Today's issue of TechnoLawyer NewsWire covers a Web-based practice management service (see article below), an online meeting service, an eDiscovery review and processing application, a Web-based customer relationship management system, and a GPS navigation app for iPad and iPhone. Don't miss the next issue.
A Portal for Your Practice
If your law firm hopes to survive, you must efficiently manage every element of your practice — clients and matters, documents and email, appointments and tasks, secure collaboration, billing and collections, and much more. There's just one problem — what if you're not a mega-firm with a dedicated IT department and onsite trainers? What if the software you can afford lacks the features you need or has too many features you don't need? One company claims to have explored the actual needs of law firms, resulting in a Web-based practice management system with everything you need and nothing you don't at an affordable price.
Portal4Law … in One Sentence
PortalSoft's Portal4Law 5.0 is an online (SaaS) practice management service for law firms and legal departments.
The Killer Feature
Back in the day, lawyers were content if their practice management software helped them organize their contacts and calendar and connect that data to their matters. While this need still exists, the number of documents lawyers must manage has exploded thanks primarily to email.
PortalSoft integrated document management into Portal4Law from day one rather than tack it on as an afterthought. Each user has up to 10 GB of storage space for uploading and classifying email and documents. Once uploaded, you can share documents with colleagues and clients. Portal4Law remains available to use during batch uploads and subsequent document indexing because the processing takes place in PortalSoft's data center, not on your computer. The versioning technology keeps track of multiple revisions of a document.
Portal4Law not only handles your work product and related records, but also discovery documents. You can connect both types of documents to a specific matter. Portal4Law offers full-text Boolean, fuzzy, and filter-based searching, including by author, client, matter, date, and custom tags. The Export function enables you to produce a collection of selected documents in native format for discovery.
"We are dedicated to offering large firm features at a small firm price point," PortalSoft CEO Ajit Dandapani told us. "The depth and sophistication of our document management feature set illustrates this guiding principle of ours."
Other Notable Features
Portal4Law also contains traditional practice management features. For example, the billing system supports multiple fee arrangements that you can customize — time and expense slips, periodic fixed-fee, milestone-based fixed-fee, retainers, advance deposits, etc. You can use the preloaded Uniform Task Based Management System codes or create your own. When processing time slips, you can have Portal4Law automatically enter the amount due based on the activity or the person who performs the activity.
Other notable features include a dashboard that summarizes pressing appointments, tasks, and recently-modified matters, secure real-time collaboration to ensure multiple users can view each other's changes nearly instantaneously, cloning of forms and documents in your library, and context-sensitive help.
What Else Should You Know?
PortalSoft costs $39.99 per user per month. You can try it free for 30 days. The annual subscription discounts twelve months service to the cost of eleven. Learn more about Portal4Law.
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.
