OTB Consulting

  • Home
  • About OTB
    • Our Story
    • Team OTB
    • Awards
  • Services
    • Technology Guidance
    • Software Implementation
    • Training
  • Solutions
    • Practice Management
    • Document & Email Management
    • Time, Billing & Accounting
  • Products
    • Practice Management
      • Time Matters / Billing Matters
      • Tabs3 / PracticeMaster
      • Actionstep
      • Centerbase
      • Clio
      • BKexpress
    • Document & Email Management
      • NetDocuments
    • Time & Billing
      • PCLaw
      • Tabs3
      • Actionstep
      • Centerbase
    • Office 365
    • Consumer Bankruptcy
      • BKexpress
      • BKexpress Cloud
      • BKeTouch
      • BKecf
    • Practice Area Templates
      • U.S. Litigation Packs
      • Time Matters Litigation Pack
      • Insurance Defense
    • TM Touch
    • TM Tools
  • Resources
    • Downloads
    • OTB Technical Support
  • Contact Us
  • Blog
You are here: Home / Archives for Tom Rowe

November 6, 2020 By Tom Rowe Leave a Comment

Time Matters – Important November 15, 2020 Deadline

If you are a user of Time Matters, and have let your AMP (Annual Maintenance Plan) lapse, this is a very important post.

Summary

  • Renew your AMP by November 15 and avoid paying the True-Up/catch up costs – this could save you tens of thousands of dollars.
  • Billing Matters is now part of Time Matters at no additional cost.
  • The new pricing for the Time Matters AMP is $39 per user per month or $468 per year with no 1st user surcharge.
  • If you don’t get back on the AMP by November 15 and decide to do so later, your license will not be perpetual.
  • Give us a call and we will get you connected to an account exec who can get you back on AMP.

Details

Get Back on AMP and Avoid the True-Up/Catch Up cost
For some time now, Time Matters has required an AMP to get technical support, access to certain features, and most importantly all new Versions and interim updates. Some of our clients have let the AMP lapse. To go back on AMP – typically to upgrade to a new version like TM 16 – LexisNexis (now PCLaw | Time Matters, aka P|T) charged you a “True-UP or catch up fee for the previous period of time when you didn’t pay for the AMP. After a couple years, it was cheaper to just re-purchase Time Matters than it was to pay the True-Up cost.

Until November 15, 2020, you have an opportunity to get back on the AMP and P|T will waive the True-Up charge. You simply pay $39 per user, per month or $468 per user, and there is no additional charge for past AMP that was missed.

New Pricing – Billing Matters no Longer Charged Separately
P|T has also announced a new price for Time Matters – $39 per user per month, or $468 per year, per user. This brings in Time Matters at a price roughly half the cost of competing cloud applications. If you are a Billing Matters users, it’s even better … the $39 per month includes Billing Matters. In other words, Billing Matters is now part of Time Matters and you don’t have to pay an extra charge for it. If you don’t use Billing Matters, you now can at no extra cost other than getting it setup.

Perpetual Licensing
You currently have a perpetual license of Time Matters. This means that if you decided to stop paying the AMP at any time in the future, you still own the product and can keep using it forever. That can’t be taken away from you.

However, if you are NOT on AMP currently, don’t get back on by November 15, and then later decide you want to get back on AMP so that you can upgrade to a new version, you won’t have a perpetual license. If you then stop paying AMP in the future, Time Matters will no longer work for you.

Additionally, you want to make sure you renew each year in a timely fashion. If you don’t renew your AMP on time in the future, you will not have a perpetual license if you subsequently renew. You want to keep a perpetual license. You want to be on the most recent version. Be timely with your renewals.

Information Attached – Contact Us by Next Friday, November 15, 2020
Here are two documents that provide additional details:

  • AMP True-Up Flyer – this will give you information about this deal.
  • A flyer that discusses pricing, and changes that PCLaw|Time Matters has implemented under new management, including the $10 million investment that PCLaw|Time Matters has made.

Filed Under: Time Matters

July 8, 2020 By Tom Rowe 1 Comment

NetDocuments for Time Matters Users

This is the first of a multi-part series on why Time Matters users should move to NetDocuments for their Document and Email Management needs.

It’s time for Time Matters users to start using NetDocuments.

OTB Consulting has been the leading Time Matters consultancy for more than 2 decades. During that time, we have installed the Time Matters Document and Email Management System (DMS/EMS) in hundreds of law firms and have migrated over 30 million documents into it. We personally used the DMS/EMS for over a decade.

While we have hundreds of Time Matters clients who continue to use the Swiss Army Knife of legal practice management systems, we believe it is time for you to use a dedicated DMS/EMS system. Having successfully transitioned over a dozen Time Matters firms, we believe that NetDocuments should be that system.

Email Overload is the Problem

For a DMS/EMS that is part of a practice management system, Time Matters gets the job done. BUT it is time for Time Matter users to consider moving to a dedicated DMS/EMS … and the reason has everything to do with Email.

Why does email make the difference? Today, law firms and lawyers receive and generate emails and documents at a ratio of about 100/1. That’s right, for every 1 document that a law firm generates or receives, it generates or receives 100 emails. This should come as no surprise to anyone. You see it every day as you get frustrated with your full email inbox and the hundreds of emails you receive. More proof? The hottest legal specific software genre going today is e-discovery software because pouring over physical boxes of documents is no longer the litigation discovery nightmare scenario – it’s the millions and millions of emails that have to be dealt with.

Without a doubt, the number one frustration we see with lawyers and law firms is the overwhelming amount of email they receive, and how difficult it is to handle it.

How Do Time Matters Users Handle Email?

The Time Matters DMS/EMS handles email in two ways (you can use both but should use just one).

Proprietary Format

The first way, which has been around since 2000, is to save emails into the Time Matters Email database in a proprietary format. The “metadata” (date, time, subject, from, to, cc, etc.) and the “message” of the email are stored as a data record in a SQL database. The attachments are split out of the email and stored separately in a secured folder on your server, and are logically related to the associated database record.

.msg Format

A few years ago, Time Matters started allowing users to save email in their native “.msg” format. Instead of a proprietary format, the metadata, message and attachments remain in the .msg “envelope” and are stored as a Time Matters Document record instead of an Email record.

Anyone that started using Time Matters before 2012 had to store email as a proprietary email. When Time Matters introduced the alternative to save email as a .msg document, older firms would have had email in two places if they switched. Firms that have more recently begun to use Time Matters have, for the most part, saved email as a .msg document.

With that background, why is it we think you should switch to NetDocuments?

Problems with the Proprietary Email Format

Saving emails in a proprietary, non-.msg format is simply no longer tenable for several reasons.

First, the proprietary format for sending and replying doesn’t look professional. Because email has all but replaced paper correspondence, clients expect to see professional looking emails. When an email is saved into Time Matters in its proprietary format, and then subsequently opened and replied to, it looks like something you would expect to see in the 90s or 00s. To effectuate this, email needs to be stored in its native .msg format in Time Matters.

Second, from time to time law firms need to extract email from Time Matters. If the emails have been stored in the TM proprietary format, this is very difficult and expensive. Law firms need to extract email for two main reasons:

  • when partners leave and take clients with them, or a client leaves and needs their file;
  • and for litigation purposes

When either of these happen, and you have to produce the emails for a file, it isn’t pretty. When you were saving an email for every 10 documents, it wasn’t a problem. Now that you have a 100/1 ratio, it simply is too difficult and risky. Here’s why:

  • Because the TM Emails are in proprietary format, you have to reconstitute them to try to get them back in their original format. There are programs available to do that, but they are not inexpensive (they shouldn’t be, they are highly specialized programs). And, it takes a lot of time to do all this.
  • Even if you can reconstitute them, they aren’t the original emails. You can’t say, “here is the email,” with any level of certainty. If you have to prove that this the email, you can’t state it is the original. You will have to carry the burden of proving that is the original email, broken down into a proprietary format, and then properly reconstituted.
  • For departing partners, or clients that request their email, you can’t easily do that if you have stored them in the Time Matters DMS/EMS. Someone to locate all the email attachments and then stich all that together at a new location. This is costly and imperfect.

Because emails are stored in their original format in NetDocuments, with attachments stored with them, it’s quite easy to locate and export emails in a format that is exactly as it was received, and can be used as a native email in any application.

Time Savings

It is far more difficult to save an email in Time Matters.

In NetDocuments, you can save a majority of your emails with a single click, or less.

  • For most email you receive or send, NetDocuments’ predictive technology auto-matches email with the Case/Matter it is associated with.
  • With NetDocuments’ “Conversation filing” function, once an email is saved to a Case/Matter, all subsequent emails in that thread or conversation are automatically saved with no intervention on the user’s part.
  • If an email is sent to more than one person in the firm, only one needs to save the email and the other recipients will see that the email has been saved.
  • For those that prefer dragging and dropping, NetDocuments can reside within Outlook and emails can be dragged to the appropriate folder.
  • If you like to use folders in Outlook, in addition to being able to drag and drop to them, folders can be mapped to the associated Case/Matter in NetDocuments. When you move an email to the Outlook folder, it is automatically saved to the mapped Case/Matter in NetDocuments.

Saving email in Time Matters requires that you add an email record that has to be opened, completed, and then saved. This requires that you select a Code, and then select the Case/Matter to which the email is associated. Doing all this requires numerous mouse clicks and typing. With NetDocuments saving email is a one-click process, at worst, with the likelihood that your email will be saved in most instances with no clicks needed.

Saving email in Time Matters as a proprietary email, something we don’t recommend any more, does have some Case/Matter predictive capabilities. But it relies exclusively on the sending and receiving email address, has no additional predictive capabilities, and none of the advanced features found in NetDocuments.

When saving email as a document in Time Matters, which is what we now recommend, there are no predictive filing capabilities. You have to manually perform a database lookup to relate the email to the appropriate Case/Matter. Additionally, none of the metadata is extracted and stored when you save an email as a document. This means that the to, from, cc, and bcc fields are not extracted and not available for searching. If you want that information you have to manually enter it, all of which takes a lot of time.

From a ROI perspective, this alone would likely pay for NetDocuments.

It takes at least 5-10 seconds more per email to save into Time Matters than NetDocuments. This results in lost time, and likely less email being saved when users get frustrated and give up. Once they give up, it means that your history of email is not complete, and that staff members’ Inboxes are clogged up, breeding inefficiency.

Complete v. Incomplete Information

As alluded to above, when you save an email in NetDocuments, the document type – Email – is automatically saved. The subject and all metadata – date and time the email was sent and received, the to, from, cc, and bcc information is all extracted and entered into NetDocuments. The metadata, the message and the attachments are all indexed and ready to be searched with a few seconds of the email being saved. You have a viewer that allows you to view the email without opening it, and you can “page through” your emails as you do in Outlook.

With Time Matters, very little to none of this happens. The subject is automatically entered. But you have to enter the document type, and the date entered into the system for searching is the date and time the data record was created in Time Matters, not the date and time of the email. The to, from, cc, and bcc information is not extracted and put into Time Matters for subsequent searching. The little metadata that is saved is searchable using one method in Time Matters, while the rest of the email and its attachments are searchable only if you have configured the Document Search function of Time Matters, and often is not available until the next day (the indexes are typically run at night).

From an ROI perspective, your searches in NetDocuments will be more accurate as Time Matters doesn’t store any of the relevant metadata – you can’t do a search of emails by who an email is to, from, cc, etc. Not being able to effectively search for your emails will result in incomplete searches, and a considerable waste of time.

Viewing Emails

Simply put, you can’t easily view emails in Time Matters when you save them as documents. With NetDocuments your ability to view your emails is very similar to what you experience in Outlook. In NetDocuments, you can have a listing of all the emails in a Case/Matter with a viewer to the right of the list. Using your mouse or the up and down arrows on your keyboard you can work your way through your emails viewing them in their entirety.

Time Matters does not provide an email viewer. You have to open an email, view it, close it, and then move to the next one. Open, close, move to the next one. In other words, something no one does. With the proprietary email, there is a way to view your emails, and walk through them. But again, we don’t recommend that.

From a ROI value perspective this either causes a great waste of time, or it means people can’t efficiently and effectively use the email that they save.

Conclusion

With NetDocuments, you can then use Outlook for your email, which provides a more professional look and feel. Should you need to extract your emails for whatever reason, what is a time-consuming and expensive job with the Time Matters EMS/DMS can be done much faster, easier, and will be far less expensive. Your staff will easily save minutes, if not hours, per day managing their email. And, because it is easier, they will actually save the email into a shared repository where it is accessible by those that need to read it. The entire email, including all metadata is available for easy searching and viewing.

NetDocuments and ndMail costs $60 per user per month. Just looking at the email component of the service, we are confident that you would save that much in the first day of each month for every user.

Filed Under: Document Management Software, Email Management, NetDocuments, NetDocuments, Practice Management Software, Time Matters

May 12, 2020 By Tom Rowe Leave a Comment

Ransomware Heads Up

I recently read an article by Sharon Nelson and John Simek, of Sensei Enterprises, Inc. Sharon and John are well known legal technology security experts. When Sharon and John say, “[in] light of the new threats, we believe law firms need to take ransomware much more seriously than they have in the past,” I believe them. You can read their article here.

We do not handle law firms’ firewalls, anti-virus, or backups. That isn’t our business. But, every law firm we work has to deal with all of the issues that affect the security of their data. Over the past 5 years, we’ve had at least a dozen, likely more, firms who have been hit by ransomware and have had to recover. Here are some of our observations:

  • Those that had virtualized servers (VM), which were backed up at least once a day, had the easiest times recovering. Simply strip the servers down to bare metal, and then reinstall the VMs. Most of those firms were up and running within a day, some within a few hours. If you aren’t setup using virtual servers, you should be. Contact your IT company and see what it would take to make this happen. If you are going to upgrade servers in the future, insist on VMs.
  • Those that had non-VM backups eventually recovered most of their data, but it took a lot longer, most often weeks instead of hours or days.
  • Those that didn’t have backups had to chose to pay the ransom. Both firms were successful in getting the documents back. One paid several thousand dollars, the other around $7,000. Payment was made in Bitcoin which took a while to obtain.
  • We had at least one client that lost all their data as they didn’t have a backup.

One option firms have to avoid ransomware is to host their data in the cloud. This can be done using SaaS applications like NetDocuments, Centerbase, Actionstep, Soluno, etc. Or you can use “desktop as a service” or DaaS providers, where premise-based software like Time Matters, PCLaw, and the like, are hosted in the Cloud and each user accesses a desktop environment to use the programs.

With respect to DaaS and ransomware, one purported advantage of this type of environment is that they handle all the security. Yet, we have had at least 3 firms using DaaS get hit by ransomware. 2 were down at least a week as the company restored the data, and the other never got their data back. Yeah, it was as terrible as it sounds.

The lesson for firms using DaaS or SaaS is that if you have data in the cloud, you should make sure it is safe and have some redundancy setup. For example, NetDocuments provides a service call ndMirror where all document are mirrored to a local drive. Actionstep provides a periodic SQL data dump to a local server. Time Matters users can set up SQLBackupAndFTP, an inexpensive program that easily backs up the Time Matters SQL database to a Dropbox or other Cloud repository. Anyone running SQLBackupAndFTP could have their Time Matters up and running within a day, if not within a few hours. We wrote an article about it a while ago.

Filed Under: Data Backup & Restore, SaaS, Uncategorized Tagged With: DaaS, ransomware, SaaS

October 27, 2017 By Tom Rowe 1 Comment

Outlook AddIn Disabled

I got a call from a new NetDocuments client the other day indicating that several people in the firm were losing their NetDocuments integration. This is caused by the AddIn for Outlook taking too long to load. Outlook 2013/2016 have a feature that disables such COM Add-ins. You need to make it so that it is always enabled.

Go to File > Show and Disabled COM Add-ins:

If it is missing, you will find the NetDocuments Outlook AddIn listed – in the screenshot below you see the AddIn, but it is enabled and working:


If it has been disabled, it will look something like this:

You wan to select Always enable this add-in and it should always show up, even if it is slow to load.

Filed Under: NetDocuments, NetDocuments

March 11, 2017 By Tom Rowe Leave a Comment

Buyer Beware – SaaS LPMS Reviews

This post was written in April 2016, and for some reason I don’t recall I decided not to post it. But, with ABA Techshow around the corner,  and because it remains as true today as then (perhaps even more so) I’ve decided to publish it. This is written from an April 2016 perspective.  Tom Rowe

A random Lawyerist tweet came across my feed the other day that caught my eye … a review of yet another cloud-based legal practice management system (LPMS) – Ciinch. I was intrigued because I’ve been in the legal practice management software business for over 20 years and I hadn’t heard of this system. I’m glad I read the article as it presents a great example, on a number of fronts, of why you have to be careful reading software reviews.

The first paragraph was interesting simply by how wrong it was …

Once, lawyers suffered from a dearth of specialized law practice management software, and if you were not at a firm large enough to get something custom-built, you limped along with Outlook or a clunky, old-school software package. However, the success of practice-management suites like Clio and MyCase have made it clear that lawyers are desperate for something to help them manage contacts, emails, documents, and billing in one package.

If, by “once” the author means before there were computers then I supposed she would be correct. But, for the past 25 years there has been anything other than a “dearth” of LPMS. For a quick history lesson from someone who was right in the middle of it as a consultant and a VP of one of the premise-based LPMS companies, the first such products were introduced in the late 80’s, and Time Matters, Amicus Attorney, and Abacus Law formed a “Big 3” in the 90’s that is quite similar to what is now referred to as the Big 3 in the SaaS world of LPMS (Clio, Rocket Matter, and MyCase). Practice Master, one of the better premise-based LPMS today, and West’s ProLaw became very competitive and highly used over the years. Throw in Legal Files, Perfect Practice, Perfect Law, LawBase, Needles, Prevail, Case Files, and Client Profiles, almost all of which are still marketed and have large user bases, and you’ve had a thriving LPMS industry for almost 30 years.

While it may be easy for people new to this industry to look back on those programs as “clunky and old-school” they were as cutting edge at the time as the SaaS based products are today. Moreover, they were truly innovative in their design and function, unlike today’s LPMS which haven’t added much in the way of substance, just the way the product is delivered to the end user. That’s not to say the new way of delivery is not a wonderful and awesome thing – it is. But, 99% of the core functionality of today’s leading SaaS LPMS was already developed and in use by the early 2000s. Although forced to market against the “old school” programs, the modern SaaS LPMS providers owe a great debt to the pioneers in his area like Bob Butler, Dan Berlin, Judd Kessler, and Ron Collins, who truly defined what LPMS was then and still is now today.

This is important, not purely for clarifying history, but because of what we can learn from it. I’ve enjoyed the excitement that the cloud-based LPMS have brought to this area of legal technology. As the article accurately states, as more and more SaaS LPMS are introduced it has become an “increasingly crowded field.” But, having a bunch of new programs entering the market isn’t new … the same thing happened from about 1998 – 2003. When the first Big 3 were taking the legal technology world by storm you couldn’t go to a tech show where one of the highlights of the show was a shootout between the Big 3. Because of the excitement of the efficiencies and profitability these products generated, dozens of other companies jumped in to take advantage of the technological advances of the time. That’s the way markets work. Not surprisingly, many of these companies failed. Those of us around back then can recall that every time we would go to ABA Techshow or Legal Tech New York (which used to be more for smaller and medium firms) there would be any number of new premise-based LPMS touting all the great things they did, only to be gone within a few months or a year. Sound familiar? It seems that at every ABA Techshow the past few years there have been numerous new SaaS LPMS popping up. Like their premise-based precursors, many of those will fail because there is only so much room for a product that does pretty much the same thing LPMS has been doing for the past 25+ years.

Which brings me to the substantive part of the review. The author accurately states that Ciinch is missing numerous core features that a SaaS (or any type) of LPMS should have:

  • No data import (seriously?).
  • No integrated email or Outlook integration (“If you do heavy-duty task, calendar, and document management via your Outlook account currently, as many lawyers do, Ciinch will make you feel like you are doubling up on your work.”)
  • No secure client portal, one of the main advantages of SaaS LPMS.

She then bends over backward to try and give some reason why the program might be a “solid choice.” This makes no sense as everything she states Ciinch does can already be gotten from any of the other far more mature and reputable SaaS LPMS. Had I written the review, based on her observations, I would have concluded that “because the program doesn’t bring anything new to the table, is missing core functionality that many other reputable products already have and have had for years, you should steer clear and go with proven programs like Clio, ActionStep, and others that have far more functionality. Based on history it is likely this program won’t be around for long.”

To bring the story full circle, the Lawyerist review was written in October of 2015 and I am writing this 6 months later in April 2016. Ciinch’s last tweet was in September 2015, and their last PRWeb announcement about how great it is was in July 2015. Their website, at least when I wrote this, is no longer functioning. Google searches for the company and it’s founder reveal no activity since September 2015. I think it is safe to say that rather than a “solid choice,” Ciinch was like many of the new SaaS LPMS that are springing up … they look good because good looking web based programming at a very shallow level is very easy to do today, but really don’t bring much new to the table that the more mature products already offer. I believe the lesson one should take from this is to be wary of puff piece reviews that don’t really dig into a product, and be wary of new LPMS that just popped up. Unless they bring significant substantive innovation to the LPMS model, you are way better off going with an established player in the market.

A final note … I was surprised at how bad this review was. I’ve not been on the site for a while, but my experience has been that Lawerist is a good resource for solo and smaller law firms with a lot of valuable content with valuable and active dialog among the lawyers and legal staff that frequent it. Sam Glover, owner of the Lawyerist, sets a snarky tone for the site and is far more likely to be overly critical of LPMS software than he is to write a puff piece on software that was obviously deficient. So, while I was surprised, it goes to show you have to always be careful when you read software reviews.

Filed Under: Practice Management Software, SaaS

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • …
  • 6
  • Next Page »

Blog Categories

  • Announcements (2)
  • Awards (7)
  • Consumer Bankruptcy (3)
  • Data Backup & Restore (2)
  • Document Management Software (9)
    • NetDocuments (8)
  • Email Management (7)
    • NetDocuments (5)
  • Metrics (1)
  • News (2)
  • Paperless Office (1)
  • Practice Management Software (16)
    • ActionStep (3)
    • Time Matters (7)
  • Reporting (1)
  • SaaS (2)
  • Scanning (1)
  • Social Media (2)
    • Twitter (2)
  • SQL (1)
  • Time & Billing (1)
  • Uncategorized (2)
  • Windows 10 (2)

Blog Post Tags

ActionStep Analytics BKexpress Clio DaaS Document Management Email Overload Metrics MyCase ndOffice ransomware Reporting SaaS SimplyFile Time & Billing Time Matters

Blog Archives

  • November 2020 (1)
  • July 2020 (1)
  • May 2020 (1)
  • October 2017 (1)
  • April 2017 (1)
  • March 2017 (2)
  • January 2017 (1)
  • August 2016 (2)
  • April 2016 (1)
  • January 2016 (1)
  • August 2015 (1)
  • July 2015 (2)
  • June 2015 (1)
  • May 2015 (3)
  • April 2015 (4)
  • March 2015 (5)
  • February 2015 (1)
  • June 2014 (1)
  • March 2014 (1)
  • October 2013 (1)
  • January 2013 (1)
  • December 2012 (1)
  • September 2010 (1)
  • October 2009 (1)
  • June 2005 (1)
  • June 2004 (1)

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Get social … follow & like us!

Facebook
Twitter
Visit Us
Follow Me

Login

Resources

  • Tips & Hints
  • Videos
    • NetDocuments UI Changes Videos
  • Webinars

Contact Us

  • OTB Consulting
  • 166 Quade Drive
    Cary, North Carolina 27513
    USA
  • 919-677-1415
  • info@otb-consulting.com
  • Download vCard

Copyright © 2023 · All rights reserved - Out of the Box Developers, LLC · Log in