Law firms with contingency-based practices such as personal injury, malpractice, and mass tort may find that generic practice management software requires significant customization to meet their needs. But why spend so much time and effort customizing when you could instead use a product tailor-made for such purposes?
Filevine in One Sentence
Filevine is cloud-based practice management software that initially focused on plaintiffs firms but has since broadened its reach.
The Killer Feature
Nowhere else in law practice can efficiency make a bigger difference than with document drafting. Filevine's new Fusion feature brings document automation to its case management platform. "Fusion isn't about saving a minute or two when generating simple forms like retainers," says co-founder and CEO Ryan Anderson. "It's about saving hours of professional time by automating the creation of deeply complex and functional documents."
You start in the Report Builder by choosing the data you want to use — literally anything in Filevine. For example, you might build a report called Demand Letters to pool data from all the new clients your firm has agreed to represent within the past week. Once you create the report, you can use it to automatically generate the demand letters.
"Fusion gives us the tools to reinvent how we create robust documents," says Austin Kirk, a partner at Saiontz & Kirk. "What used to take hours can now be done in minutes. Even better, because it's pulled automatically from Filevine — our trusted system of record — we know the details will be right every time."
Filevine Fusion also enables you to track anything at your firm by building a report for it and then saving it for one-click access. For graphical analysis, Filevine's Periscope tool enables you to build custom dashboards to provide an overview of your firm's health — settlements (actuals versus projections), lawyer productivity, top referral sources, etc.
Filevine Fusion automates the creation of any document.
Other Notable Features
Filevine distinguishes itself from other platforms with its approach to law firm workflows and internal communications. As a result, law firms that use Filevine increase their caseload by up to 67% without increasing headcount.
Custom workflows enable you to build processes for any practice area. Workflows consists of a series of related tasks and triggers. Filevine includes several prebuilt workflows that you can tweak.
Filevine supports unique data types such as medical records, reducing the number of custom fields you need to create during setup. It automatically captures email correspondence, supports communicating with clients via text messages and faxes, and offers an internal messaging system that has supplanted internal email at many of the 1,000+ organizations that use Filevine. You'll also find document management, expense tracking, task management, and statute of limitations deadline tracking.
Each case or matter has an Activity Feed on which you'll find all this data in reverse chronological order (customers affectionately refer to these feeds as "Vines"). You can search a feed, apply a filter to show a specific data type, and add notes. Support for hashtags enables you to create ad-hoc categories for quickly finding information.
At the top of each case is a customizable toolbar that displays the "Vitals" of the client and the case. You can pin hashtags there for instant searches and also move the case to the next phase in a workflow.
What Else Should You Know?
Filevine integrates with popular products such as QuickBooks Online, G Suite, Office 365, Slack, Box, Dropbox, and NetDocuments. If you need an integration that doesn't exist, you can build it yourself using the company's Open API. Explore Filevine and bookmark the website.
Meet Neil J. Squillante
Neil J. Squillante is the founder and publisher of TopLaw, an award-winning network of free email newsletters for lawyers and law office personnel. Many consider TopLaw newsletters the only ones they need. A Fastcase 50 award winner, Neil has a long track record of inventing successful advertising and publishing technologies and related best practices. Previously, Neil practiced commercial litigation at Am Law 100 firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher. He received his J.D. from UCLA School of Law and his B.A. from Duke University. At UCLA, Neil served as a Managing Editor of UCLA Law Review.
