Practice Management

IOLTA ABCs

/ Bruce Cameron

OK, strictly speaking, you don’t need to have a trust account. If you never receive settlements on behalf of clients, never receive advance fee or cost payments from clients, and never hold other funds on behalf of clients – you might not (at least in MN) need a trust account. However, the Lawyers Professional Responsibility Board’s recommended practice is to maintain a trust account just in case. Think of it as cheap CYA insurance.

Opening an IOLTA (lawyer’s trust account) in Minnesota is a simple process – find an approved bank, download and complete a Notice to Financial Institution form (see the Lawyer Trust Account Board), and then take the form with you to the bank when you open the account. After spending 30 minutes with a banker and making a nominal deposit you’ll walk away with an IOLTA account.

While the Lawyers Board and the Minnesota Bar Association have a number of helpful materials on managing your trust account, they do omit some very practical hints like:

  • Use different color checks for your operating and trust accounts (green for your operating account – its your money & red for your trust account – stop its your client’s money)
  • Color code your deposit slips so that they match the check color of the account (green stripe for operating, red stripe for trust)
  • Keep your trust account & operating account at different banks
  • When choosing a bank for your trust account, ask what interest rate the bank pays on the funds – pick a bank that offers the best interest rate. It costs you nothing while helping others.

The eFax Option

/ Bruce Cameron

How does one handle the occasional fax? The traditional model is to buy a standalone fax machine or a multi-function printer and either pay for a dedicated phone line or a line sharing device. The other option is eFax.

eFax services convert a fax into a digital file that can be received by eMail and vice versa. The typical eFax solution provides a dedicated fax phone number that will convert incoming faxes to email attachments that are automatically sent to your eMail address. Your outgoing faxes are sent as eMail attachments to the eFax service which sends them to physical fax numbers so your outgoing faxes are received just as if they had been sent by a standard fax machine.

Based on research done by FaxCompare, the “market standard” is for a service to provide a 30-day free trial, have no start up fee or hidden fees, and to offer 24/7 customer service and both send/receive capabilities. Expect to pay about $10 per month for 300 total pages (incoming & outgoing combined) with additional pages costing about $0.10 per page.

Here is a “SaaS” model that works for me. It is less expensive than owning dedicated hardware, is more efficient since it cuts down the number of steps needed to send a fax, should be more reliable, and is more secure (faxes go to specific eMail addresses rather than sit in the fax machine until someone picks them up). Plus it is the “greener” alternative. The best part is that FaxCompare has done most of the comparison shopping already and offers a set of apples-to-apples vendor reviews.

SaaSy Practice Management

/ Bruce Cameron

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:

Caseload

/ Bruce Cameron

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.

VLOTech – A More Complete Solution

/ Bruce Cameron

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.