Comment: Make matters better

By Mark Craddock, group sales and marketing director, FWBS

Faced with tough competition and increasingly demanding clients, more and more law firms are turning to new front-office technologies to boost the productivity of their professionals, increase client satisfaction and, ultimately, improve their profitability. To achieve these goals firms must arm their professionals with comprehensive information about their active matters and help them service their clients effectively.

Unfortunately for professionals, this critical matter-related information is typically scattered throughout their firm. They must search through multiple, disconnected applications and data sources to find everything they need to service clients – tracking down e-mails in Microsoft Outlook; finding the right file in their firm’s document-management system; locating time and billing information in the accounting application; or viewing pending critical dates in the case-management system.

There is no shortage of data generated by modern legal systems. The key is being able to expose all the right information about a matter, when and where it is needed, to the relevant knowledge worker(s). The design logic behind a matter-centric system is thus simple – pulling all the relevant information together from different sources (including back-office financial and time-recording systems, case-management files and any third-party sources) and then outputting it in the appropriate form to lawyers, law firm staff and any other involved authorised parties, including clients. In other words, the matter lies at the centre of a structured and, wherever possible, proactive flow of information, with automation being used to maximise productivity.

Managing e-mail is probably the foremost issue facing law firms today. With e-mail communication now forming the backbone of human and commercial interaction, the management, storage, accessibility, security and integrity of ‘virtual’ documents is a necessity. In the law, there are two challenges. First, to maintain rigorous control over e-mail and, second, to use e-mail actively to gain major efficiencies in management and practice, particularly as the information contained within e-mail is such valuable intellectual property in law firms today.

The key issue facing all firms wrestling with the e-mail management issue is what to do about the existing e-mail mountain lying all over the place in individual inboxes, desktop files, databases and storage repositories; and about the constant inflow of matter-related e-mails that arrive day after day. The solution that gives maximum benefit to the lawyer does not focus on the operational needs of disk-storage usage and other such IT challenges. Instead, it brings alive all the e-mail information as part of the client and matter data.Approaching this with a ‘file as you go’ principle enables lawyers to profile every new and existing e-mail, very simply, working the way Outlook does.

Modern business challenges have dictated a great improvement in the level of information accessibility and application ease of use. The key for significant productivity gains is to bring the matter-centric approach to working within context. This means that if any authorised member of a firm is looking at any type of information within Microsoft Office, all client, matter and financial information is available via a single click.

Mark Craddock is group sales and marketing director of FWBS – www.fwbs.net/www.mattercentre.net