Does It Compute?

What Is the Future for Time Matters and PCLaw?

So what does the future hold for Time Matters and PCLaw (and other acquired products, but those are the ones I am most familiar with). Most importantly, should you upgrade to the most recent version?

To cut to the chase, yes, you should upgrade to TM Version 9 and PCLaw 9, especially if you are on a version previous to version 8. Previously, I have encouraged clients to adopt an “every other version” strategy for Time Matters (unless there was some specific feature they particularly needed), so why the change? (Note that since PCLaw upgrades are free with maintenance, this is a somewhat different situation.) My reasoning on this is a bit lengthy.

First, it is clear that LexisNexis is committed to pushing products into a Software as a Service model - Web-based subscription. In fact, sales reps are already pressuring potential buyers to buy into the LN Total Practice Advantage - which is TM plus a variety of Lexis research options. If you currently use LexisNexis for research, this may make sense. Otherwise, it is just going to cost you a fair amount extra. Currently, if you end a subscription, you wind up with a network version of the latest release of Time Matters, so your data is intact and usable (but that option could well change). I won’t go into the merits of SaaS, but there are a lot of issues to be considered: see my blog of April 4.  http://doesitcompute.typepad.com/heckman/2008/04/negotiating-a-s.html

Logically, this means that sooner or later, the various LN products will be available primarily, if not exclusively, on a subscription basis. One possible scenario for this is that LN will raise the price of the standalone product and offer more or less deep discounts for the SaaS version. Apparently this is already happening to some extent.

This trend is reinforced by the fact that LexisNexis seems to be focusing its efforts internationally rather than in the U.S.  Thus the new Senior Vice President of its Global Practice Management Solutions division (of which TM and PCLaw are a part), Kate Holden, is headquartered in England, not Dayton. This appointment is so new that her bio is not even listed yet on the Lexis Executive Bios page.

Recent acquisitions include (at least) the Locus practice management system in Australia, and Axxia and Visualfiles in England. See also the acquisition of the LAWbase practice management program in New Zealand, announced last week. Note that all these acquisitions involve practice/case management programs.

The international focus of LexisNexis is part of the answer to the argument: “Lexis would be crazy to alienate its customer base by going the SaaS route exclusively.” The fact is that Lexis’s actions since the acquisition of TM and PCLaw have already significantly alienated its customer base: overall customer satisfaction has noticeably decreased, and Lexis may find it easier to buy into less competitive markets than to fix its offerings in the highly competitive U.S. market.

The major push to SaaS is likely to happen sometime within the next 3 years or so. It is likely that there will be a Time Matters 10 in 2009, but it quite unclear whether there will be a TM 11 around 2011, and I would be rather surprised to see a version 12.  For LexisNexis one advantage of the SaaS model is that they do not have release new whole releases, they can simply update the software.

LN is also likely to consolidate overlapping products, starting with Billing Matters and PCLaw, possibly by refusing to sell new standalone versions of Billing Matters, and then sunsetting it as the versions of TM sunset and are no longer supported. Expect this to happen to Billing Matters within the next few months. More globally, they apparently plan to consolidate all the products - TM, Billing Matters, PCLaw, Juris, etc. into one monster, subscription-based product. How long this will take and how well it will work is anybody’s guess (don’t hold your breath or bet money on it). While the idea of putting all products into the same SQL-based code base sounds rational and attractive, implementation is likely to be extremely difficult (read: buggy).

So why upgrade?  Many firms have so much invested in Time Matters (still arguably the best program of its type on the market) that switching is not really an option. LexisNexis (and many other companies) typically support 2 versions back from the current version. Thus the current version is 9, so versions 7 and 8 of TM and PCLaw are supported, but not version 6. Version 9 will continue to be supported through version 11 of these products. Hopefully, in the next year or so some of the outstanding bugs will also be fixed.

Overall, then, it is likely that TM 9 will be the most stable version over the longest period of time. So it is worth upgrading, especially if you can take advantage of one of the sales that are offered periodically. Since PCLaw upgrades are included in the cost of maintenance, this is not as much of an issue. However, to the extent that it may be “fused” with TM, it would still be a good idea to bring it up to date as well.

Removing Unwanted Templates from PCLaw

PCLaw ships with a large number of bill templates. Many of these are for electronic billing in one LEDES format or another. Most firms do not use any of these and it is simply an annoyance to have to scroll through them all the time.  Fortunately, there is a simple lo-tech solution.

Using Windows explorer, go into the PCLaw program directory on the server, then to the Data | Statdata folder.  Create a new subfolder called “unused bill templates” or some such. If you then click on the “Type” column in the Statdata folder, it will sort your files by type. PCLaw bill templates all have an *.rbf extension. You can then select and move the *.rbf files that you are not using to the “unused” folder. You might want to be conservative and keep many of the basic templates - Detail, Sdetail, Generic, Interest, etc. in the event you need them. If you move one you need by mistake you can always move it back.

A similar strategy works for other templates that you may not use - cost recovery (*.crl format) for example, or custom tabs (*.ctl format).

The only drawback to this scheme is that it requires ongoing maintenance, since every time you update PCLaw to a new build, it will repopulate all the templates and you have to do it over again.

Interest and Taxes in PCLaw

Charging Interest and Taxes in PCLaw is a two-step process.  First, you have to set up the program overall to charge them. This will set defaults going forward (but not for previous clients). This is done under System Settings | Past Due or System Settings | Interest.

Second, for past clients, or if there is any change, you have to set the charges manually for each client. There are a number of reasons why this process is not further automated.

First, you may not want to change interest for all clients, just for certain ones with a history of not paying promptly. Secondly, the applicable tax can be different in different jurisdictions (counties, states, etc.).

In the Matter Manager, under the Billing tab, select the appropriate options.

Acquire, Merge, Destroy - Now Comes the Destroy Part

PCLaw used to have one of the best tech support departments of any software company. Wait times were generally under 1 minute (except at year end), and support was very good.  Now, support is being moved from Toronto to Dayton and first level support is staffed by friendly – and completely inexperienced – midwesteners. But at least at the first sign of a non-trivial question, they would escalate to second level support in Toronto.

But now it seems that the second level support in Toronto is being dismissed en masse (presumably so LexisNexis won’t have to pay Canadian severance packages) and then only 8 or 10 are being rehired. So in essence, LexisNexis is destroying what used to be one of the best support operations in the business (plus, it was a profit center for PCLaw). And the remaining support people are not exactly going to have a warm and fuzzy feeling about job security. Even for Lexis, this seems like a completely irrational move.

At NY LegalTech in February, a number of people remarked that every time Lexis acquires another product it is more money in the pocket of the companies that have remained independent. In this case, Amicus Attorney (also located in Toronto) will have a great opportunity to pick up some experienced technical support people. Meanwhile, PCLaw support will continue to deteriorate.

PCLaw -- Great Responsiveness

Working together with another consultant, I recently had occasion to identify a bug in the PCLaw Trust to General Transfer function.  It turned out that in PCLaw v. 9, if you wanted to manually edit the automatic transfer routine, and you were transferring more than $1,000, you could not edit the amount properly.

What is noteworthy, however, that within the space of slightly over two weeks, PCLaw had fixed the issue and a new build was available (9.10d). Leaving aside the question that this sort of bug in a fundamental feature should not have existed in the first place, this kind of responsiveness is one reason why PCLaw has the great reputation it does.

Cost of PCLaw - Then and Now

Several people have challenged my assertion that the price changes in PCLaw since the Lexis acquisition were “pure profit” for Lexis. Well, perhaps not “pure,” but lets take a look.  When PCLaw was acquired in spring of 2005, pricing was as follows:

PCLaw:    $250 per user up to 10 users
PCLaw Pro:    $2500 for 10 users (i.e., $250 per user)
PCLawPro SQL was available for $1,000 extra.

Support was $150/year up to 5 users and $300 for 6-10 users. After that it was $60/user for PCLawPro, and $100/user for the SQL version.

Today, the pricing is as follows:
PCLaw:    $400 for first user, $300/user thereafter.
PCLaw Pro    $4,000 for 10 users and $400/user thereafter
    (SQL only)

PCLaw Support     $250 for first user; $50/user thereafter
PCLaw Pro Support    $100 per user, 10 user minimum.
(Note that Lexis tries to make this more palatable by offering a 15% discount for the first year support).

So, for a 5-user firm on PCLaw, the price difference is $1400 vs $2050 or a 46% increase. For a 10-user firm on PCLaw Pro, the price difference is $3100 vs. $5,000, or a 61% increase. Lexis justifies this by saying that it is now including some utilities (in particular cost recovery) that were previously charged for. This is true, but it depends on whether you need the utilities or not: if not you are paying extra for nothing. Further, even though in relation to prevailing market prices, PCLaw was underpriced at the time of acquisition, it was still profitable.  So if you jack up prices for an already profitable product, the result is ...

On the other hand PCLaw is still the best product of its type out there, so it is well worth the added cost.

The Favorites Screen in PCLaw

PCLaw allows you to populate the “Favorites” screen by selecting the icons for your most commonly used functions.  If you do billing, you can create icons for pre-bills, bills, recreate (i.e., reprint) bills, and so on. If you do accounting, you can select accounting features.

If you turn off the “help” panel (right-click on the screen and uncheck “Show Help Panel”), you can have up to 15 icons in the new screen and 10 buttons if you prefer the old screen (which many long-time PCLaw users do).

To add a button, simply click on “Favorites” and then in the main screen right-click and select “Add Button.”  Select the button you wish to add. You can also manipulate other aspects of this screen by right-clicking.

A word of caution. The buttons appear on the screen in the order they are selected. You cannot move them around once they are there. Therefore, some thought is required so that you group similar icons together (all the billing icons, for example).

PCLaw Links to Other Programs

I recently ran into the same issue at two clients that were linking to PCLaw (one was Time Matters, the other was Amicus Attorney). The issue was that time for one specific file simply would not transfer to PCLaw. The matters appeared to be linked properly, but time simply would not transfer.

It turned out that in both cases the cause was the same: a user had tried to post time to a new matter before it had been created in PCLaw.  (Saying: “you would think that if things were set up properly this could not happen because the matter would be created in both programs simultaneously” violates one of Heckman’s Laws, namely that any time you start a sentence concerning a computer issue with “you would think that...” you know you are in deep trouble).

It would appear that when the time entry was first rejected it was somehow “marked” so that it would NEVER transfer. In Time Matters, we had to delete all the time entries and recreate them; then they would transfer. In Amicus, we had to de-activate the matter, create a new one and transfer the time to the new matter, then it would transfer.

Bizarre, but true.

Numbering Invoices by Year in PCLaw

Some firms may want to number their invoices by year in PCLaw. With some limitations, this is possible.

At the beginning of the year, create your first invoice. In the “invoice number” field, type in the invoice number you wish to start with, such as 080001. PCLaw will ask if you wish to use this as a starting number for subsequent invoices.  Say yes.

Note that there are some limitations: you only have 6 characters and you cannot use non-numeric characters. So 2008-001 will not work, but 080001 will work.

PCLaw - Time Matters Link

The link between PCLaw and Time Matters works pretty well once all the categories are matched up - time is ported over to PCLaw seamlessly and it leaves PCLaw to do what it does well.

One major problem, however, is that the Time Matters matter reference field is hard coded to be drawn from the PCLaw description field, memo field or both.  Since many firms use the PCLaw description field as the Re: line in their bills, it frequently is not the most efficient matter reference (i.e., how matters are sorted and alphabetized) in Time Matters. There is no equivalent of the Amicus Attorney “Short File Name,” which is extremely efficient.

The obvious solution is to have a matching screen in Time Matters, equivalent to what they have for Outlook or other integration procedures, that would allow you to link specific fields rather than having it hard coded with a limited number of choices. However, they have resisted implementing this elegant solution for a number of years.

A simple workable alternative is to enter the TM Matter reference as the PCLaw description field (which is one of the ways that PCLaw can sort its data anyway)  and then use a PCLaw Custom Tab to enter the information that will actually be produced on the Re: line of the bill. This solution gives you the best of both worlds: an easy to use Matter Description and a more formal Re: line for your bills.