Empower your business with personal contact management in legal agreements

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good afternoon and welcome to everyone joining us for today's PC law webinar presented by Debbie Schaeffer's CPA since 2005 debbie has trained her clients on a variety of products including PC law antimatter's she has worked extensively with law firms giving her unique perspective of knowing both sides of the bill and matter debbie has also earned a reputation for quality service and comprehensive answers to complex business critical questions my name is Mackenzie Bourne and I'm a client experience manager at PC law Time Matters and I'll be your host for today's webinar presentation this PC law webinar presentation is designed to give you more insight into the capabilities of PC law and all-in-one billing accounting and matter management's solution this webinar presentation is complementary to all of our attendees Debbie will first go through her prepared presentation and then we will at the end of this webinar and with a Q&A session if you have any questions Pete please feel free to ask them via the questions pane located on your webinar control panel all of our attendees will be in listen-only mode for the duration of this presentation Debbie at this time I'll turn the webinar over to you thank you so much Mackenzie I appreciate that you made me a lot younger than I am which is just fine but I've actually been doing this since 1985 so a little bit longer than 2005 not that it's relevant the only point that makes it relevant is that I've worked with hundreds of law firms over the years and I am what's called a certified independent consultant with PC law Time Matters but I do represent other products as well and I work with law firms to help them identify what solution they should use and what's best for their environment so given that premise what I would like to cover today is I'd like to cover you know a little bit about Who I am the components of a legal office system before I can tell you why PC law is good I need to tell you what you need to look for when you look at software how you determine what's right for your firm and then I'll tell you why I think PC law is really a very good solution so Who am I why should you even listen to me I have 35 years of experience I happened to be an accountant as I said I've worked with hundreds of law firms and I've spent hundreds of hours evaluating and learning solutions so one of the things that's very imperative for my job is that I'm always up to date and I'm always know what's going on because I can't become stale new products are introduced constantly and I must learn all those products to determine whether they are a potential solution for my firms or not my clients so I am always learning new products I'm always keeping up-to-date on the environment so what are the components of a good legal office solution when you say that you're ready to buy new software for your law firm you really want to identify what you're looking for because there are lots of products in the marketplace that offer lots of different kinds of solutions so obviously being a CPA what I typically will look for is a solution that contains accounting because to me that's imperative you need to have a solution that has accounting that will integrate with your time and your billing and obviously for a law firm you have to have trust accounting it is your requirement the Bar Association has rules for this safekeeping rules where you must keep good records about your trust account and who owns it and what happens with that money we also have components called practice management practice management is typically calendaring contact management document management conflict checking I think I've covered it all and you'll notice that those are also separate components now there are software that do just portions of practice management calendar and software dedicate a document management software that can also save your emails as well but there are also packages similar to PC law where you're able to get those practice management components in the same place that you're doing your billing and accounting so these are the basic components but what happens in each of these components so time entry I'm and billing is all about entering your time tracking your time and being able to bill not every law firm cares about time you do have personal injury firms contingent firms you might have firms that do flat fees often elder care is done that way and so entering their time is not as critical as those law firms that bill by top for time rather than flat fee however it is always my contention always my opinion that people should keep time even if they're in one of these flat fee firms because the advantage of doing that is it helps you further identify the profitability of these matters so I'm going to use elder care as an example typically when you do you know law firms who do estate planning will charge a flat fee for that estate planning now again not everybody's estate is the same whether we have a business whether you know we have lots of children who knows wherever our investments are it's going to change that estate planning so in those law firms determine that they're gonna build bill a flat fee for that work they should keep track of their time to determine whether their flat fees are in range of making a profit because yes you can look at a financial statement and yes you can see that you made money but do you know how many files were actually winners how many files actually made money versus did you lose money and if you're charging twenty five hundred let's say on every single estate planning matter but it turns out that it's taking you 20 hours to do that work you're not making money on those or your actual billing rate is quite low you're maybe shortchanging yourself so even for those flat fee matters I do believe that time entry is something that's very important to be considered and that I the objective of time entry is to make it easy to make it quick because you're keeping track of your time and how do you make money if you work for clients if it takes you a long time to keep track of your time worked then you're taking away from the time that you could be changed charging to a client so again if you're doing electronic billing then you have to have required fields you want the sort of checks going on at the time of time entry remote time entry from an iPhone from a portable device not sitting at your computer could be important then when we look at billing we want to take a look at what's important in our billing so there are things that are very very important number one how do the pre bills go how are you going to be able to deliver your invoices do you want to do it electronically through email or do you want to print them and mail them can you do flat fee billing can you build by the hour can you segregate and say hey maybe when I get to a certain point of my time I'll give them a flat fee for the first 20 hours and then I'll charge by the hour are you able to put in different billing formats and again this is gonna be specific to your firm so when you're looking at solutions you want to make sure that you've identified what's required by your firm do you have to submit your bills to billing clearinghouses in a leads format and if you do that's a requirement how do you accept payments do you accept credit cards do you use a external program like law pay or do you just take checks and do you take EFT s you take wires you need to make sure that your system that you're considering is going to be able to take advantage of what you actually do in the firm accounting accounting is unique for lawyers there is no way for me to put that any differently it is you have to keep track of your trust fund which is by client it doesn't affect your financial statements but you have to have books and records that show all the receipts in all the checks you have to account for your client costs some firms will account for client costs as an asset and other firms where they recover those client costs in a short period of time will typically expense those costs that that would be offset by what they collected and then bank reconciliations you really have to be able to reconcile your bank accounts right inside your accounting system because your books and records for tax purposes should be presented in the cash method of accounting what that means is that income is only recognized once you receive it it is not recognized when you create the bill so in many of the legal accounting systems you still can get an accounts receivable report but that those figures don't are not reflected on your financial statements generalized accounting package like QuickBooks they are not meant to be for a professional industry they are meant for firms that buy and sell widgets QuickBooks has no idea about trust accounting if you need to do trust accounting in QuickBooks you have to setup a different company you have to setup a different bank it just does not work cleanly and QuickBooks is based on the accrual method of accounting which means as I said that accounts receivable and income is recognized at the time you actually create the bills so it is my opinion and I've done this for a long time tried to make QuickBooks work it is not the solution for accounting for lawyers I know accountants love QuickBooks because it's easy and it's what everybody uses but there isn't an accountant that I have not been able to work with on a legal accounting system because if I can give them the reports that that account needs it doesn't make a difference what system is producing those reports so in accounting what do what are the requirements I gave you some generalizations in the first screen but I want you to know that there are some things you should consider in an accounting system for a legal firm you may want multi Department reporting maybe by type of law maybe you've segregated your attorneys by type of law if you're a generalized practice maybe you want to do it by a location perhaps you may want to do it by partner there are in these law firms that are 20 or less oftentimes we accumulate all the cost by partner and so I need flexible GL formatting chart of accounts formatting where I can identify departments or cost centers or a practice area or an office I want my accounting system to contain accounts payable but that doesn't mean that those payables get recorded on the general ledger when I enter them in if you're working with an accounting system that's part of a legal package it's going to be smart enough to know when you put in a payable invoice it will not get posted to the general ledger until it is paid or unless that payable is a client cost in that case that client cost gets recorded immediately and then we can take a look on we can take a look how it's going to effect that file so in other words I want the client cost recorded a MIDI immediately on that case so that I can bill it and I may need to build that client cost before I can actually pay it so your accounting system should have some sort of payable system you could do 1099 s cheque printing and you'd like to have some sort of bank account integration so that perhaps you can bring transactions in from the bank account or at least bring in the bank statement a good accounting system has to have internal controls so when you're looking at software you want to make sure that there are controls put in that software that will minimize the errors for instance I don't want to be able to write a check from my trust account for a particular file unless that file has money so I don't want to spend money from the trust account if that client doesn't have money in the trust account and it's good when you have a system that actually checks that for you so that's what I mean by internal controls separation of duties it's always best if we could identify and have one person writing the checks receiving the money but a different person doing my bank reconciliations because obviously if I have the same person writing the checks receiving the money and doing the bank reconciliation I have no check over their work and I know that for small firms this is very difficult but if it can be accomplished it's a good thing trust account as I mentioned your accounting system has to include trust accounting trust accounting has very specific rules that must be followed for all lawyers so you want an accounting system that's going to be able to give you the reports that you need that's going to be able to give you the reconciliations that are required if you should get called by the Bar Association the next component to these legal systems is typically practice management there are plenty of practice management systems on the market that might have billing but no accounting and then they want you to link with something like QuickBooks again not my favorite solution because even though the billing and the all of the trust accounting might be done in your billing system when you have to link to an external accounting system there are no controls built in that ensure that you're recognizing all the money that you've received and all the money that you've spent on behalf of clients in order to recover those funds so even though many of these practice management systems will tell you oh yeah we've got this great link to QuickBooks well that's a great link but how are you ensuring that the two systems are balanced and reconciled and the other thing that I always say to people is the more times we touch a transaction the more times you have to enter it the more times for error so a good legal system a good legal office administration system is going to be something where you enter a transaction once and it affects all of the systems within it that need to be posted so in other words when I write a client cost or check for a client cost it needs to be posted to the file it means to be posted to my bank account and it needs to be posted to my general ledger and I want all of that to happen just as a result of entering that transaction once so these practice management systems really are about the practice of law how can we make it easier for you to practice law not necessarily account or accounting for the practice of law so the components of a good practice management system are going to be document management calendaring document generation maybe a client intake form conflict checking and maybe a CRM system so within all of this some of the legal accounting systems have these components some of them don't and this is something that you need to identify as to whether this is important for your firm or not and so when you look at these systems you may say hey look I use net Docs or I use world Docs or I as I manage I don't need that document management maybe my accounting system doesn't need to have it or the integration to it normally when you have a document management system like one of the ones I've mentioned there needs to be some sort of integration at least a pass matter information between the two components but again how you handle this this is just showing you what could be involved in practice management you're gonna look at all your solutions and you're gonna decide which is gonna give you the best bang for your buck basically so what is document management it's typically a structured approach to storing documents and retrieving documents typically it's by client by matter by type of law or by type of document and again you need to make that decision whether you need a document management system that is a standalone that integrates or you want it as part of your billing or legal office solution typically some of these all-in-ones include document management some don't and it the degree of the capabilities of the document management system vary based upon all of the different applications that you will look at a calendar I think a calendar should be in a nautical in an integrated legal office solution we want that calendar synchronized either with Outlook if you use Google it's gonna be more difficult because not that many people integrate with Google but there are some who do and you wanted to integrate perhaps with their mobile device so that if you're at court and you need to make an appointment you want to be able to see that calendar that's in your legal office application on your phone as well you'll have a firm calendar so that you can see all the time keepers or workers in your firm and then you may want to integrate with rules-based calendaring there are some excellent products that do rules-based calendaring some of the systems have it included in it if not you can sometimes add it law toolbox is a great solution for rules-based calendaring and they have an add-in that goes right into Outlook as well and also integrates with some of the law office automation products contact management or CRM keeping track of your leads keeping track of your customers managing those relationships is done through a contact management system it's a list of all the contacts that come through your firm not just your clients not just your vendors but opposing counsel opposing party if you're an elder care firm perhaps you're going to long-term care facilities or you're working with accountants or whomever it might be so it's good to keep track of people who you touch people who you talk to entering them into a contact management system somehow defining what type of contact it is because then you can pull those records and use those contacts in marketing campaigns in perhaps even holiday cards whatever it might be that you're doing to help bring more business into your firm you get a tremendous amount of potential contacts that could turn into clients and tracking them is the start to turning them into clients what sort of reports are important for you to better manage your firm for growth purposes as well as just practice purposes so yes it's always great to get a financial statement that's going to show you how much money you made but again I feel that it's very important to understand your profitability from a matter perspective as well as from a timekeeper perspective as you start to hire people in your firm I think it's very important to know whether those timekeepers are making enough money for your firm how productive are they are you having to write down their time because they take more time to do a task then you can build the client and that's important information for you to know so some of the reports that you want to be able to look at might be a collection report how is money coming in by responsible attorney maybe origination is important for you but also by fee credit lawyer who's working on it maybe by type of law maybe by a referral source how these cases are coming into your firm who's giving you all that business so again it's very important as you go through and you look at other systems and you look at the components of systems that you identify what's gonna be important for your firm rather than what they offer you so you have to create software requirements specifically for your firm so all of those components I told you about are the global world now you have to take that global world and you have to bring it down to your specific practice you have to prioritize what your needs are set a realistic budget it's not gonna be a hundred dollars to buy a package and you're gonna either determine that you're gonna convert your data from your current solution or not you're gonna start from scratch but you have to determine that you have to propose a date the best time always to convert is at the beginning of your fiscal year the beginning of a quarter the beginning of a month include your current pain points so when you're identifying what software you want to use make sure you identify what is difficult for you to do with your current solution create a wish list involve your staff because it's not just you it's many of the staff members who are working to make them feel part of this and then when you make that change they are definitely going to buy into it because they've been considered in picking that potential solution so as you look at your requirements there are certain things you want to think about you want to think about the number of your users the require T analytics your billing consideration how are you doing payroll how is that going to be brought into the system do you need to have credit card processing what is your growth when do you think you're gonna are you gonna stay at the same level an attorney who is 65 years old is gonna have a very different growth projection than someone who is 35 so you have to be honest and think of where you're going and what you want to do as you develop these requirements do you want an all-in-one solution so obviously that's what I think is best is it all-in-one solution but there are many people who do want separate packages that idea of having a true document management system that might give you a client portal for document collaboration might be something that you need and you can't use the in document management system in a legal office solution that contains billing and accounting you just may need more functionality but you have to be realistic about what it is that you need do you need to have the ability to take information from your matter files and create documents from that information and again that's important for you to identify and to determine for your firm because not every firm is going to be the same how do you bill how many trust accounts do you have you need that accounting do you need that rules-based calendaring and people in California use it much more than many other states in the country other states use it as well but California is the heaviest you need to know if that's something that you need and again as you look at these you're deciding whether I need one vendor or I need multiple vendors and that's difficult to identify and to know what's right again it's my opinion and this is me only me and I keep saying these are opinions that an all-in-one solution is the best I think an all-in-one solution with accounting billing trust accounting calendaring at a minimum contact management works very well because it gives you the tools you need to better control your system again my opinion these practice management systems that make you go to QuickBooks or zero I feel are not the best because of the lack of reconciliation because of the lack of identifying what it is that those systems you know you cannot balance the two systems together I think it's very difficult to do that and each transaction has to be entered twice and I find that not to be a great solution again my opinion so why PC law why do I sing PC laws an excellent solution number one it's been around since 1982 I think is the year or 83 so it is a tried and true solution there were 25,000 installs of PC law in the United States and Canada I don't know what the number is right now it is written by it was written by four people who graduated from college came home after they graduated and watched one of their aunts or mothers do legal accounting using a one write system I don't know how old you all are about a one write system was an accounting system where there was a long ledger sheet and you had a card for every single client and every time you wrote a check you had to stick the card on the ledger sheet so that when you write the check it would go through to the card and the ledger sheet there was like it's not xeroxing but whatever it was ink that would print so obviously everything was done manual at that time in 1982 we had two floppy disk drive computers things had come we've come a long way but anyway they wrote a package they started it had trust accounting billing and accounting that's how they started in 2007 they added the practice management features but PC law is a complete truly integrated all-in-one solution it has everything in it so what are the components of the legal office solution this was one of the first slides I showed you and so I'm gonna go through and I'm gonna tell you what PC wall can do for you with each of these components the first component is time entry they have added PC law time matters which is the name of the new company has added a product called PC log go PC log go allows you to enter time on a mobile device whether it be your phone whether it be an iPad so you do have remote time entry with PC law the timesheets on PC law are very simple to use they have help in every single field so if you don't know what to put into that field it you can double click it it'll give you choices it has it has built-in checking so that if you're going to produce a bill for a Leeds matter Leeds 1998 bills that you have to submit to billing clearinghouses it knows that it's going to need a particular ell code and an a code and once you identify the matter to be billed as such when you enter your time PC law is going to check for those fields at time entry rather than at billing so we don't have to have someone submit the bill get it rejected because the codes aren't there we set it up in PC loss of the base check those codes as those entries are being done there is an option to do quick time entry which means that if you want to do one entry at a time we have a screen to do that and then of course we have something built into PC law it's called a time entry advisor and what that will do is that we'll look at potential billable events perhaps a calendar entry a phone call a document saved an email saved and it will say hey you did these functions do you want to create a time entry as a result of doing that it's a way to sort of give you an idea and help so that you do not lose time on your files the other thing that PC law does that I think is so very important is it gives you the ability to track the changes made to time entries at the time of billing so if you have a brand-new associate and that associate enters five hours to do a task on a file and as you're reviewing the bills you realize that you can't charge five hours for that task I can only charge two it's just because he's a new lawyer or she's a new lawyer and so I don't want to disrupt the actual time that the lawyer worked I don't want to charge the client for that entry so what PC law allows you to do is it allows you to modify that time entry determine what you want to charge the client and then it creates a duplicate time entry it's called a time reduction entry and it is marked never bill so that you can keep track of everything that's going on on that file number one that's going to affect the profitability of the file but it's also going to affect the productivity of that time keeper so it's very important to be able to track those changes and get them in reports so that you can identify how effective your staff is how effective the matters the profitability and that's a feature that not every program has so it really is is something very that I think very very useful for law firms so that's basically how we enter time you're gonna have a time sheet there are timers on the timesheet which also help you keep track you know I used to use a Filofax that those of you who are old 'old will remember that it was such a big deal at the time I've been selling PC law for so many years and I never used it obviously I finally woke up one day and said why am i doing my bills by hand and I installed myself on PC law well when I used to keep track of my time by hand I was terribly short changing myself and once I started to use timers it was amazing how much more of my fees I was recovering because I was under estimating so those of you who do charge by the hour obviously the best way to track your time is as you do it those who go back at the end of the month and try to recreate what they've done are losing thousands of dollars on income there is no way that you can remember every time entry and if you're not tracking it in a in a in a chimp the other word if you're not tracking it right away you are losing your time I guarantee you all right billing so what do you need for billing and all of you are a little bit different because you all have different requirements but those of you who have to do that leads billing PC law has leads billing built into it all the codes are there all the leads formats are set up so that when you go and you generate a bill it creates a file that can just be uploaded to the billing Clearing House we need to have flexible billing arrangements PC law allows for that you can set up a matter as flat fee as hourly billed as monthly billed you determine how frequently you want to create those bills quarterly monthly you can even create user-defined frequencies so what many of my firms do is if they have some matters that need to be billed electronically they might create a user group for the electronic bills and build them all together some of my other firms which I've helped them with cash flow you know if you bill at the end of the month all your money comes in at once obviously not everybody pays you at the same time but to improve cash flow I've helped firms do billing throughout the month where you may choose to do a particular part of the alphabet at the beginning of the month or maybe a particular type of law at the beginning of the month and then to do billing halfway through the month so that your cycling hopefully the cash flow in your firm but again PC log gives you the ability to either create user groups or different billing frequencies and that's very important and their billing is very very flexible you can also determine whether you want to automatically transfer trust at the time of billing so if a client has money and trusts you create a bill if you designate on that particular file that you want to transfer trust funding at the time that bill is generated then you're able to do that at PC law what it does is it creates a bill it creates a trust check and it creates an operating receipt all in one and so you can choose to print that check at the end of billing and you can do one check for multiple files or you can just do an electronic transfer in the bank but obviously it's all gonna reconcile and there's no more functionality that you have to perform it's all done just as a result of doing the bills there is a pre bill function which allows you to look at the bills prior to finalizing them we also have the capability of doing past due notices so if someone does not have current charges but they owe you money we can send them a past due notice you can have as many build templates as you like in PC law they are you xored maintained there is something called a template editor so you could have a flat fee billing template you could have an hourly billed template you could have one template that shows the lawyers initials one template that shows the another one that might not again all up to you and that's one of the nice things about PC law is that you have so many templates that you can choose from we also have in PC law something called a settlement statement sometimes I know lawyers have to go to court and they have to reconstruct all the activity that's been performed on a file a settlement statement allows you to produce a list of all the fees disbursements payments trust transactions in a format that looks like a bill so it's nice to bring to court it looks good that's what a settlement statement is so again the billing and PC law is extremely comprehensive very flexible and there is not much it cannot do you do have rate categories for every single lawyer you can have an infinite number of rate categories and you can define that rate category on the matter itself and you can also have rate category overrides so maybe for a particular client or a particular matter you have special rates we can identify that in PC law we can also identify specific rates for what are called soft costs soft costs are photocopies postage something you don't write a check for but you actually charge the client for we also have the ability in PC law to create a percentage of the fees as an overhead recovery on the bills and you can call it whatever you want so again that's one of the things that makes PC law so special is that all these different billing arrangements and the flexibility within the billing so PC law has accounting it's part of the package it's there it's not a module it's not something you integrate with it's part of the package when you write a check it gets recorded to the general ledger when you receive money against a file it gets recorded to the general ledger that's all wonderful but also the general ledger and PC law is quite flexible allows you to define departments like I mentioned before maybe for multi office maybe for type of law maybe for partner so that you can keep track of the expenses for that department for that partner and you can even print a financial statement an income statement by Department there is also call centers that you can use PC law does have budgeting for the income statement you can actually enter a budget on your financial statement and print an income statement that would show you versus the budget or versus last year this month last year versus this month this year year-to-date last year versus year-to-date this year you can print twelve months of an income statement so that you can see how you're doing through the month all of your financial statements can be exported to excel so if your accountant wants everything in Excel fine I can give them everything in Excel excuse me I can also print a detail general ledger so accountants love that at the end of the year all of the standard reporting is including in general ledger a trial balance income statement balance sheet and as I said that detailed general ledger the other part of accounting is your cheque writing is your accounts payable so PC law comes with a complete accounts payable system where you have the ability to enter invoices from your customers as they are received and as that invoice is entered you can then print a payable report choose what you want to pay printer checks once a month once a week however you want to do it and it'll also accumulate information for 1099s which you can print directly from PC law there is the ability to have recurring entries so if you do the month the rent every month or you could set up a recurring entry for your payroll PC law does have the ability to integrate with ADP online payroll it is a $30 add-on a month doesn't matter how many employees you have how frequently you do payroll it is the exact same product that ADP sells as an online solution for a lot more money so I hope that that's still going to stay but it's it's a great solution for payroll as mentioned memorize print transactions you can print your checks one at a time you can print them as a batch you can use whatever check format you want stub check stub you can do check stub stub whatever you want it's based on a template that same template that I use to identify the billing formats I also use for the check formats as well so PC law accounting includes cheque reconciliation have to the this is their accounting system is based on the cash method of accounting when you print your financial reports you will not see accounts receivable but you can print accounts receivable report it's part of the reports that are included in piece you all you can set up a credit card account in PC law as a bank account and keep track of your credit cards and reconcile them every single month you can have up to 99 different operating accounts I'm glad I did bank reconciliation twice and you can have a separate entry you will notice that there is a separate entry for operating funds versus trust funds every operating bank transaction requires a general ledger and if it's a receipt PC law will automatically know what general Ledger's to use based upon the bill itself but if it's a check and it's for a client cost you will always use the same GL account but if it's for rent or telephone you're gonna put in a GL account for every operating transaction with trust it does not work that way PC law knows that the trust accounting only affects the trust bank account and then a contra liability called trust funds owed you don't need to remember debits and credits PC law takes care of it for you which is very nice it makes it very easy to use so with our trust accounting PC law does have those built into controls that I mentioned in the beginning of my webinar where it's not going to allow you to spend money for a matter if there is no money on that matter it does include check writing you can have up to 99 different bank accounts and of course there is bank reconciliation when it's spelled properly there is three-way tie out if you get audited by the bar association all of the reports that the bar are going to request our standard in PC law and when you print them out they are all going to balance in the 35 years that I've been doing this there is only one firm that got out of balance and we were able to fix it they had a corrupted transaction but you are never out of balance so you could get a list of who owns the money in the trust accounts by client I can get a detailed listing of my bank account in chronological order showing how the money was received how is it spent and the totals on those two reports are going to be identical by bank account there is a third report called a trust ledger the trust ledger shows for every single file that had money and trust the detailed transactions that gets posted to that file and then the fourth report even though it's called a three-way tie out there are four reports the fourth report is your bank reconciliation itself and on the bank reconciliation it's going to show the exact same journal balance that all of those other reports that I discussed show one other thing I want to mention about PC law though I recall that I did not put it on a slide is that when you use PC while the history of that matter is maintained forever it never goes away so when you create a bill those detail of those time entries or these trust transactions are marked with an invoice number but the detail stays on that client ledger so at any point you can print a complete client ledger showing you everything that's going on on that particular matter so no detail has ever purged or taken out of the system so that's pretty much all of my accounting portion of it let's talk about what PC law can do for practice management they do have a complete document management module that integrates with word or WordPerfect email management email manet emails can be stored in PC law directly from Outlook they have a calendar with a bi-directional sync to Outlook there is contact management and there is also complete conflict checking so the document management system is an add-in to Word or were perfect you get a little add-in toolbar when you click Save on the add-in Toolbar a box pops-up and allows you to save documents directly from that application to a specific matter you do not need to be logged into PC law to have this work but you do need to have PC law installed on your computer there is also something called precedence in PC law which I think is a fabulous feature a precedent is like a form letter it's a template and on that particular form you can identify what fields from the matter you want to pull into that document so if you are doing a medical records request and you have the contacts on that file of all the doctors you have all of your clients information you can have a precedent or a template call those fields directly from a particular matter and fill in that form for you so I think that this document generation is really a great feature of PC law not enough people use it but I think it's fabulous that you can do it the thing about the document management system is when you save a document to a file or a matter in PC law you can search that document in the context of the document so if I was doing a brief on a bicycle accident and I knew I had done it someplace else I could type the word bicycle in and it would show me every place that there's a document that has the word bicycle it will show me what matter the documents in what's the name of the document and I can open it from there so for a document management system that's included in time billing and accounting package it is quite robust and gives you a lot of functionality it does not do versioning which some people do require email management again another add-in to Outlook you can save emails directly from Outlook you can have Outlook prompt you when you save an email and ask if you want to have it saved to PC law that's up to you then emails are saved in their native format there are no changes made to them so if you need to pull up an email and bring it to court it's going to look exactly like the way you received it or you sent it and again those are stored by matter my clients who do use this will delete the email from Outlook because now it's in PC law and it's stored under that matter complete calendar and PC law you can look at the calendar day week month you can have each time keeper have a different color so if you're looking at the calendar for the firm you can determine whose appointments you're looking at we have the ability to create what PC law calls ticklers it's a template of two dues or appointments that are repetitive function so for instance if I was doing in a state matter I know that after the date of death I have to pick I have to get an inventory of the assets I have to get the death certificate I have to go to do something at you know whatever it might be I'm not a lawyer clearly but there are certain tasks that have to be performed so you could create a template of those tasks when you go to court you know that you have a court date before you go to court you have to prepare you may have to depose someone whatever it might be you can create a specific set of tasks put in a file number and PC law will create all those events for you based on the criteria that you put in that template or that tickler template you can view your appointments by matter so in this there is something called matter manager you can see all of the appointments for that particular file and you can turn any appointment into a time entry you can mark your time entry completed an appointment completed so you do get a history of everything that you've done on that case we have a complete contact management system by default there's a contact created for every single client and vendor and then you can actually create additional contacts on a particular file by entering additional contact records when a contact is added to a file you tell PC law role that person plays in the file so that anybody looking at that particular file can easily find all the phone numbers all the emails of anybody who's working on that case you can also type your contacts so for instance I could have a type called banker or accountant or even holiday card and then I'm able to pull lists from my contact management in a CSV format in an Excel format and I can determine which contacts I want so here I have this whole list of all these people I can use this for marketing because I have all these accountants I have all these bankers based upon the type of law that you're performing you can pull these contacts out for that purpose complete conflict checking in PC law you can put in one name multiple names it checks every single record if you've written a check to that person if you've received money if their name is mentioned at a time entry if they're a client if they're opposing party it's gonna look at all of those tables and it's gonna give you a complete report of where there could be a potential conflict that report can be saved as a PDF on the file or you can send it to whomever needs to look at it to determine whether there is truly a contact a conflict or not reporting this is so very important so we've talked about all the functionality in the program but you want to make sure that you're gonna get all the reports that you need and PC law has lots of reports you're gonna be able to get bank reports not just from the bank reconciliation but you can print a banking journal for both your operating in general for both operating and trust you can get billing reports how much did you build billing by responsible attorney by originating attorney by fee credit productivity reports how much time are my lawyers spending on the cases are you can identify whether it is a non billable time entry like CLE credits vacation you can keep track of all of that we have collection reports which show you money received by feet credit lawyer responsible lawyer originating lawyer so every law firm has different compensation policies and using these collection reports and dumping them into Excel where you have a standard Excel format that's going to do all the calculations for compensation is perfect and we have perfect reports to do that as I mentioned all of the general ledger reports we have a whip report a trust listing a trust ledger you can just get a list of all your matters I can even give you a list of matters by opening date so I can see how many matters were opened or closed during a specific period of time maybe by type of law maybe by responsible attorney almost every report in PC law can be dumped to excel every report can be turned into a PDF there is a report that shows for every single lawyer how much time they work how much has been billed how much has been collected what's been written off how much of their time had to be adjusted at billing and I can get a very similar report for a matter so I can get and see I how many hours I worked on a matter versus what I build and I could see the realized rate on that matter and the profitability on that matter so there are all sorts of productivity and profitability reports that you can print from PC law these are all of the things that I think make PC law so special as you choose whatever solution you're gonna choose to change to realize that it's going to be disruptive a change to a new billing package or accounting package is disruptive be certain that there is security in your package PC law has security so that each user gets assigned their own user ID and password and then you determine what functions within PC law each user can use that's what I mean about security make sure you have sensible security pop policies does that mean that only associates can see their own time and I don't necessarily want them looking at another associates time to sort of compare their work you know people get crazy we all know so again security policy should be really considered and then backups PC law is an on-premise solution which means that it needs to be backed up in case your server crashes if you put it on a cloud you better make sure that your cloud provider is doing backups and you'll want to know what their backup schedule is and you want to verify your backups whatever you use for a backup verify it I cannot tell you how many times over the course of my working years people have ensured me that they have backups they crash something happens and they haven't had a backup for two months so I've seen firms with a hundred lawyers have to go and recreate data for a week two weeks whereas I've seen individual firms have to recreate it for a month or two say you want that insurance you want to make sure those backups are working and that you're doing them all the time and my last piece of advice stay friends with who your software vendor what does that mean prescribe to the annual maintenance so that you're going to get the current versions if they make enhancements to the product you want them you want to know what they're doing as a company you want to get their tech support you want to work with independent consultants like myself to help you understand the products them and customize them to your needs but you also want to know what your software vendor is doing so I hope that I've given you enough information to show you what should be included in a legal office automation product what PC law can offer for you and why I think it's an excellent solution if there are any questions or concerns I'm happy to answer them alright Thank You Debbie for that very informative PC law presentation great job at this time I'm going to turn to the questions pane and ask you any questions that may have come through during our webinar presentation today I do have a few first question coming in from mark it really is more of a general question about PC lot says is peace through a suitable solution for a larger firm 50 attorneys who must use a standalone document system like I manage file cite or is this software more designed for the smaller law firm so again this is an opinion piece I believe PC law can be used in any size firm I've had firms with a hundred attorneys 57 attorneys 20 attorneys two attorneys water I've worked with all sized firms yes PC law can integrate with I managed if you use the sequel version you can automatically have the math Stables share with I manage I have that happening in many of my locations they integrate with I manage er world Docs or net Docs so yes I believe it is a potential solution what's most important is that it's gonna give you the reporting that you need for a firm that size in order to best manage the practice but I see no reason why not why it cannot use you cannot use it in that size there was at one point when Lexus was running owned the software that they had said that any firm of 20 or more should not use PC law that was an arbitrary number I don't believe it to be true so there again an opinion from me thanks Allah thank you so much for that Debbie and it looks like the other question was very similar to it so I think you've answered that both questions that are in the paint I would say let's give it maybe a minute we're about five minutes before the new hour let's give it a minute for anybody else that wants to possibly ask the question and in about a minute we'll wrap it up this them any attendee currently looking at Debbie's slide please make sure to make a note of her contact information she is always available to any of our PC law customers but she's a great partner for us so please take note of her information if need be and Debbie I do have one question that did come in I have a question from Michael and he's asking is there any way to give a demo if there is a way to get a demo of this program I'd like to get one yes absolutely there is a way to get a demo you are more than welcome to call myself or one of the sales reps at and I guess Matthew can give that information and typically the sales reps have someone like myself or myself do the demos but yes if you would like to contact me directly I'd be very happy to do a demo of the software perfect thank you for that and Michael I'll get you Debbie's information since we have yours we'll get that courier in for me Shinae not all so I'll give it to our our sales team that's great any other questions before we close out please feel free to put them in the pain though all right I don't see anybody else typing at this time so let's conclude this does conclude our webinar today and I'd like to thank Debbie once again for expert advice on PC law and to all our attendees for taking the time out of your busy day to join us if you would like more information on please see law please call us at eight six six four four eight five eight seven one that's eight six six four four eight five eight seven one I hope everyone has a great weekend thank you so much for joining bye-bye