Law Technology News - Sample Issue

software launch a marketing business? Because Rocket Matter started as a bootstrap company without major outside investors, Port explained. He and his staff became experts at internet marketing within the legal industry. It seemed natural to offer their expertise as a service to law firms that are having trouble with internet marketing, he said.

Clio Integrations. While Rocket Matter announced its new business, two other cloud-based practice-manage-ment platforms were debuting enhancements to existing products.

Themis Solutions Inc. (www.goclio. com) introduced integrations for its Clio practice management system with two cloud-based programs: NetDocuments ( www.netdocuments.com) for document management and sharing, and Xero ( www.xero.com) for accounting and banking.

The NetDocuments integration will help Clio users upload documents to NetDocuments and associate them with matters in Clio; save documents directly to NetDocuments and Clio from within Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook; and take advantage of NetDocuments’ powerful search features, Themis said.

Xero is an accounting platform suitable for small and midsized law firms. It includes real-time financial reporting, payroll, bank reconciliation, invoicing, expense claim management, check writing, and accounts payable.

Its integration with Clio will help lawyers automatically synchronize key client and financial data between the two platforms. Bills generated within Clio, along with payments of those bills, will be automatically synchronized with Xero. Communication between the two platforms eliminates duplicate data entry.

At press time, both integrations were expected to be released in May.

A First for an App. Meanwhile, MyCase ( www.mycase.com) previewed a mobile app that appears to be a first for practice management apps — it helps

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both clients and lawyers to access their case information. While other practice-management platforms have mobile apps allowing lawyers to access their case and client information, this is the first that includes a separate portal for client use.

The app includes features that help clients view their case information, message directly with the law firm, and perform other functions. The app also helps lawyers access their matters within MyCase, send messages to clients, view contact and calendar information, and bill on the go.

As of this writing, the app was awaiting final review by the i Tunes store and had not yet been posted for download.

Attorney Timekeeper can
pull call records from your
phone and match them to
client numbers — helping
you with billing.

Real Time Keeping. A new product introduced at Techshow was Attorney Timekeeper ( www.attorney time-keeper.com). Bill Doran, president of the company that created it, Morning Waves, says lawyers lose too many billable hours through inefficient and ineffective timekeeping practices.

The best way not to lose billable time, he says, is to keep time in real time — to keep an accurate record of what you are doing as you are doing it.

The application is focused as much on productivity as on timekeeping, says Doran, who has more than 25 years’ experience developing timekeeping and time-management systems. It achieves this through simple, one-touch options.

When running, Attorney Timekeeper’s home screen maintains a persistent

robert ambrogi

list of your clients and matters, starting with those you most recently worked on. To begin keeping time on a matter or to transition to a different matter, users simply click that matter in the list to open a timer and get started. You click the timer to start, or you can set it to automatically start when you touch a matter. Alternatively, you can enter your time manually.

Doran recommends that lawyers run Attorney Timekeeper on a tablet, keeping it open and available by your side as you work on your computer or other tasks. While the program’s many touch features make it ideal for a tablet, it also runs perfectly well on a PC or Mac computer as well as on a smartphone.

A unique feature is automatic capture of time spent on cell phone calls. If you authorize this feature, Attorney Time-keeper will pull your call records from your provider, match the records to your clients’ phone numbers, and then you can decide whether and how to bill that time.

Attorney Timekeeper also includes functions that let you set billing objectives, track your progress and monitor your billing effectiveness. If you have an annual billing goal, for example, you can set your objectives and monitor your progress towards meeting them.

Similarly, you can monitor how much of your work time you actually bill, tracking it by the day, week, month or year.

The application includes embedded Uniform Task-Based Management System legal billing codes. You can set various billing preferences, including whether to bill in minutes or tenths or quarters of an hour.