Press Release: Web Access for LEAP Customers

Web Collaborator allows LEAP Office users to provide their clients with access to defined matter information and associated documents via the Internet. Clients can also send instructions and notes via Web Collaborator that are seamlessly loaded into the LEAP database, with the practitioner involved automatically notified by email.

The software is the first application in Australia to be built for the legal profession using the Microsoft Azure platform for delivery via the cloud. The client simply installs the Web Collaborator service on their LEAP server and data is published via the software to a secure, robust and scalable environment that ensures optimal performance for the firm’s clients. No additional investment in infrastructure is required.

 “Web Collaborator allows LEAP customers to provide the same type of web access capability that Australia’s largest law firms provide their clients. In today’s demanding market, the software provides a competitive advantage to the firm by giving the client immediate access to documents, status and the information about their matters without the firm needing capital investment or changes to their business processes” stated Stephen Butler, a Director of Red Rain. “Not only is customer service improved but costly interruptions from telephone calls can be avoided” he added.

The software is completely integrated with LEAP Office and the Red Rain development team have been working closely with LEAP software engineers over the past 12 months to ensure that a robust, complete and seamlessly integrated utility is available to meet customer needs.

“We are delighted to have been working with Red Rain on the creation of this new module for the publishing of LEAP data to the web. We believe that Web Collaborator is an important add on to our offering to the market place and adds further value with to our overall solution for our customers” said Richard Hugo-Hamman, Managing Director of LEAP Legal Software.

Red Rain’s plans are to further enhance the product based on initial feedback from first customers and interested parties and then extend the technology to create new modules for lawyer access.

“Now that we have built the fundamental architecture for publishing to the web with the Azure platform we have many ideas for the access of information for lawyers and are currently investigating what is possible with tablets and other mobile platforms” added Butler.


http://www.redraincorp.com/webcollaborator.html

Join me on Twitter at @sbutler59

Join me on Twitter at @sbutler59

Inprotech: Correspondence to Clients by Email?

I have recently been working on a very interesting project that has been about the streamlining delivery of communications with clients and IP offices via e-mail.

For years Inprotech has had useful features for creating correspondence as Word documents but it hasn’t really advanced much in the area of delivery of correspondence by email and managing the workflow around drafting, approval and filing of this type of correspondence to customers.

In order to address this we took a number of steps:

1. We set up standing instructions against the name record to define the correspondence delivery mechanism for the client eg. by email to the contact, by email to the associates docketing address and copied to the contact, email but paper confirmation, by fax to contact, by fax to the organisation, by mail.
2. We set up new name relationships for email copies to.
3. We created a new doc item that worked out the addressing based upon these standing instructions and copies to arrangements.
4. We then created new doc items that built the email to & cc address lines as well as the email subject line as document variables in the finished document. These variables were then used by a new macro that copied the body of the document into the email body and set up the email subject line and addressing ready to go. The letter signature block was incorporated into a new bookmark that allowed it to be deleted and replaced by the email signature when then email was created.
5. At the same time the IRN was recorded with the draft email to allow automatic profiling and integration into the firm’s document management system when sent.
6. Outlook add ins where then developed to allow the email to be automatically sent and saved. The created file using the date and the letter name that had been moved from the document title of the finished document, which corresponded to the name of the letter in Inprotech letter table.
7. Other add ins were developed to allow filing of non Inprotech emails and, in general, facilities were provided to make moving between the electronic file, Word and Outlook as seamless and with as few clicks as possible.

As this was a long time user of the product, prior to this effort, a project had been put in place to revise the firm’s document templates to use the now standard approach to template set up with a header/footer document and paragraph templates. This meant that all of the above could be built into one or two places, rather than changing approximately 350 documents. Also, all of this has been predicated on using Word as the email text editor.

At the same time we initiated a project that improved our overall approach to the validation of names and address data and, in particular, ensured that email addresses were captured in the Inprotech database for all the required parties. I may write about this in another article if people are interested.

While the above processes give excellent improvements in productivity, the issues that have been highlighted have been more related to policy and related processes:

• What correspondence should be delivered as an email body and what as an attachment. Should substantive advice be provided on the firm’s letter head with a signature?
• What if documents are likely to be forwarded by an associate to the end client, does this affect the presentation of the firm to that organisation?
• What if the recipient doesn’t receive emails in HTML format or uses a different email tool than Outlook? Does this raise concerns as to the presentation quality of our correspondence?
• How does the packaging of the total piece of correspondence occur? How are incoming documents such as IP office receipts and certificates scanned, filed and attached to the email?
• If our invoice is to go with the correspondence how is this created, attached and delivered? Is an electronic (PDF) invoice acceptable?
• Which correspondence is to be signed? Can the PA or support staff apply the signature?
• Who should send the email? The PA? The PA on behalf of the attorney? The attorney themselves?

I would be interested to get other people’s feedback on how they have approached these issues.

New Web Site

We have finally revised our web site to something significantly more professional looking using an agency that has marketing and graphic design skills! Good when you know how!

The objective was to better articulate our message and explain to the world what we are about. I know the previous version was completely confusing.

http://www.redraincorp.com/ - check it out, all feedback very welcome.

Inprotech: Emailing One Off Statements (and reports in general)

Ever been in the situation where you are chasing debt and the customer requests a copy of the invoice or statement. Rather than re-print them, scan them or mail them, why not e-mail directly from Inprotech.

With statements this is relatively straight forward. Release 4 includes the ability to create PDF files on the majority of print functions. To e-mail a statement:

1. Run the statement program and select the debtor you need the statement for.
2. Select the Print button and choose the PDF file option and click the Email Report option.
3. If the e-mail address of the person/organisation that you want to send to is recorded in Inprotech complete the name in the Email To field. This will cause the system to extract the e-mail address from Inprotech and use it to the construct the e-mail. If it is not, leave this field blank.
4. Select the Print button and an e-mail with the statement attached is created. If the e-mail address can be found within Inprotech it will be used to create the e-mail otherwise the e-mail address will be left bank. In this instance enter the e-mail address from your contact list or simply type it in.
5. Send the e-mail!!

As a note, this functionality is available on virtually all print dialogs in the system.

Prior to release 4 the only file format that you could send to a customer in any sort of readable manner was RTF and if you follow the above using the Rich Text Format File option then the process is exactly the same.

If you are not comfortable with this approach another way to create a PDF version of the statement and e-mail it is as follows. Unfortunately it is a bit more convoluted (and hence the potential to go wrong is higher) but still better than a manual process.

1. Run the statement program and select the debtor you need the statement for.
2. Select the Print button and choose the Print Set Up button.
3. Select the Inpro Document Converter printer and OK.
4. Select the Print button. The document will be created as a PDF, save the file to your desktop.
5. Double click on this document to open it with Acrobat reader. Selected File and Attach to E-mail from the menu in Acrobat, this will create an e-mail and attach the file to it.
6. Complete the e-mail address and send the e-mail.

Unfortunately invoices are another story so I'll cover that in another article.

Doing Business in 2009 part 1

Welcome to the new year. I trust everyone had an excellent Xmas and holiday season, I certainly did. Apologies for the delay in getting a new article published but it has been hard to get back into a work mindset after a nice and lengthy holiday!!

2009 certainly promises to be an challenging year from a business viewpoint. In fact, the financial crisis is nothing like I have seen in my life time and I suspect this is the case for the majority of people. Governments reaction to all this with the traditional Keynesian response of pushing public funds into the private sector to stimulate demand, using both monetary policy and budget deficits, but does this economic theory hold true today? For myself, I could never have imagined a position where the entire car industry in the US could have self destructed (and where it still may) and most commentators are saying that it will get worse before it gets better.

The legal profession, and IP law firms in particular, have always been very recession resilient. The nature of the work changes but the volume and the margin remain. It will be interesting to see if this remains the case this time around.

In any case, the market will turn around at some stage in the future and growth will return, if for no other reason than we keep populating the planet. Of course, the $64 million question is how long it will take but, once again, most commentators can’t see this happening for the next 12 months at the earliest.

So what should a firm be doing in this uncertain environment? My general view is that this year is a great opportunity to be preparing the business for when the growth returns, focusing on operational efficiency, business development and optimizing investments already made.

At this point I'll take a caveat and skip the basic financial stuff where I think you need to be very, very confident to be extending any debt facilities and leave that for another forum. Equally, major investment needs to have a quick return guaranteed. Significant investment that has a return in 1, 2 or 3 years time would need to be considered very carefully.

So how can Inprotech help?

Operational efficiency is the area that I would be focusing on first. I’ll write a future article about how the product can help with business development and marketing.

The product itself has been designed with excellent automation facilities that can both lower the cost of a performing a transaction while improving quality. Look at reviewing the workflow and processes around your higher volume transactions. For example, if a major part of your work is filing locally or PCT national phase entry, look at fine tuning these processes. When was the last time these workflows were looked at? Are all the steps still necessary, can they be deleted or consolidated? Removing 1, 2 or 3 steps in a highly used process can release a lot of clerical and/or professional time with affecting margin.

Do you do a lot of European Patent, CTM or Madrid applications? Have you made effective use of the automatic copy facility for creating national phase or related removal/opposition cases?

Then the renewals process. Can this be improved and streamlined? For foreign renewals can you make use of the fees & charges module to automatically calculate and manage estimated charges for reminder letters (even if you are not using the Billing module – I must write an article on this)? Is the reminder letter process efficient and effective? Do you, for example, make use of the multi case reminder letter approach and bulk instructions receipt for those clients that require reminding in this fashion or is there an expensive manual process in place that manages this? Are you using standing instructions to handle auto renew processing and differing reminder letter numbers and frequency for those clients that request processes outside of the norm? Can the substitute letter functionality be used for those clients that require correspondence in a different format?

Overall, the system has a lot of power in this area and renewals is one “department” that should be highly automated from both a productivity and risk management perspective.

Next area to look at are letter templates. A simple SQL query on the database can return the list of letters produced over the last 12 months so that you can isolate the letters most used. Take the top 10 or 20 or whatever is appropriate. Is there any manual intervention involved to produce the final version of these letters that could be removed by a slight modification to the file take on or data capture process thereby allowing data to be captured and hence included in the letter automatically rather than manually. A simple change to a highly used document template could bring high return at low cost.

Please note that I am not suggesting a review of all templates, just the ones that are highly used. Remember the Pareto 80/20 rule. 80% of the effort is generated by 20% of the tasks. Focus on this 20%.

A similar thing should be done with letter templates that are created on an ad hoc basis through the PassThru process. Simple changes to highly used letters could bring big return. Question why things are done in a certain way. Just because they have always been done that way doesn’t mean that it still needs to be.

Another thing to consider is maybe using the Fees List program for lodgement processing if you have a spreadsheet, Word-based or manual process. This program can be used standalone without the need to use the charge generation. Simply set up the Fee Types and create the lodgement list with the program by selecting the case and the lodgement type. The integration will bring in the relevant case details without the need for re-typing and potential errors. If you want to go a bit more advanced the system can be set up to calculate the official fee but I am not sure that the benefits in doing this outweigh the set up effort so I would probably suggest just entering the amount manually.

I would also be looking at the name & address management process. Take on of new clients is often an area that causes issues and improvements and tightening of control here can bring big productivity gains right through the process. Ask yourself whether control should be centralized? Can the name copy facility be used to assist with getting some of the base data right? Have the country defaults been set up appropriately? Have you implemented audit trails so that issues can be tracked down and investigated to iron out issues as they occur?

Are the facilities for credit control being used effectively? If you are not using Billing and the Accounts modules then the Restrictions functionality is the main assistant here but the Correspondence and Billing Instructions fields could be used to warning on outstanding debt. Of course you would have to weigh up the effort required to keep this up to date but, depending upon your accounts module, maybe some simple SQL could be built to make this a process that doesn’t require that much manual intervention.

If you have Billing maybe putting a budget against a case and monitoring against it can be of assistance in managing your financial exposure to clients. You can also use Billing to collect, use and monitor prepaid funds even if you don’t have Accounts Receivable. If you are using Accounts Receivable are you making use of credit limit monitoring?

If you have Billing and are not using Fees & Charges then you can get big benefits. I know the set up is counter intuitive and there can be a bit of maintenance involved but if you can work through this and understand the concepts there is a lot of power there that can lead to productivity and control improvements. Once more I would look at initially implementing with the high transaction load areas such as renewals, filing applications, examination requests and for areas that you suspect fees are slipping through the cracks with the manual process.

Of course, I am probably preaching to the converted here but hopefully there may be one or two areas to explore. It always difficult to be generic with these types of things. When you know the specifics of customer it is much easier!!

In any case, the goal should be to fine tune, to improve, to build greater productivity & quality that means your systems are as effective as possible, both for the short term return and to be ready for growth when it returns.

Inprotech: Names Maintenance for Accounts

It is possible to created a restricted access version of the Names program so, if you are using the accounting modules, the accounts department can be given access to update name, address and accounting details related to a customer.

Release 4 added in the Supplier tab to this functionality and hence it made it potentially useful for those clients using Accounts Payable and the fully integrated accounting suite. To give it a go set a new application in Security for the Names executable using the parameter –NACCOUNTS. It’s quite nice from an accounts viewpoint in that all the extraneous tabs disappear and the relevant information is all there, easy viewable. The programs look so much easier to use when they have tabs that are all contained in the one screen. Don’t know why, it’s just neater!

One area that this restricted version doesn’t cover however is the Staff Responsible tab. So if the accounts department is adding these details so that the aged debtors report can be produced by attorney responsible then you still need to give them access to the full program.