Rural Lawyer

Carilyn Elefant’s Complete v. Cobble v. Cutting Edge is an excellent 30,000′ look at the general choices available for practice management. While  I believe that she is right in recommending that any new solo take a serious look at web-based (SaaS) solutions, I don’t believe that desktop solutions have seen their day. Until reliable high-speed Internet connections are ubiquitous the web will be both a great strength and an Achilles heel.

As I look for a practice management solution, I am looking for that magic bullet – a software package that will facilitate the mundane business of practicing law leaving me more time to practice law. Sure a cobbled system – Outlook for contact management, a strict file structure & naming conventions or perhaps some type of revision control software (SVN is free) for document management, and a tickler/productivity system like Tim Ferriss never forget anything again – is an inexpensive and workable solution. The downside is that like any D.I.Y. project, it just invites tinkering, tweaking, and time-wasting as one strives to perfect it, and, unlike desktop and SaaS solutions, there is nothing in the cobbled solution (besides one’s personal iron determination) to impose disciplined consistency.
Desktop solutions are the devil we know. They have years of development behind them leading to full-featured software and generations of lawyers that will swear by/at them. The implementation of any desktop solution represents a serious investment of money (upfront license costs, yearly maintenance agreements) and time in the form of steep learning curves and software maintenance.

The new kids on the block are SaaS solutions. Lacking the comprehensive feature set of the desktop solutions, they reduce training costs and eliminate maintenance expenses. If one considers total cost of ownership, SaaS solutions can be a quarter of the cost of a desktop solution. The risk here is one of trust. Do you trust your Internet connection enough to risk access to your conflict checker/time keeper/billing/document management software? Do you trust the SaaS vendor to keep your data secure, private, and confidential? Lacking a well-established user community and reputations built through long experience, SaaS solutions are the devil you don’t know.

See also:

• FYI: Software as a Service (SaaS) for Lawyers
• Tools For Your Law Office
• Tools for Your Law Practice
• Web 2.0 – Productivity Tools and Resources
• WebComputing – I want to Believe
  

Finally, a SaaS Practice Management tool whose pricing makes sense. Caseload by Blackletter offers subscriptions that range from free to $50/month. For $0/month, 2 users can work on a single active matter. Other plans increase both the number of users and the number of active matters. Don’t like limits, then the $50/month plan is for you – unlimited users, unlimited matters.

Caseload must have project management genes somewhere in its origins because it is very work-flow oriented and offers graphical outlines of each active matter showing task order and deadlines. Caseload does not offer many frills – invoices are fairly plain, no multiple billing rates, and there is little to customize. But it does provide the basic tools for matter & contact management, calendaring, to do lists, billing, and file storage.

The user interface has a few rough edges – it is not always possible to move from one subsection to another without making use of the browser’s back button and you may have to scroll down the page to reach the “help” button. Other complaints – there does not seem to be obvious way to import/export data, no tutorial is provided, there is no way to classify a contact as opposing party, and conflict checking is rudimentary bordering on primitive. While, the price point helps to mitigate the software’s flaws, my overall feeling is that Blackletter may have jumped a little to soon when they released this version.

At $260 per month per attorney, VLOTech is a significant step up in price from rival practice management SaaS offerings Rocket Matter and Clio. However, if you are interested in having a true 100% virtual practice, VLOTech is a far more complete solution.

In addition to the standard practice management and billing features, a VLOTech subscription includes a dedicated IP address, dedicated hosting, a firm web site, and secure client homepages that can be used to facilitate client communication.

For more information on the potentials of practicing law online,  VLOTech offers a free ebook. Keep in mind that the 100% vitual practice is a radically different paradigm for the practice of law, so check with your local PR board to see what gotcha’s exist in your jursidiction.

Greg Broiles is correct in pointing out that I did leave out hardware costs from my ROI computation. I also left out the cost of Internet access, the availability of high speed Internet access, and a myriad of other factors that would go into an exhaustive ROI computation. Greg’s point is quite valid, any ROI analysis has to be done from a specific set of circumstances and will give different results for different inputs.

I think the software as a service (SaaS) model is the potential of being the next great thing after all it affords the vendor greater control over their intellectual property, eliminates the end user’s upfront software costs, and may reduce the end user’s hardware investment. For the model to work, the end user has to have reliable access to a high speed Internet connection. For those of us in rural areas, we are the Internet’s hinterland and Internet access often means dial-up, high speed translates to 9600 baud, and reliability is dependent on the vagaries of the gods and the local phone company (surveys show that only about 39% of rural households in my neck of the woods have access to broadband Internet service).

I think that both Rocket Matter and Clio have the potential to be great products. Of all the practice management products I’ve reviewed so far, I think that Rocket Matter offers the most user-friendly, KISS interface out there. If it were a standalone product, my decision as to which practice management system to use would be simple. The ugly reality is I’m a one computer, one lawyer practice with a dodgy internet connection and I’m not sure that SaaS is for me. Your mileage may vary.