Practice Management

Starting the Firm

/ Bruce Cameron

I’m finding that starting a firm is a process of choosing answers to a myriad of questions and hoping that each choice is going to be the right one — your typical entrepreneur worries. The one bright spot is that information is plentiful out there from general small business advice to technology review sites. Here’s some sites I’ve found useful so  far.

My go-to site for general small business advice is: SCORE.org. From on-line articles to confidential counseling, SCORE provides no-nonsense practical help from people who have been there and done that. With over 300 offices and over 10,000 volunteer counselors nationwide, there should be a SCORE office and volunteer mentor near you.

Every business needs a mission and every mission needs to be expressed. For those of us with writer’s block, there’s Mission Statements – your on-line source for mission statement inspiration. My current favorite is Sandoval Law Firm’s mission statement: “To provide fair, honest, and equal representation to those in need of legal aid.” Short and to the point.

Without adequate information, technology choices are difficult to make, and for legal software your standard review sites like CNet just aren’t much help. Not to fear, litiReviews by LexBe is here. Full text reviews are organized by software category and application name.

For those of us that see marketing as terra incognita, festooned with the warning Hic Sunt Dracones, Duct Tape Marketing is here to help. The articles section offers simple affordable solutions to problems ranging from advertising to web site design. My only quible is that a given topic heading not seem to always align with the subjects covered by the articles filed under that heading – I don’t see the connection between “Virtual Assistants” and “Online Gaming Can Be Expensive – Here’s how to Pay to Play“.

Rocket Matter Redux

/ Bruce Cameron

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.

Rocket Matter & Clio

/ Bruce Cameron / 3 Comments

Both Rocket Matter and Clio are online practice management solutions. Based on their respective demos, they both offer an integrated intake-to-billing system. Sam Glover on the Lawyerist offers a good review of both Clio and Rocket Matter.

While both products offer very attractive user interfaces and operating system independence, I don’t get their pricing model. Based on their introductory pricing, ether product will cost a single lawyer firm $600 per year. At first blush, this is less than half the cost of a product like AbacusLaw, but a maintenance contract for the more traditional practice management solutions typically run less than $200 per year, the long term cost of the online products soon outstrips the cost of the more traditional solutions.

So, I don’t get the “why” of online practice management. There doesn’t seem to be any outstanding difference in features and the price is not that competitive. Install a traditional product on a laptop and you have data portability. Backup your computer hardware regularly and you have the same degree of data security. I suppose not having to do software upgrades is a plus, but is that really worth an extra $400 a year? If the yearly cost of either Rocket Matter or Clio was equivalent to the cost of a traditional product’s service contract, I’d buy in, but until then I’ll keep looking into a more local solution.