than 85 standard reports, and an overhauled Report Writer to make it easier to create your own custom reports. You can base a report on virtually any standard or custom fields, and sort the data as you see fit.

Other Notable Features
Needles has a wide array of features, including calendar, contacts, email, internal messaging, conflict checking, statute tracking, checklists, document management, case status, cost tracking, litigation management, and much more.

Opening Needles displays the Needles Today screen — a dashboard that lists upcoming calendar items, email and internal messages, and a checklist of tasks related to your matters. Needles' internal messaging system enables you to view a communication related to a case. In version 4.8, you can elect to have these messages sent to your email address so you can access them when you're not logged into Needles (e.g., on your smartphone).

Also new is a redesigned interface that enables you to view more information on Needles' case status screens, which provide a snapshot of a particular matter. You can export a status screen in HTML format and upload it to your extranet for client viewing.

Over the years, Needles has added the ability to integrate with accounting and billing programs such as QuickBooks, Tabs3, and Timeslips. Version 4.8 adds integration with Juris.

What Else Should You Know?
To make it easier to get started, Needles includes Case Types — templates for practice areas ranging from bankruptcy to insurance defense to personal injury that include everything from client intake to legal research to statutory deadlines. You can customize these templates further to suit your specific workflow. Needles costs $1,000 per user for up to nine users. The price per user drops incrementally at 10 users, 20 users, etc. Learn more about Needles.

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Originally published on August 24, 2009 in our free SmallLaw newsletter.

I'm back again with five more technology hacks for small law firms. While technology is not necessarily a bastion of hope in these dark economic times, it can give the small firm practitioner a leg up on the competition and level the playing field for client service and communication compared to a larger outfit. If you missed my first five hacks, you can find them on TechnoLawyer Blog.

1. Track Your Time Writing Emails With MonetaMail

MonetaMail is an Outlook add-on that tracks the time you spend on email activities.

MonetaMail is inspired by the following facts:

Email is the most popular communication tool. Much email activity is of short duration (certainly under the 6 minutes for the 0.1 hour minimum time tranche). Many users do not actually know how much time they spend in email and usually grossly underestimate their email activity time. Moreover, users do not want to leave the workflow of reading and replying to email to track their time.

The solution, prior to MonetaMail was to either ignore or forget about billing for email time, make some wild guesses, or sift through your Sent folder and reconstruct what happened.

MonetaMail tags, tracks, and reports your email time by two different user-selected descriptors (you need set up a descriptor only once per email address). The basic idea is to track the time that slips through the cracks by seamlessly integrating into Outlook. The reporting function enables you to evaluate email productivity by client, project or time-period, on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. The captured time should eclipse the $99 price.

2. Send Video Emails With Eyejot

Even in the hands of a gifted writer, the written word can prove difficult to decipher. Enter video messaging service Eyejot.

Eyejot enables you to send video messages by simply signing up, logging in to your account, uploading or recording your video, and clicking "Send." There is no software to install or download. It works with all major browsers.

A free account enables you to send an unlimited number of 60 second email messages, and provides support for RSS feeds and iTunes, and a visual address book. Upgrading to the Pro version for $29.95 per year extends the video length to 5 minutes and provides an inbox perpetual in duration (the free account stores email for only 30 days).

For $99.95 per year, the Pro Plus version enables you to add your own logo and color scheme to Eyejot's notification elements, receive alerts when recipients view your video messages, and attach documents to your video messages.

3. Tweet From Outlook

Twinbox is a free Microsoft Outlook plugin that seamlessly integrates with Outlook to enable Twitter users to update, reply, archive, search, and receive their friends' tweets.

After download and installation, simply visit the "Options" menu and enter your Twitter username and password. What sets this app apart from stand-alone Adobe Air based Twitter applications such as TweetDeck is the ability to archive, manage, group, and search your tweets the same way you manage your email. You can also upload photos and Outlook attachments and automatically download all tweets matching the keywords you specify, similar to a supercharged Google Alerts for Outlook. Thus, Twinbox enables you to monitor what people are saying about you and your firm.

4. Backup Your Browser Settings With FavBackup

FavBackup is a free portable utility (meaning it does not have to be installed, just executed) that will backup your browser preferences, passwords, extensions, and sessions.

It works with all major browsers, including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Safari, and Google Chrome. Backing up is as simple as running the downloaded file and following the guided prompts.

5. Set Up Advanced Voicemail With YouMail

YouMail is a free voicemail service that will blow the pants off your cell phone carrier's default voicemail package. Think Google Voice without the extra phone number.

YouMail provides visual voicemail, personalized greetings based on the caller, voicemail sharing, caller blocking, and voicemail alerts by email and text. For a fee of $3.99/month, you can have voicemail messages transcribed and emailed to you. Another nifty feature is the ability to make folders to organize your voicemail messages as you would your email. You can also download your voice messages in .mp3 format.

What better way to organize client communications, send notes to yourself, and compartmentalize all communications? Give it a try and let me know what you think.

Written by Will Geer of JDhacker.

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Originally published on August 17, 2009 in our free SmallLaw newsletter.

Lawyers are intimately familiar with the need to harness time. Even those who work on a contingency or flat-fee basis know that timesheets and expense records are the lifeblood of the profession. But does billing have to be so prone to error and subject to endless second-guessing? Can we ever have 100% confidence that our bills won't be challenged?

Not as it stands now. Sure, software is available to help tame the billing monster, but choices are limited and none of the major vendors offers a true solution. The most popular tool is an electronic stopwatch of sorts, but if you still enter time manually on a computer or mobile phone then you haven't solved the problem. The only reliable way to truly harness and accurately track the billable hour is to empower our office equipment (fax machine, phone, computer, printer, copier, scanner, smartphone) to become timekeepers.

The Problem

Soon after becoming a lawyer I learned firsthand that billing was not about time so much as it was managing client expectations. Billable time and chronological time often do no relate to one another at all. How else could you explain the fact that a document drafted in 6 hours can generate more fees than a real estate transaction that takes the same amount of time to negotiate and close? It's enough to make you wonder whether there's any point in keeping time records at all. And for those willing to try, a number of barriers exist:

1. It is virtually impossible to track everything you do.
2. Some events are just too short to track at all.
3. Keeping records interrupts your workflow.
4. Records are only as good as your stopwatch.
5. Ensuring the accuracy of records is challenging.
6. Predicting the future follow-up time is difficult.

There is a payoff for keeping good records despite the odds. By the time your firm issues invoices the underlying work is usually a fuzzy memory. If clients want to question their bill or delay payment all they have to do was demand proof that a particular event occurred (or at least that it took as long as the bill says it did). Only a solid set of records can address such questions.

Unfortunately for my first employer, he chose not to invest in defensible timekeeping methods so most of the time he had no way of supporting his invoices. I vowed to do better when it was my turn to run a practice.

The Non-Solution

In 2000 I started my own firm and deployed a system to gather time electronically. At first the results were a revelation. Even with 5 timekeepers (3 lawyers, 2 paralegals), I could issue and collect invoices in a fraction of the time it had taken my former employer and still be confident that they were accurate.

Before long however, it became apparent that the system was only as good as the timekeepers: garbage in meant garbage out. Invoices could still be attacked, and employees could still short-change the office by failing to record time. In fact, the more timekeepers we had the more mistakes, duplicates, and stray entries I had to clean up. Eventually the billing process consumed five days per month and I had to admit that the system was broken. I needed a smarter solution.

Web 2.5 to the Rescue

In 2004 Flickr, Digg, Blogger, and others showed us that Web-based applications could thrive by doing one thing well instead of being all things to all users. As innovative as they were however, such Web 2.0 sites did not address the practical needs of small law firms.

In the last few years however, products like Basecamp, Bill4Time, Caseload, Clio, Rocket Matter, Tempo, and others have developed Web-based applications that apply directly to our practices. What's more, applications such as AirTime-A4P, Chrometa, Element55, RescueTime, MonetaSuite, and WorkTRAKR automatically track activity, eliminating the need for you to enter your time. While you must make sense of all the activity captured and convert it into time entries, you won't have to worry about forgetting any activities or having incomplete records should a client object.

Can this group of next-generation time-capture solutions solve our billing problems? My answer is a definite "maybe." But that's okay because whether the winning application is one of the contenders listed above or just an idea taking form in the mind of a software engineering student at Stanford, we already know enough to know that automatic time capture represents the future of hourly billing. The only question is which product(s) will emerge as the killer app in this category — much as WordPerfect changed legal writing in the 1980s. Until we know, we will all just have to keep billing the old fashioned way.

Written by Mazyar M. Hedayat of M. Hedayat & Associates, P.C.

How to Receive SmallLaw
Small firm, big dreams. Published first via email newsletter and later here on our blog, SmallLaw provides you with a mix of practical advice that you can use today, and insight about what it will take for small law firms like yours to thrive in the future. The SmallLaw newsletter is free so don't miss the next issue. Please subscribe now.

Coming today to Fat Friday: William Shilling responds to a recent TechnoFeature about Macs in a law firm, Robert Maize reviews FileCenter's file deletion failsafe mechanism, George Allen reviews 3M's ergonomic joystick mouse, James Moore reviews the Treo Pro and shares what deterred him from buying a Palm Pre, and James Walsh shares some important information about Timeslips and the 64-bit version of Windows Vista. Don't miss this issue.

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Coming today to Answers to Questions: Noel Klebaum reviews PerfectLaw for practice management, Steve Loewy explains how he archives email using Acrobat Standard, Philip Franckel discusses the difference between the various versions of Dragon NaturallySpeaking, Burton Bruggeman reviews Lanlogic for hosted Exchange, and Phil Dubois compares OpenOffice to Microsoft Word. Don't miss this issue.

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Today's issue of TechnoLawyer NewsWire covers time capture software (see article below), a widescreen GPS navigation device, a document and photo scanner, an online workflow system for approving and paying bills, and an iPhone app for using your FreshBooks account. Don't miss the next issue.

Time Capture Software (Almost) as Smart as a Lawyer

If humans ever split into different species, lawyers will likely evolve into giant heads with no bodies. After all, you only need your body to transfer your thoughts to your computer. Otherwise, it serves no particular function other than creating more lawyers, which you could no doubt outsource. But for now, you may as well make sure you get paid for the long hours you spend hunched in front of your computer.

Chrometa 2.0 … in One Sentence
Chrometa automatically captures and organizes the time you spend on your PC, facilitating your ability to accurately bill all your time.

The Killer Feature
As soon as the "ink" dried on our previous report on Chrometa 1.1, the company announced version 2.0. As you may recall, we pointed to Chrometa's ability to log all your computer activity as its killer feature. You can later transform these log entries into time entries in your billing system.

This automatic capture still exists, but the company has added a second killer feature -- drag and drop, which further automates the time capture process.

You can now drag one or more activities recorded by Chrometa and drop them on the appropriate client/matter account. Chrometa is smart enough to remember this action so that next time you perform similar work (e.g., editing the same document), Chrometa will automatically enter the time spent in that client/matter account.

"We found that lawyers spend an average of 2.6 hours each week reconciling their time," Chrometa CEO Brett Owens told us. "Chrometa's automatic time capture and now drag and drop take a significant bite out of this process."

Other Notable Features
Befitting its new version number, Chrometa includes many other new features. For example, you can now capture meeting, phone, and other time spent away from your PC, and categorize it by client/matter. This form of tracking requires manual entry, but Chrometa created a quick entry tool for this purpose. The upshot is that you can now see all your activities in Chrometa.

By popular demand, Chrometa features improved categorization of computer activities. For example, it can list email messages individually by subject line along with the accompanying time spent reading or writing the message. Chrometa also supports advanced tagging of both Word and WordPerfect files, providing similar granularity down to each individual document. When you're ready to transfer the time entries you've captured into your billing system, Chrometa can sort them by client/matter.

Equally notable in the new version are the redesigned user interface (see accompanying screenshot) and improved security tools. You can now password protect Chrometa, delete activities, and remove historical data.

What Else Should You Know?
Chrometa 2.0 runs in Windows XP and Vista, and sells for an introductory price of $99, which includes unlimited email support. You can try it for free for 30 days. Learn more about Chrometa 2.0.

How to Receive TechnoLawyer NewsWire
So many products, so little time. In each issue of TechnoLawyer NewsWire, you'll learn about five new products for the legal profession. Pressed for time? The "In One Sentence" section describes each product in one sentence, and the "Killer Feature" section describes each product's most compelling feature. The TechnoLawyer NewsWire newsletter is free so don't miss the next issue. Please subscribe now.

Originally published on July 20, 2009 in our free SmallLaw newsletter.

If you hung out a shingle at a leisurely pace with cash reserves, strong credit, a book of business, and no regrets, dust off a copy of How to Start and Build a Law Practice by Jay Foonberg. The rest of you might want to keep reading, however. This installment of SmallLaw addresses the swelling ranks of the newly unemployed (law firm layoffs) and involuntarily self-employed (178 law schools, 40,000 graduates) who thanks to this year of breathtaking economic free-fall have decided to go solo.

Top 10 Solo Traps to Avoid …

As you read through the list below, keep these common traps in mind, as they represent the most palpable and often the most fatal blows to would-be sole practitioners:

10. Isolation, insecurity, fear.
9. High-maintenance clients.
8. Unrelenting competition.
7. Technology whiplash.
6. Employee nightmares.
5. Nowhere to turn for advice.
4. Underestimating costs (software and services).
3. Ethical quagmires.
2. Notoriously uneven cash-flow.
1. Deadbeat clients.

The Envelope Please …

By and large I've organized these tools based on cost, coverage, and effectiveness. I encourage you to try as many as you can and share your experience with your fellow solos. So let's get started.

Web Sites

The .com revolution ended over 10 years ago, so why is Web site development and hosting still a mystery? Explore free and low cost Web site resources before you agree to pay (and pay, and pay, and pay) for a site.

My Recommendations: Avvo, Justia, Template Monster.

Social Networks

When it comes to reaching prospects and other lawyers on social networks, I've lectured, written, and given presentations until I was blue in the face and worked up a whopping case of carpel-tunnel. So I guess one more mentioning won't hurt.

My Recommendations: Avvo, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, JD Supra.

Blogs

Blogs developed from outlets for pure self-expression into "premium" services run by "legal blogging experts" (whatever that means). Frankly, I'm not convinced, so I split my vote between free and paid services. You be the judge.

My Recommendations: Blogger, TypePad, WordPress, LexBlog, Justia.

Software as a Service

Today you can manage complex recordkeeping, file management, billing, calendaring, task management, communications, and a dozen other vital functions on your iPhone. Ten years ago they said it would never happen, but we proved them wrong! Thanks, Google.

My Recommendations: Google Apps, Basecamp, Zoho, Clio, Rocket Matter, OpenOffice. (Bonus: Microsoft Office 2010 online next year).

Custom SaaS

In a perfect world you would only use tools suited to your practice. But the world isn't perfect. Luckily, customizable SaaS enables you to add, subtract, and modulate applications so that you don't have to pay for features you never use (Are you reading this Microsoft?).

My Recommendations: Google Apps, Basecamp, Advologix/Salesforce.com, Zimbra.

Research

Remember when the price of gas went down last summer? Remember when the cost of legal research subscriptions went down? Me neither. Even the Saudis get it so how come it costs more to review a Supreme Court decision today than it did 10 years ago?

My Recommendations: My Findlaw, Lexbe, LII (Cornell), Fastcase.

Communications

From email to instant messaging, conference calls to faxing, message management to call routing, the telecommunications market has proven to be almost as stubborn as the legal market when it comes to change. But change it has, and there are now more choices than ever.

My Recommendations: eFax, Google Voice, Free Conference Call, GoToMeeting.

Prospecting

Lawyer marketing often offends older lawyers used to a more genteel approach. Of course they didn't have to compete with 30,000 other unemployed graduates. Since you do, check out these sites designed to help you get a jump on the competition.

My Recommendations: LawFiles, Avvo, LegalMatch, Twitter (yes, Twitter).

Billing

Sure it takes money to make money. But why so much? Since the days of Red Gorilla (bonus if you remember that .com darling), Web-based billing has been the fevered dream of a madman. Or at least it was until a surge of do-it-yourself timers and time-keeping services hit the market.

My Recommendations: Tempo, Clio, Rocket Matter, Bill4Time, TimeSolv, Chrometa, MonetaSuite, Proximiti. (The last three are experimental but worth trying.)

Document Backup and Sharing

Making files ubiquitous has proven to be harder than it sounds. Limitations on bandwidth, file-size, extensions, and a variety of other factors have conspired to keep file sharing clumsy and uninspired. Luckily, you have options.

My Recommendations: Dropbox, Google Docs, Docstoc, JD Supra, Microsoft Live Office. (Bonus: Office 2010 will have a free online component.)

Collaboration

"Collaboration" sites let you display information like a Web host, share and exchange documents like Google Docs, and interact with one another like a social network. So why give them a separate category? Because most of the time these sites represent a useful compilation of features perfect for everything from ad hoc bar association groups to teams of lawyers working on a case with national scope.

My Recommendations: Basecamp, Clio Client-Connect, Groupsite, Google Sites.

Online Chat

With the aid of the ubiquitous instant messaging client, you'll never need to yell out the office door at your associates again. But you will anyway. Just saying.

My Recommendations: Google Talk, MSN, AIM.

Onward and Upward …

If I've left anything out I apologize, but I feel confident that this list should stand you in good stead, at least for now. If you have suggestions of your own please let me (and everyone else) know.

Written by Mazyar M. Hedayat of M. Hedayat & Associates, P.C.

How to Receive SmallLaw
Small firm, big dreams. Published first via email newsletter and later here on our blog, SmallLaw provides you with a mix of practical advice that you can use today, and insight about what it will take for small law firms like yours to thrive in the future. The SmallLaw newsletter is free so don't miss the next issue. Please subscribe now.

Coming today to Answers to Questions: Paul Strawinski reviews PaperPort, OmniPage, and Dragon NaturallySpeaking, Tom Trottier shares some Windows performance tips plus an excellent idea for those considering switching to a Mac, Sandra Adams suggests the best way to integrate Tabs3 and QuickBooks, Sebastian Carey compares eDocs to Worksite, and Chris Gierymski reviews SplitCourt for electronic filing. Don't miss this issue.

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Coming today to Fat Friday: Nicholas Bettinger shares his tips for managing email overload, Theodore Borrego weighs in on Ross Kodner's BigSolo column, Bob Walsh reviews SherWeb for Hosted Exchange and Drobo, Samuel Matunog discusses social networking for lawyers, and Ann Vetter-Hansen reviews Rocket Matter. Don't miss this issue.

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