Second Opinions

We Need to Upgrade to a Calendar that Can Be Networked. Suggestions?

By Ross L. Kodner

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 why lawyers get disciplined: Spending client trust funds on a 75-foot motor yacht or missing a case deadline. I won't help you with any propensity you might have to fool around with client trust money, but here's several ideas about how to meet your clients' dates and deadlines.

First, a clarification: Technically, it is possible to network the calendar, CorelCentral, which is part of the Corel WordPerfect 2000 suite. But it's not such a great idea. CorelCentral is not a particularly strong product in a networked environment. It tends to show major strain as an address manager if you have more than a just few hundred entries, which affects its reliability as a calendaring system as well. There are much better choices.

Because 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.

Now that the virtual shoe has dropped, let's all take a deep breath and work backwards through the issues related to small firm calendaring.

The first issue to address in looking at PC-based calendars is whether you need a legal-specific product, or whether a 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 also allow you to see calendars for entire cases where there may be dates for several people posted. This is the fundamental difference that separates legal calendaring/docketing systems and case managers and their calendaring components from generic date-tracking products.

It is not, however, impossible to get a "case view" in a non-legal-specific calendaring program. In Novell's GroupWise (www.novell.com/groupwise), for example, you can 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." This builds a comprehensive case calendar and an individual calendar for each person posting dates.

Legal-specific products take a different, more efficient approach, requiring far fewer mouse clicks. For example, in the popular TimeMatters case management system, you post a date indicating which specific case/matter it relates to. This one step takes care of ensuring that the date posted appears on both an individual's calendar as well as the case.

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 cut-off, correctly calculating the date posting according to local rules, and factoring in holidays and weekends, etc.); 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.; ticklers; etc. This saves a lot of work compared to doing it manually. Programs such as TimeMatters, with its "chained events" feature, do it automatically: one posting, many entries made. This not only is a huge time-saver, it is also a strong quality control and malpractice avoidance tool.

Examples of capable, but non-legal-specific programs suitable for your firm include, but are not limited to:

1. Lotus Organizer 6.0 . The latest version of this venerable product is known for its system resource frugality, and easily networkable (including smaller peer-to-peer Windows 95/98/NT networks) approach to group and individual calendaring. Its familiar visual interface follow the "Filofax" metaphor, offering colors to distinguish types of dates and level of importance. Palm PC compatibility is present or available from Palm synchronizing tools such as Puma's Intellisync and Dataviz' Desktop to Go.

2. Microsoft Outlook 2000. Part of the Microsoft Office 2000 Suite, it requires Microsoft Exchange Server to be shared across a network. Unlike the first premature release early in the Microsoft Office 97 Suite's lifecycle (which many pundits referred to, not so affectionately, as "Lookout!"), this now 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.

3. Novell's GroupWise 5.5. GroupWise has evolved into an extremely capable and well-integrated mix of calendaring, group scheduling, contact management and e-mail tools (it also contains the remnants of the old Softsolutions document management system). 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.

Two Sizes

Legal-specific calendaring is available in two sizes: standard and industrial strength. 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. For example, Compulaw (www.compulaw.com) offers Vision '98, with 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 TimeMatters from Data.TXT Corporation. This product now is available in everything from a "Personal" version for $150 that skips links to billing systems (such as Timeslips, PC Law, Jr. and TABS III); 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 of data) that can't sleep at night unless they have a SQL Server database chugging away on an NT server. The client/server edition runs $1000 for the first user, $400 for additional users.

Amicus Attorney (Gavel & Gown Software) and AbacusLaw (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 TimeMatters. Adopters of the newly-released Corel WordPerfect Law Office 2000 suite will find a single-user copy of the latest Amicus Attorney IV included.

Recommendation

The MAPI connection between products such as GroupWise or Outlook and TimeMatters 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 bundling in 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.

For example, you can use TimeMatters as your case-related calendaring, contact, to-do list information entry point. With the e-mail connection between TimeMatters and Outlook or GroupWise, those two systems will stay synchronized in terms of e-mail. You get the benefits of both products (GroupWise and Outlooks's strong Internet e-mail handling abilities and TimeMatters' 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.

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. The bottom line is this: Get a PC calendar for your practice, now! You, and your malpractice insurance carrier, will be much happier! (And probably sleep a little better.)

Ross Kodner is a "recovering" lawyer-turned-legal technologist with Milaukee's MicroLaw, Inc.