Jadek & Pensa choose Lawman from Timeslice in London for their legal software needs
One of Slovenia’s leading law firms – 13 fee earner practice Jadek & Pensa – has chosen Lawman from Timeslice as their complete legal office system. Pavle Pensa, one of the firm’s two managing partners, explains their need, their search, the solution and the experiences of this choice and his ambitions for the future together.
Always priding themselves as being progressive in IT and seeing its importance in providing client best value, Jadek & Pensa was one of the first firms in Slovenia to introduce networking in the office, and was storing electronic evidence in files and even calendar sharing as long ago as 1994 with its use of Novell Groupwise. At that time, everything was still running under DOS and it took some time to upgrade and advance their use of technology. In 2002 a further step forward was taken in a move to Lotus Notes/Domino however, as it was felt that there was no real development potential in this solution, it was decided to try to find a provider that could offer a totally up to date, future-oriented platform and solution.
Jadek & Pensa had a major issue with the Lotus system: it was unable to provide the level of management reporting required. It was difficult to get the right reports to be a useful management tool and, most importantly, there was no automatic time recording. Time was entered into the system manually, file by file, resulting in the whole picture for the day’s work never being available. From a management point of view it was therefore difficult to obtain meaningful reports and an overall practice synopsis.
The overall objective behind their search for new software was to improve efficiency, gain easy access to management information and to provide fee earners more control over their time. They wanted an integrated system, integrated electronic files, emails, time recording and the ability to gain instant access to all reports needed for management purposes.
Jadek & Pensa could find no local document management system provider able to provide this integration. New development was promised in Lotus Notes but there was no future foreseen within this product. Consequently, the thought was to switch to Microsoft completely and seek out a supplier who could provide their software already well established on this platform.
The Search
The firm’s first point of research was the Internet. The system had to be in the English language so the search was concentrated on American and English systems. Jadek & Pensa looked up the information provided by the English Law Society on systems used in England. From there they found out about the London Legal IT Show, which they subsequently visited.
The new system had to be multi-currency: Jadek & Pensa invoice in US Dollars, Sterling and Euros. It had to provide specific Slovenian characters and handle the different date formats. The price had to be right. And, the new supplier also had to be willing to go out of England and provide confidence in provision of the ensuing support.
A short presentation of the Lawman system was provided by Timeslice Limited on the company’s stand at the Legal IT Show. The next step was a visit to Timeslice office in June in London for a full presentation and discussion about specific requirements. This resulted in an order in August, an installation in November with a test database and Jadek & Pensa going ‘live’ on Lawman in December 2007, just 10 months from the first meeting.
Pavle comments “A new provider would have to be willing to develop their software, compliant with Slovenian law and the official tariff system for lawyers, which is quite complicated and based on value of the case and certain typical activities which are changed from client to client dependant upon value of cases and the activity in order to get the correct value of the service. Timeslice demonstrated their ability to undertake such development, showed knowledge and understanding of handling such changes and had the core fully established Lawman product to work upon”.
Conclusions
Jadek and Pensa now plan to completely use all of all facilities within Lawman.. Currently developing the credit control system to their own needs, they also want to start using the work flows around their own requirements within case management, and also want to examine the full potential of Lawman Marketing. By that time the firm will have reached all its goals, including having full electronic file storage and a developed knowledge base around that.
Pavle comments “The adoption of Lawman fulfilled our objectives and even additional bonuses with the provision of essential and comprehensive management reporting on Billing by Fee Earner, Fee Earner Time Reports and Debtor Reports in particular. Even the transfer of information from Lotus Notes in the electronic conversion provided by Timeslice as part of the service was so full and complete that we are able to get reports on the time information posted beforehand that we were unable to get from Lotus Notes”.
Pavle concludes “Staff find Lawman easy to use and it does not require a lot of training, based as it is in Word and Outlook, and it records all data that is needed in a law office. As this data was already held by the practice the adoption of Lawman did not change routines and bring with it the consequent problems acquired with change. It was particularly extremely useful that all the data in our old system could be transposed automatically to the new one”.
Jadek & Pensa use Lawman for billing routines – Timeslice added some development work on this to fully comply with the local system of services in accordance with the official law tariff in points so that the client can see what was charged on an hourly basis and not just on the official tariff system. Templates were agreed for bills and credit control forms and work undertaken promptly by Timeslice in liaison with their own local IT resources and the platform was soon migrated from Domino to Exchange and SQL Server.
Pavle continues “We are extremely happy with Timeslice on several levels, firstly responsiveness from the personnel, which is always quick, even in the beginning when negotiating the purchase and that included speedy agreements on necessary developments of the system; then also later in the face of development and testing and going live – their response was excellent and any issue always quickly resolved. One of our fears was that any provider would be far away, but distance has never proved to be a problem”.
Futures
Jadek & Pensa has informed Timeslice that there will potentially be a change in the law regarding the tariff system. There may be an abolishment of points, and fees will be in Euros. Timeslice will use this information to reflect any new development work required, and are happy to look even further, at ranges of values adopted by other surrounding countries, where ‘points’ are different currencies. At the time of this development Timeslice took the opportunity to devise a language table to go further than just Slovenian, with the ability to provide similar solutions to these other countries with parallel or even more diverse needs.
Digital Dictation is a future option for Jadek & Pensa. It was tried in 2001 and did not work, but the firm is willing to try again and also benefit from its integration with Lawman Document and Case Management in providing automatic time recording and the management of dictation documents and consequent work flows.
Jadek & Pensa are looking forward to adopting all the latest developments from Timeslice and are extremely proactive in suggesting and trialling new features to progress with any moves forward with the technology available; they were one of the first practices to move on to Timeslice Outlook.Net. Timeslice is also providing the ability for Jadek & Pensa to allow Client access to their website to follow the course of their case, documents and transactions.
Jadek & Pensa are very satisfied with their decision and are happy to talk to other practices about their experiences. Pavle comments “Most outstanding features were – the transfer of our data from old to new – the ease of working with Lawman and the Timeslice people – the success in organising files so that they are all in electronic format – the easy search through documents and ease of finding our own precedents – the general increase in efficiency in preparation of documents – and use of Fee Earner Workstation, where certain rights have been set to fee earners so that they can access their own financial data. Reporting and general business efficiency has been revolutionised”.
