December 24, 2005
Comments (9)

Choosing a Case Management System for a Law Firm

We’re about to put in a new computer system. I’ve had TimeMatters for 8 years and really like it alot. However, for whatever reason we’ve never got the full use out of it. Some of it might be our fault, but we’ve got lots of use out of it, but haven’t been able to use it to it’s full capacity. Since we first bought TimeMatters, we’ve gone from a general practice to a straight trial practice and it’s time to put in litigation specific software. Although, I’m not opposed to looking to others, the leading candidates are TrialWorks and Needles. Needles has always been considered the high end in litigation software. In the past 5 plus years, TrialWorks has been coming on strong and while has a smaller market share, has really taken a sizeable portion of the market in a relatively short period of time.

After spending more than 30 hours with each of the programs exploring the nooks and crannies, I think they are both fabulous programs. My impressions in a nutshell are that TrialWorks looks like it was built with all of the functionality of Needles, but with all of the technology that was available 5 years later. Needles on the other hand, has made customer service it’s number one priority, has a number of local and regional user groups and tours and TrialWorks hasn’t had the time to catch up with the customer support and large installed user based of Needles yet.

This is some of the things that I’m looking for in a case management program:

Prospective Client Intake – When the receptionist takes information from a potential client on the phone, the program should prompt her with the questions to ask for the appropriate type of case. For example there will be different questions for a workers comp case than a car wreck. Once they have the basic information, they should be able to send it to me attached to an instant message. At that point, I can take a quick glance and tell the secretary to schedule an appointment, that I will talk to them, to do a complete client intake form, or to send a rejection letter and to refer the case out. When the case is accepted, any of the initial intake information should automatically be in the case file.


  • Document Generation – I want to be able to generate nearly any paperwork directly from the client file. The database keeps information on the client, date of injury, location of injury, medical providers and treatment received and other information. There’s not too many letters, forms, complaints, motions, discovery requests or other documents that can’t be generated with this type of information. When I want to file a complaint on a car wreck case, there is not too many ways to get in a car wreck. Rearended at a red light, rearended failure to yield, defendant ran a red light or failed to yield and t-boned client, defendant crossed the median and hit client head on. The program can prompt for the appropriate language and then generate the following documents: Summons, Complaint, Civil Court Cover Sheet, Standard Interrogatories and Requests for Production of Documents, Cover letter to the Clerk of Court requesting that they clock the complaint in and return the originals and a letter to client stating that we are filing the Complaint and explaining what that means in the litigation process. All those documents should be generated with the press of a button. And don’t even get me started about Workers Comp forms.


  • Scanning – I want to quickly and easily be able to scan all incoming and outgoing documents in the case. I want to be able to batch scan so that it is easy for the secretary, but then mark and move the file to the client’s subdirectory. All of our staff have HP laser printers with scanning heads and they can scan their outgoing correspondence themselves. We also want to scan in all medical records. Storing the records in adobe acrobat will have a number of benefits; 1) It will allow the file to be ‘taken with’ or reviewed off site easily. 2) It will  allow for easy production of discovery requests. 3) It will allow us to do custom bates stamp and maintain version control. 4) It will allow us to ‘mark up’ the meds easily. 5) It will allow us to back up the medical records on a regular basis. 6) It will allow for simple and inexpensive archiving of the file upon completion of the matter.


  • Calendaring –  I want to be able to schedule in chains or a sequence of events. For example, when I schedule a deposition, it should also create  a ‘To Do’ for my paralegal to schedule a court reporter, a ‘To Do’ for my paralegal to confirm the deposition, a ‘To Do’ to prepare for the deposition, a ‘To Do’ to meet with the witness to prep them for the deposition’, plus the appropriate Notice of Deposition, subpoena and letters to the defense counsel, witness, client, court reporter and videographer. And of course when the deposition date gets changed, the dependent dates should automatically move with it. When the deposition gets cancelled, all of the dependent dates should be marked as Done, deleted or moved off the calendar automatically. The program should know which chained events are dependent on the primary date (the deposition) and which are independent. That’s just an example for a deposition. The program should be able to set up chains for trials, ordering medical records, filing suit, responding to discovery requests, making discovery requests, sending a demand package or other events.

  • Master Case Plan/Checklist –  There should be a case plan on how we handle on every type of case we handle. To Do’s and checklists should be on the computer automatically. The clearer you are about your expectations, the more likely they are to be met. Ideally, the checklists will have dependent events. This means that if there are conditions precedent to an event, it won’t show up until that condition has been met. For examples, we don’t need ticklers and To Do’s for discovery requests on the calendar until after suit is filed.


  • Financials – The program should be able to print and track client expenses and automatically calculate and generate a settlement/disbursement statement for the client. The disbursement statement should be able to be customized.


  • Screen Layouts – Should be organized in a logical matter. The screens should be able to be modified and customizeable, allow for customized calculated fields, lookups, radio buttons, check boxes and other time saving features.


  • Reports – The program should be able to tell me what is going on in the firm. This means what is going on with the case, what happened in the office that day, what is getting done and what is not getting done. I also want to be able to see a full complement of management reports (which we’ll cover in another post).


  • Interaction with Other Devices – Then there are the basics, contact management, synchronizing with my Treo, tapi compliance interface with a digital phone system and the ability to interface with a digital copier/scanner.

    • Geez, I don’t ask for much. Do I?


    But that’s what we’re looking for. I have a paralegal that used Needles for nearly 7 years and loves it. But we’re leaning towards TrialWorks. The one issue that’s been holding us back is that TrialWorks uses Outlook as a calendaring system and is inextricably linked with MicroSoft. While I’m no longer an anti-MicroSoft fanatic, I use Opera and Firefox as web browsers and am still on WordPerfect.


    I’ve spoken with Robb Steinberg, the president of TrialWorks and he’s extremely knowledgeable and an extremely large fan of MicroSoft. If you like MicroSoft, that’s not a problem. And while I don’t need one now, it would be nice if there was a Linux or a Mac version 3–5 years down the road.


    In the long run, I’ll probably swallow my pride and join the rest of the world in the MicroSoft parade. I’d rather spend my time and energies on being a better trial lawyer than jousting at software windmills.

    Written By:John Day On December 28, 2005 12:43 PM

    David - I have been a Trialworks customer for years. Overall I have been extremely pleased with it. Robb and his folks are very knowledgable and provide good service.

    You need to know the following: Scanning every doc eats up a lot of space. We have had to upgrade our hard drive several times. Be ready.

    Second, it is important that everyone in your office been on the same version of Windows. We just went to this in Sept - and it greatly reduced any glitches.

    Third, RAM is critical.

    I would recommend Trialworks to anyone. Indeed, we now have the Trialworks team serve as our IT department; they do all updates and fix the inevitable glitches in our entire system (17 users) from Miami. Our bill for tech services has decreased and so has our downtime.

    Written By:Dave On December 29, 2005 3:12 AM

    John,

    It makes me feel better that you guys have TrialWorks. I'm meeting more and more people that have TrialWorks.

    My main objection is not to the company, but MicroSoft. I'm not as rabidly anti-MicroSoft as I was in my younger days. But.....I'm still not ready to be a 100% MicroSoft offfice.

    On the other hand, my main goal is to practice law and not be a tech guru.

    Written By:Alex Rosen On December 29, 2005 2:47 PM

    Great info. We're considering adding trialworks to our lineup of practice/case management software packages in addition to Amicus, TimeMatters & PCLaw.

    I'll be evaluating the program next month, I look forward to discussing it with you and the group here.

    Written By:Steve Isaacs On January 5, 2006 10:10 AM

    Have you looked at ProTempus case management software? After concurrently using Time Matters (since 1999) and PCLaw (since 2002), I decided I needed case management software that: my staff would use; had adequate documentation; did not conflict with other software; did not require frequent system administrator assistance on the network; good technical support; required minimal training; and would work in a plaintiff's personal injury and criminal defense law firm. I found myself forced to make the change after experiencing technical difficulties and when I discovered my staff found it easier to revert to paper and pen for recording messages and case facts instead of using Time Matters and / or PC Law (ouch).

    With a background in engineering, information technology and programming, and knowing that software had greatly improved over the last few years, I assumed that there would be many case management systems from which I could easily choose that would help me manage my practice quickly, thoroughly and efficiently. Sadly, I made a bad assumption. In addition to the basic criteria previously posted on this Blawg for case management software, I needed software that included at the very least the following features: efficient to use; intuitive user interface; robust and easy to use report generation; good technical support; good documentation; low cost; compatible with Word Perfect, Word, Open Office (www.openoffice.org - free robust office suite software in use around the nation), and QuickBooks; and able to transfer schedule and client data to a PDA.

    I evaluated several case management packages, including (but not limited to): Needles, TortPro, TrialWorks, ProLaw, and ProTempus. I am familiar with Needles, having observed it in use for 13 years in my father and brother's personal injury practice (yes - they are advertising lawyers). I considered purchasing Needles - designed for tort attorneys - even though Needles did not meet all of my technology and end-user requirements. However, Needles extremely high relative cost and the fact that I would have had to put my law practice on hold while my staff underwent training for a three or more days caused me to look elsewhere. I reviewed the literature on TortPro and discussed the software in depth with a telephone sales person. TortPro appeared well designed and would meet my needs, but I did not like their dependence on MicroSoft products and apparent limited support. TrialWorks also appeared to meet my needs, but it required custom programming and required that I switch all of my staff to Microsoft Office - an expensive proposition since my firm standardized on WordPerfect Office years ago. I also decided against ProLaw for many of the aforementioned reasons. Kentucky Circuit Court Judge Stanly Billingsly (see Judge Billingsly's helpful website at www.lawreader.com) and his wife Gwen recommended I evaluate ProTempus (www.protempus.com) after learning of my difficulty in finding suitable case management software that truly met the needs of the solo practitioner.

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    I signed up for the Findlaw sponsored link deal and let them do the site. Will be happy to discuss my experiences off line. I will say this: Both Lawyers.com and Findlaw have driven an appreciable amount of traffic. They're both worth doing in my opinion even though its not cheap. I went for a couple of years of no one being able to find me. That ain't cheap either. The portal/directory features of both are excellent.

    Written By:Larry Lockwood On January 16, 2006 4:33 AM

    I too have used Time Matters for many years. However, I never got the full use out of it either. The email portion never worked right, in integration with word procesors was slow. I am looking into writin my own in OpenOffice, Bas, and integrating it with the other programs in openoffice with a open sorce type environment for we computer lawyer types. Just a thought.

    Written By:Bob Kelley On February 3, 2006 3:10 AM

    Has anyone tried Client Profiles?

    Written By:Jamelle On May 3, 2006 5:40 PM

    Sorry Im late to the party here. My office current uses Time Matters 7. And I feel COMPELLED to tell you guys about my experience with it. Well we first had a system called Goldmine. It was alright, but like people were just never on the same page through the 4 different departments, but ooh could that merge documents like mad. In January we converted to Time Matters. We wrote out own custom conversion program so we did not lose much of the same info from Goldmine to Time Matters. Also we had all the users design their own Contact and Matters screens. We also wrote our own Goldmine to Time Matters document conversion program. And really it HAD to be done.

    So fast forward to the here and now. First off Time Matters reports are BASIC. And their DB is CONVOLUTED at best. An example are their deposits. The deposit table lists one deposit and each check and amount IN ONE MEMO FIELD. Im talking about ONE HUGE MEMO FIELD fixed with check numbers and amounts delimited by fixed character lengths. So to report on this we had to write our OWN PARSER to put the data into our OWN TABLE and make our own crystal reports viewer to display the info on the user's desktops.

    Another thing, we have about maybe 800 document merge templates. I dont know if that's the case or not, but everytime we try to merge docs IT IS SOOO BLOODY SLOW OMG!!!! The only way to speed it up was we had to go GIGABIT END TO END for all the heavy document merging users. That's right 100 Megabit please, you kidding me!? Time Matters needs GIGABIT. Also to alleviate the document issue we just finished creating our own document merging tool to do MULTIPLE documents at one time for the same contact or matter. Time Matters couldn't do it so we did it in Time Matters ourselves. Of course the API cost us $1600 to interface and play nice with Time Matters itself, but hey if they don't do it you gotta do it yourself. And this actually works out to be much faster than even the regular document merging that's included in Time Matters.

    Also Time Matters crashes a lot. And really, since we switched some users to GIGABIT, they get it much less. And our Time Matters is on a dedicated SQL server with 2 gigabit cards, and 3 gigs of RAM.

    BUT on the other hand Time Matters does have everything it takes for Case, Matter, Contact, and calendaring. We use outlines for CASE management between departments. The Matters and the ability to put in your own time and sent directly to Billing Matters is very beneficial. Just don't plan on using Time Matters built in reports. They suck. Make your own in Crystal. And if you have to. Write your own parser for some of their data to get the data you need into your crystal report.

    Well sorry for it being so long I just had to vent.

    Written By:Steve Moglowsky On May 14, 2006 3:19 PM

    Janelle,

    I'm a new user to Timematters 7.0 and am doing document generation via HotDocs and Wordperfect. I'm in the process of coding my documents now and found that the merge process (like you experienced) is BRUTALLY slow. Documents can take anywhere between 45 and 90 seconds to generate which feels like an eternity.

    Your solution was to upgrade your network to support gigabit data transfers but did you ever spend any time examining the the call process in the SQL server itself? I'm a noob at this stuff, but I have friends with knowledge who suggested a number of other possible reasons for the incredible slowness... from a badly designed query system to faulty drivers.

    So far, their 2 suggestions are (1) to use the server as a workstation to generate a document to see if the lag is really in the network connection to the workstation and (2) running a SQL server monitor in the background when I try to generate a document to try to better identify where the lag is taking place.

    I think TM7.0 will work just great for my office but I absolutely have to overcome the slowness to document generation issue.

    Any thoughts?

    Written By:Grady cayce On September 12, 2006 2:17 PM

    We are migrating from an under-used and no longer supported version of Timematters 3 to Client Profiles. Does anyone have a suggestion for getting the data out of the memo and staff fields? Thanks

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