Legal Application Software vs Software for Other Industries

I did a job at the start of the year that was a bit of fun. It was helping a listed company (small cap) select an ERP system to replace MYOB and a range of Excel spreadsheets that had evolved as the business had grown.

The company however was not a legal firm. Fundamentally they had a simple manufacturing process that recycled damaged oil feedstock into crude oil that could be used again. A fascinating business opportunity in today’s market in my view.

Now it had been many years since I had been involved with computer systems for distribution and manufacturing businesses but it all came back pretty easily. FIFO, bill of materials, inventory, picking lists, bill of lading, despatch, all terms that are completely foreign when working with a law firm’s systems. In the end a nice blast from the past but accounting is accounting and the process of making something and then selling it is not that hard, albeit MRP can stretch your brain at times.

In any case, my role was mainly to facilitate the selection process. Gather requirements, structure them in a manner that was understandable to vendors, liaise with the vendors regarding their responses to get to a shortlist for the client’s management team and then coordinating demonstrations with the client’s staff and assist negotiating the final contract.

We sent the RFI out to the major players: SAP, Sage, Pronto, Sun, Dynamics, NetSuite … and received details responses from all.

Well that’s great but why is all this relevant to a legal technology blog, I hear you ask. Well, for me it was interesting to see how the differences in approach that these systems are taking to generic system issues. Three items in particular were significant to me.

The first item was the user experience, or UX, as the term is now. Every single product that we looked at had a “dashboard” approach to the user interaction. This was role based and allowed different components to be presented depending upon that role. For example, a purchasing clerk has a different set of common tasks, reports and information requirements from a sales clerk or, indeed, a manager, or a Director. All of the systems allowed each role to have tailored task lists, information that was summarised at a higher and more manageable level but allowing drill down into the details as required. For managers, this included the graphical representation of information and the subsequent drill downs required, right down the specification transaction and GL journal lines if necessary.

From what I have seen of the legal products none have them have thought through the dashboard approach to the same level that these ERP systems have. I have to admit that I know Elite 3E espouses this approach but I haven’t had a lot of personal experience with the product but from what I have heard from our staff with hands on experience, it’s not that easy to do. At least the thinking is there though.

Overall the approach that has been taken with all systems that we looked at is simple, elegant and intuitive. I have grabbed two screen shots from one of the products below to show the approach. I have purposely chosen one without a high level of graphics to highlight that this is the employee’s one stop shop for working with the system, not simply a reporting system.

You will also note embedded integration with Outlook and this was the second item of interest to me. Clearly automated workflow is a hot technology topic for a law firm and the same applies for a manufacturing/distribution business. Documents need to be created and moved around for approval and processing by various departments and managers. Similarly with documents received.

Now obviously a law firm has a higher volume and greater variability of documents but what I liked about the workflow approach of the above systems is that a) it is closely embedded with Outlook and email so that the interaction with the user occurs through the use of this tool and b) while a more powerful workflow engine under pinned the approach (either WWF or a proprietary environment), the set up of the rules and the flow had a very simple and understandable user interface that made setting up basic workflows something that could be done by the everyday user.

The third item was that every proposal we received offered an externally hosted option. Whether this was through a relationship with a data centre, through their own facility or, with NetSuite, a true cloud based system, the client could choose to not have to manage the infrastructure for the application. This is what the company wanted because they only had a small IT team and had offices in Australia and the US.

All of this led me to wonder why some of these fundamental differences were in place and my take is that the general ERP market is significantly bigger than the legal market and, as a result, more competitive. Market forces therefore drive more innovative approaches to problem solving to win market share and retain customers.

Of course there are different drivers with a legal application but, to my mind, it will be interesting to see how the systems evolve in some of the areas above. Most interesting development to me is the Lexis Nexis partnership with Microsoft to produce a legal system based on Dynamics AX. I wonder how that is going?

For those that got this far, the client selected the Dynamics product.

I would love to hear other’s opinions on the above.

Resource & Capacity Planning for Lawyers – Herding Cats??

I just finished a small job for a 25 lawyer law firm. The problem the managing partner had was that his team were always overloaded and requesting more staff to handle the excess workload. You would normally think of this as a growth opportunity but unfortunately the fees billed at the end of the month didn’t reflect this overload. There are lots of potential implications here but without any information to base decisions upon it was difficult to isolate what the issue is.

The firm had started to formalise its management procedures and had recently instituted a weekly task list for lawyers that required tasks to be prioritised and reviewed by their supervisor. They had looked at a number of software systems to collate this information (or alternatively define the planning process) ranging from very expensive to very basic. In fact, none of them really fitted the bill so there is a little bit of a market opportunity here. The expensive ones were a massive overkill or addressed a different problem. The cheaper ones had approaches that didn’t really work for a law firm and required the use of a different and non-integrated timesheet. Then again, maybe there are other reasons that there is no simple solution.

In the end I built them a “mini-system” in an Excel spreadsheet. It maps out the weeks going forward for all staff and the lawyer is now required to estimate the effort required on their task list as well. We then categorised the priority to be either “must be to be done this week” or “could be done later than this week”.

All the estimated hours from the task lists are then entered by the receptionist into the spreadsheet based upon priorities, just the total hours though. Future leave, booked CLE commitments and seminars are also entered into the spreadsheet for the week that they were to occur. This process was already in place with the firm’s receptionist in terms of updating the absentee calendar so it was a simple step to also update the resource planning spreadsheet.

The “report” aspect of the tool then applies agreed standards on non-chargeable business development and management effort to map out planned utilisations based upon available time. It also looks after non-full time employees with lesser capacity for the week. Nothing too complicated, just calculating the capacity and highlighting in red when a week exceeds 100% and orange if it exceeds 80%.

The spreadsheet is then available on line in read only mode for all staff and is reviewed at the weekly management meeting. The idea is that the team can quickly see which lawyers are over capacity and which are under capacity. They can then look to use people that have available time for the week on tasks rather than having some people super busy and others idle, balancing the load so to speak. A snapshot of some of the report is below.

Now before all you systems guys out there say “this should be a software application to ensure data integrity and validations and ease of entry”, I know it should. The fact of the matter is that the firm didn’t want to spend a lot of money on this process and I fully agree with that stance. It was difficult to work out how well the process would work and what value would be obtained hence the goal was to keep the investment low until we learnt a bit more about what was possible. Basically, the above took a bit over two days of consulting effort.

But how good would it be to have a distributed entry approach with the tasks stored in a database and linked to the actual matters. Information could be rolled forward, compared to actuals and collated in a whole range of different ways for management information. Imagine also assisting the planning process by examining the lawyers Outlook calendar to capture future commitments.

Now the process has been in place for a month or so, what has been learnt? The first challenge has been to get the lawyers to think about tasks more from a time management perspective than the professional work aspect.

Prioritising work is an issue. We have continually had lawyers reporting on their task lists that they have 60, 70 and 80 hours of work that had to be completed in the week. What we haven’t seen though is super stressed staff as a result of this workload nor real issues with customer service because the tasks haven’t been done on time. We are hoping that as time passes the lawyers, after seeing the feedback from their numbers in the report, will be become more disciplined as to how to prioritise.

Estimating work is an issue. Basically, the system needs a number of hours, not a range. What we have ended up doing is taking the midpoint of the information provided but when you see a range of 8-60 hours you worry that a greater breakdown of the actual task is required. Of course, tasks can have different possibilities of resolution so estimating can be difficult. Once more, we are hopeful that as the tool is used these things will work themselves out. In the end, however, it is the aggregation of data that is important not the individual items so the variations should come out in the wash.

The interesting thing that has happened since implementation has been the introduction of another category for “potential future work” for a bit of a longer range forecasting ie. the next 2 to 3 months. This is not future new clients from business development activity but work that is reasonably likely to occur from existing matters. This has allowed the management team to decide on hiring people in one of the practice areas based upon real information rather than a feel. The first small sign that the processes are maturing.

Automating Client Reports

We just finished an interesting project with an Elite 3E customer. It was building on work we had done with their Keystone database but interesting nevertheless.

The business requirement is that the firm has a number of clients that regularly want information about their matters in electronic format, most typically Excel. The information varies from client to client, either in content, layout or sort sequence. What they did previous to our involvement was highly manual, employing the equivalent of a person just to manually create the reports.

To address this we developed a program that allows them to register a report for a client. The first step is to give it a report name, some grouping and filtering information, column sequencing, report headings, the file format to be created (Word, PDF, Excel) and then the email address of who it is to be delivered to.  The next step is to pick the columns of information to be included on the report by ticking check boxes.

Once the report is registered, it can be set up to run every day, week, month, quarter etc… for a particular range or period of time. The user runs the report production program, selecting which schedule to run. The program then automatically requests SQLServer Reporting Services to generate generic content and Excel macros to format and customise the layout for each client..

As it turns out, they typically email to the partner/secretary responsible for the client first to check the data quality rather than email the client direct. The document is reviewed first and then forwarded to the customer. One manual step but at least people aren’t involved in the monotonous task of extracting and formatting the data each month now!

The net result from the firm’s view point is that the process is significantly less labour intensive and setting up a new report is simply adding a line in a program we have created. The number of reports produced like this now for clients is well over 50 and, because it is all automated, the costs involved have diminished considerably.