Small Law Office Calendaring: A Quick Survey

by

Ross L. Kodner, Esq.

© 2000  Ross L. Kodner, Esq. All Rights Reserved

Miss a deadline . . . lose your license! Most malpractice insurance carriers and state bar disciplinary board members will tell you that there are two primary reasons for lawyers being professionally disciplined: spending client trust funds on a 75' motor yacht or missing a case deadline. This article can’t help you with any propensity you might have to fool around with client trust money, but it will give you several ideas about how to meet your clients’ dates and deadlines.

Since I always fight the temptation to turn to the last page of a new novel to see how it ends, let’s start with a conclusion: you would be insane not to use a PC-based electronic calendaring system . . . period. Whew, that’s better isn’t it? Now that the virtual shoe has dropped, let’s all take a deep breath and work backwards through the various issues related to small law firm calendaring.

The first issue to address in looking at PC-based calendars is whether you want and/or need a legal-specific product or whether a more "generic" calendar is adequate. There are several key differences that make a calendaring system "legal-specific":

Legal-specific calendars allow you to see calendars for individual people in your firm (which ALL calendars do), but they go the next step--they allow you to see calendars for entire cases where there may be dates for several people posted. This is the fundamental functional difference that separates legal calendaring/docketing systems and case managers and their calendaring components from "generic" date-tracking products. With all that said, it is not impossible to get a "case view" in a non-legal-specific calendaring program. In Novell’s GroupWise (www.novell.com/groupwise), for example, it is possible to create a "resource" using the name of a case (i.e. Smith v. ABC Insurance). Then when anyone posts a date related to Smith v. ABC Insurance on their own individual calendar they would "cc" the "case resource." In doing so, a comprehensive case calendar is built as well as a consistent and complete individual calendar for each person posting dates. Legal-specific products take a different and more efficient approach, requiring far fewer mouse clicks. In the calendaring section of a case manager such as Time Matters, one posts a date indicating which specific case/matter it relates to. This process takes care of ensuring that the date posted appears on both an individual’s calendar as well as the case--one step, less hassle, less time required.

Legal-specific calendaring systems have features such as date calculators (i.e. ability to correctly count backwards from a trial date to a 45 day discovery cutoff, correctly calculating the date posting according to local rules, especially if it should fall on a holiday or a weekend), automated sequencing of related dates (i.e. you post a trial date that has a scheduling order with a series of 10 deadlines that will happen prior to trial including a discovery deadline, lay and expert witness list deadlines, etc. and 3 ticklers for each - this could easily be 30 dates that have to be correctly counted out and posted - a lot of work if you have to do it manually) - programs like Time Matters, with their "Chained Events" and similar features in other products, do it all automatically: one posting, many entries made. This is not only a huge time-saver, it is also a strong quality control and malpractice avoidance tool--the dates all get in, and get in correctly.

Examples of capable, but non-legal-specific products that are suitable for a firm in your size range include, but are not limited to:

Lotus Organizer 6.0 (www.lotus.com/home.nsf/welcome/organizer) - the latest iteration of a venerable product that has engendered quite a following over the years. This product has always been known for its system resource frugality, easily networkable (including smaller peer-to-peer Windows 95, 98 or NT networks) approach to group and individual calendaring. Much of the appeal of the product is its familiar visual interface, following the "Filofax" metaphor. It offers lots of nice colors to distinguish types of dates and their level of "criticalness." Typical contemporary features such as Palm PC compatibility are present or available from Palm synchronizing tools like Puma’s Intellisync (www.pumatech.com, about $70) and Dataviz’ Desktop to Go (www.dataviz.com, about $50). Pricing is reasonable--about $80 for the first copy with licenses available for about $60 each.

Microsoft Outlook 2000 (www.microsoft.com) - part of the Microsoft Office 2000 Suite. Requires Microsoft Exchange Server to be shared across a network (part of the Microsoft NT BackOffice Suite - www.microsoft.com/backoffice). This product has become so ubiquitous that the term "Outlook" has become almost "generically" representative of all e-mail and calendaring software. Unlike the first premature release early in the Microsoft Office 97 Suite’s lifecycle (which many consultants and systems integrators privately referred to, not so affectionately, as "Lookout!"), this is a mature, stable, fully-featured product combining calendaring, contact management and e-mail capabilities. The best (read: cheapest) way to acquire this product is as part of Microsoft Small Business Backoffice Server Suite 4.5 - a bundle of network tools including the needed Exchange Server software - with high-value pricing for up to 50 users.

Novell’s GroupWise 5.5 (www.novell.com/groupwise) - many of us cut our calendaring teeth on the old WordPerfect Office program (remember even before that when it started life as WordPerfect Library?). Well this isn’t your father’s WordPerfect Office. GroupWise has evolved into an extremely capable and well-integrated mix of calendaring, group scheduling, contact management and e-mail tools (and it also contains the remnants of the old Softsolutions document management system, but that’s a whole ‘nother story). GroupWise 5.5 requires that your firm have a network fileserver running the Novell NetWare operating system in version 4.x or above. As with its Microsoft counterpart, GroupWise is best acquired for a small firm as part of the aggressively priced network bundle called NetWare for Small Business 5.5--usable in firms with up to 50 users.

Legal-specific calendaring is available in two sizes: standard and industrial strength. The "standard"-sized products are a shrinking number of calendaring/docketing only products. Often these are part of a suite of software offered by vendors of legal time and billing systems and most often, are larger-firm oriented. Compulaw (www.compulaw.com) is the most-known product in this category with its Vision ‘98, particularly so because of their included calendaring "rules" for posting series of dates for common litigation practice events.

More typically today, legal-specific calendars are embedded as key components of case management software. In the small firm arena, there are a plethora of choices. Market leaders include Time Matters (www.timematters.com) from Data.TXT Corporation. In its latest 3.0 release, this product is now actually available in everything from a "Personal" version for $150 that skips links to billing systems (such as Timeslips, PC Law, Jr. and TABS III) in favor of very low cost for the super-budget conscious to a "Professional" product that is priced at $350 for the first network user and $150 for each user thereafter to a new Client/Server product focused on larger firms or firms with tons o’data who can’t sleep at night unless they have a SQL Server database chugging away on some hidden NT server - it runs $1000 for the first user, $400 for additional users plus the need to have an NT server running Microsoft SQL Server database software.

Amicus Attorney (www.amicus.com, Gavel & Gown Software) and AbacusLaw (www.abacuslaw.com, Abacus Data) are the two other major players in the small firm case management marketplace. Both of these products offer cutting edge case/person calendaring capabilities at comparable price points to Time Matters. Adopters of the Corel WordPerfect Law Office 2000 suite will find a single-user copy of the latest Amicus Attorney IV included at no additional charge.

The scope of this article doesn’t permit a detailed review of the robust and rich range of calendaring and docketing features in legal-specific calendars and case managers. However, it may be accurate to say that it would be easier--and far less time-consuming--to assemble a list of capabilities these programs don’t have. I recommend reading a brand new article that thoroughly surveys the latest crop of small and large-firm case managers, including their calendaring functions--it can be found as the cover story of the December/January 2000 issue of Law Office Computing magazine and is authored by lawyers/technologists Sheryn Bruehl and Tom O’Connor.

To help further, the following is a side-by-side comparison between a legal-specific case management system (using Time Matters as an example) with its calendaring and other various functions v. a generic product--the widely-used Novell GroupWise system:

Issue

GroupWise

Time Matters

Calendaring

GroupWise is not case-specific, it tracks calendars by person. Thus if you want to see a case calendar, comprising dates, ticklers, etc. of several people who may be working on the file, it can be done but is cumbersome and not technically an actual feature of the program (specifically one would have to create a "resource" in GroupWise using the name of the case - when anyone posts a date on a case to their own calendar they would "cc" the "case resource" - in doing so, a comprehensive case calendar is built)

Time Matters, as all case management products do, can show dates either by person or by case

E-Mail

Very capable in terms of both internal and Internet e-mail capability. The GWIA (GroupWise Internet Agent makes connecting all your users to an Internet Service Provider via the SMTP mail-handling protocol very easy to do)

This is where things get interesting with the new Time Matters 3.0. It uses something called MAPI connectivity to OTHER e-mail products that are MAPI-compliant (such as GroupWise or Microsoft Outlook). This means you could send e-mail, either internally or via the Internet with EITHER the mail screens in Time Matters or GroupWise and the actually "under the hood" mail processing/delivery will be handled by GroupWise. So the products actually work together (this was not previously the case)

Contact Info

GroupWise has a relatively weak and virtually non-customizable address book that tends to strain after more than 500-1000 entries are put in. It also cannot import from Act.

This is an area of clear edge in favor of Time Matters. It is extremely strong in its contact tracking, searching and ability to import from many sources including Act.

Remote Accessibility of Information

Three great options with GroupWise for getting at your calendar, to-do items and e-mails when away from the office:

 

1) GroupWise "Hit the Road" - this is a synchronization function that allows you to have a local copy of GroupWise on a home PC or a laptop. You can then click "Hit the Road" before leaving the office with a laptop, or "Send/Retrieve" if you’re at your remote machine and it will connect (directly or via the Internet or a direct modem dial-up) and sync the network and remote calendars and e-mail

 

2) GroupWise WebAccess - if you set up web server software internally and you have a full-time secure Internet connection, you can use a Web browser via the Internet to access (passworded, of course) your e-mail and calendar information - can’t look at anyone else’s without a password for them, but it’s still a terrific feature that means you can do it from ANY Internet-connected PC whether there is GroupWise software loaded on it or not

 

3) If you have a full-time Internet connection as described in no. 2 and WebAccess operational, you can use any POP3-compatible product to access your GroupWise inbound e-mail (i.e. Microsoft Outlook Express or Eudora Pro--the two most popular standalone Internet e-mail products, as well as Netscape Messenger, part of the Netscape Communicator product)

 

Time Matters fully synchronizes with laptops or home systems to give you access to your calendars, contact information, to-do lists, e-mail, etc. I have a number of clients using Time Matters in either a branch office, home office or mobile situation and they have been very pleased with the syncing functions--there is much more information tracked by Time Matters compared to a more generic, non-legal specific product like GroupWise--and it all syncs.

Summary

My recommendation, given the MAPI connection between products like GroupWise or Outlook and Time Matters for calendaring, contact management, to-do list tracking and e-mail purposes makes this one a slam dunk. If you already have GroupWise by virtue of the bundling in the NetWare for Small Business Suite 5.0, or Microsoft Outlook/Exchange Server via the Microsoft Small Business Backoffice Server Suite 4.5, there’s nothing more to buy. We recommend, in this comparison, using Time Matters as your key case-related calendaring, contact, to-do list information entry point. With the MAPI e-mail connection between Time Matters and Outlook or GroupWise, those two systems will stay effectively synchronized in terms of e-mail. So you get the benefits of both products (GroupWise and Outlook's strong Internet e-mail handling abilities and Time Matters stronger calendaring, contact tracking and conflicts checking abilities) without complex separate functionality--and with the benefit of being able to use a single interface for all these functions (Time Matters, in our example).

 

Whether a generic calendar that you use to track the dates, to-do items and possibly client and case-related addresses in your practice, or more ideally, the date management capabilities of the current crop of legal case managers, choices abound. In addition to publications like Law Technology News, Law Office Computing, The Lawyer’s PC (and their Annual Legal Software Directory published every November) and the publications of the ABA Law Practice Management and General Practice/Solo & Small Firm sections, consider other sources to explore these products. Legal technology listserves such as Network 2d, Lawtech, Technolawyers, Netlawyers and Solosez (the latter not being solely a legal tech listserve but rather a virtual community of SSF’ers where techno.talk is a common occurrence) are great places to hear real-world software experiences from practicing lawyers and in-the-trenches legal consultants. In fact, if you’re not taking part in this grassroots techno.resource, my article on the subject at www.wisbar.org/wislawmag/archive/nov99/tech.html might help.

So the bottom line is this: GET A PC CALENDAR FOR YOUR PRACTICE . . . .NOW!! Your malpractice insurance carrier will be much happier!

NOTE: A prior version of this article appeared in the January 2000 issue of Law Technology News.