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You are here: Home / Archives for Practice Management Software / Time Matters

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

March 4, 2017 By Tom Rowe 1 Comment

Configuring ScanSnap for use with a DMS

We support NetDocuments and the Time Matters internal Document Management Systems (DMS). Both systems let you save Acrobat files using buttons or links in Acrobat to pop up a document profile form.

Fujitsu’s ScanSnap desktop scanners are by far the most used scanner in the legal space. We often have to address the problem that when the ScanSnap software gets installed the default settings are not friendly to the DMS we support. The default settings bring up the ScanSnap management tool, adding a layer of complexity not needed. What you want to happen is for a scanned document to be automatically named (the DMS will ultimately name it, so you don’t care what that name is) and then pop it up in Acrobat. You can then use the DMS buttons and links to save it into NetDocuments or Time Matters.

To configure your ScanSnap for this use case do the following:

Right click on the ScanSnap button in the Task Tray, and select Scan Button Settings…

When you the settings dialog first comes up, Use Quick Menu will be checked. Uncheck this checkbox.

Press the Detail button to see the rest of the settings that you couldn’t see on the Quick Menu.

Under Application, select Adobe Acrobat:

Under the Save tab, select the folder where you want the documents to be scanned to. This is a temporary holding folder as the documents will be saved in the cloud in your NetDocuments repository, or saved and moved to your shared folders in Time Matters.

When you press Apply and then scan, your scans will come up directly in Adobe Acrobat.

 

Filed Under: Document Management Software, NetDocuments, Paperless Office, Scanning, Time Matters

January 19, 2017 By Tom Rowe Leave a Comment

Downloaded a PDF and can’t locate the Time Matters DMS controls

The Problem

My clients call me all the time with this problem:

I download PDF files from the court/ECF/whatever source and when I go to use the Time Matters DMS controls (TM Save), they are not there. Why can’t I save the PDF’s into Time Matters?

The problem is that newer versions of Internet Explorer and Chrome serve as a PDF viewer. When you download PDFs they are downloaded and opened in the browser instead of in Acrobat. While this is a very nice feature, it causes a problem when you don’t have access to the full features of Acrobat including the document management system (DMS) controls that Time Matters installed.

How to Resolve

To resolve this problem, you have to turn the browser PDF viewer feature off.

How to turn it off in Chrome and Firefox.

Here is how you do it in Internet Explorer:  Step 1 in Acrobat, and then Step 2 in Internet Explorer.

Filed Under: Practice Management Software, Time Matters

April 19, 2016 By Tom Rowe Leave a Comment

Saving Non-Standard Files in the Time Matters DMS – Email Yourself

The Time Matters DMS has integrations with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, WordPerfect, Outlook, and Acrobat. Basically, when you have one of these types of documents open you press a TM Save (or TM Connect) button and you are provided a Document Form to complete. Once completed, the document/email is saved to the appropriate place in your document store. It’s really simple and easy to use, and keeps you from having to drill down into a hierarchical folder structure to save documents.

But, what do you do when you get a non-standard document like a WAV, AVI, JPG, TXT, HTM, XML, or other document for which there isn’t a Time Matters integration? Per LexisNexis help, you should place it a shared folder and then right click on it and select “Send to” and then “Time Matters.” When you do this for one or more documents, you get the “Create Document Profile Records” dialog that let’s you specify how you want the Time Matters Document record to be completed.

LN_help

The main problem with this method is that you have drill into the hierarchical folder structure to put the document in the correct place, or just have a folder into which you drop these types of files. When you use the TM Save functionality, Time Matters saves a copy of the document you want to save in the exact location where it belongs.

A better way for Time Matters and Outlook users – presumably a large percentage of Time Matters users – is to drag and drop the document(s) into an Outlook email and send it you yourself. This is easily done, and easier than the LN recommended way. Once you get the email – in a second or two at most – you have all the TM Save/Connect tools within the TM-Outlook integration to save the documents as you normally do. Once saved, simply delete the email.

A final point – most of these types on non-standard documents will probably get emailed to you anyway. Better to save from the email than save it to a shared folder and then “Send to Time Matters.”

Filed Under: Document Management Software, Practice Management Software, Time Matters Tagged With: Document Management, Time Matters

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