Does It Compute?

Practice Master and Worldox

I recently had occasion to install the Practice Master link to Worldox and was rather impressed.  The link is available if Worldox is running and is very simple to set up. It must, however, be installed on every PC, even if it looks like it was already installed when you go to a particular PC. 

Practice Master exports the client/master list which can then be imported to Worldox when setting up the link and after that automatically creates a Worldox entry when a new entry is created in PM. In addition, since Worldox uses a text lookup for files (which means you have to have padded zeros for the files to sort properly – e.g., 000123), and PM uses a numeric lookup, it asks if you want to insert padded zeros to match Worldox correctly. You should set the Worldox Client/Matter fields to match the number of characters in PM.

It is similar to other links (Time Matters, Amicus) in that the “Quick Click” item for “View Worldox documents” is actually a lookup for a specific client/matter. That is, you get all the files without being able to add sort items such as document type. However, PM also includes a Worldox search screen that allows additional search criteria so that you can do a more exact search without leaving Practice Master. None of the other programs offer this option.

What Should I Do? Upgrade to TM 10?

I am being asked the following question with increasing frequency: “I am running a previous version of Time Matters (usually 8 or earlier). Given the state of LexisNexis and the uncertain future of Time Matters, what should I do? Should I think about switching?”

Obviously there are a lot of things to consider, but here are some general parameters.

Time Matters 10 is essentially a service release which fixes a large number of bugs and is generally more stable than previous versions. Also, the Pro version has been eliminated and replaced by the SQL version (previously labeled Enterprise). If you are a small firm running Pro, you should definitely upgrade to 10. It will be much faster and more stable.

After that, it depends on how much data you have (how long you have been using the program), whether you have heavily customized Time Matters  and whether you are willing to “start over” (at least in part). Converting data to any other program will be quite expensive and probably incomplete (i.e., you won’t get all your data, especially if your TM has been extensively customized).

Next, of course if you are sufficiently frustrated to be willing to “start over” then you completely free to make any choice you want. Most people are not willing to do that.

Lastly, I agree with Steve Stockstill who posted a comment to the effect that it is not a question of “whether” the SaaS model will become dominant, but “when.”  In my view, the current offerings are largely immature, but are developing very rapidly.

Therefore I think that the best option (depending on some of the above criteria) is probably to temporize:  upgrade to TM 10, keep it for 2-3 years and then see where things are at.

TM 10: Big Firm Capacity; Small Firm Capabilities

Faced with repeated and ongoing complaints about Time Matters Pro in version 9 and earlier (some consultants wouldn’t even install the Pro version), Lexis converted all Time Matters editions to a SQL database.  This has gotten generally positive reviews in terms of stability and speed.  It has, however, created some issues in particular regarding backup.

SQL is not for the faint of heart. Firms that were accustomed to simply manipulating the TM database location, backup, etc. can no longer do that just by moving things around. You have to use the SQL Management Studio, a whole different piece of software with a not insignificant learning curve and stiff penalties for mistakes (loss of data).

The issue of backup is an especially critical one. TM now includes tools for backing up the entire database.  However, by default the backup is stored under the SQL directory, which by default is stored on the C: drive.  So if your hard drive crashes, your backup crashes as well.

Users would be well advised to find a knowledgeable Time Matters and/or SQL consultant to set this up. Once it is done, however, it should need almost no attention in the future, so it is essentially a one-time charge.

Time Matters Indexer

When Time Matters 9 released the indexer as a standalone program, it created a certain amount of confusion. The Indexer is set to run on the first workstation that logs into TM, and there is no way to control it.  If you try starting TM on a separate workstation “first,” that takes up a separate license, which is obviously not a solution. The Indexer, to state the obvious, is responsible for indexing all the Time Matters data and makes searches extremely fast.

It is possible to disable the indexer entirely by creating a simple text file with Notepad named norun.txt. Put this file in the ...\Data\Index\LNDATA folder on the server where the shared Time Matters data is located. While the file is in that folder, the data indexer will not start. But that is not really a solution either.

Ideally, it should be possible to run the indexer as a service, but LexisNexis has not addressed this issue in TM 10.

It is, however, possible to run the indexer with command line switches. Create a one-line text file (call it tmindex.bat or whatever) that looks like this:

Start c:\tmw9e\tmdatndxe.exe /data=c:\tmw9e\data

(obviously the location may change according to the location and version of Time Matters). You can then set this batch file to run on startup. (Thanks to Jeff Stouse). This can be done either on the server, or on a separate PC (perhaps an older PC that is being replaced), a la Worldox Indexer.

Chris Sperry has written a utility that does allow you to run the indexer as a service, but I have not tested it. Contact Chris through Jumpstartsolutions.com

Billing Matters Officially Bites the Dust

LexisNexis has finally announced that Billing Matters will be “sunsetted” (no longer supported) at the end of 2013. Consultants have known this was coming for several years and it was obvious when LexisNexis acquired PCLaw that it would not continue to support both products indefinitely. According to the official statement, Billing Matters will continue to be supported with new versions of Time Matters through 2013. However, if you upgrade Time Matters in 2014, Billing Matters will no longer work.

Interestingly, the email that was sent to Billing Matters users exhibited a characteristic that I always find both amusing and incomprehensible coming from a software company:  the merge file used to generate the email was incompetently done, misaddressed, wrong names, etc.  Also, they don’t seem to proofread their emails: the official statement from Loretta Rupert states that “Time Matters will continue to be support [sic] beyond 2013.” Not something to increase confidence in the company or product.

For those hardy souls still attached to Billing Matters, in three years Software as a Service billing programs (such as Bill4Time) will easily be mature enough to replace Billing Matters. Actually, they could probably do so now, but that’s another issue.

Otherwise, LexisNexis seems now to be pushing PCLaw as the entry to small firms (up to 20 users) and may be getting ready to upgrade PCLaw’s “Front Office” functions.  A LexisNexis “Technorelease” dated yesterday claims that PCLaw “is the most widely used practice management software in North America.” PCLaw is a Time/Billing/Accounting practice and has never really been described before as a “practice management” program. The same Technorelease pointedly does NOT describe Time Matters as a practice management program. On whether or not PCLaw can “do it all,” see my blog of August 24.

Time Matters 10 Is Coming

Time Matters 10 should be out shortly. Given the past history, it will likely be out willy-nilly for the Lexis Nexis Conference in Dallas on Sept. 24-25– which seems as if it will be very poorly attended, since the “early bird” rate of $375 which expired Sept. 1 has been replaced by a “special” $99 rate (code is either PMAC99 or NEW99 for anybody interested).

Rather than claiming dozens of “new” features, they are now focusing only 7 “features.” The list is quite telling.

Time Matters Pro is being discontinued and all versions will now be SQL. This is a tacit admission that the Pro version never really worked – consultants have for years been recommending the “Enterprise” SQL version even for single users.  Of course, this adds an extra layer of SQL complexity to the program.

Improved TM Connect for Outlook. Again, this is a tacit admission that the TM email module has always been one of the weakest aspects of the program and many consultants recommend against using it (although it does have its proponents).

Focusing on using Microsoft Exchange for integration and links to Blackberrys, iPhones, Palm Pre, etc. Again, many small firms do not want the added complexity of Exchange. It is, however, relatively easy and inexpensive to get a hosted Exchange setup and some consultants are starting to offer this as a service. But it is another level of complexity.

Improved backup and restore via SQL This is an important improvement although not exactly a “feature” in terms of end user perception.

Enhanced Power Views. This is a good addition (and has been a long time coming). It used to be that you had to purchase advanced Power Views from consultants.

Desktop Extensions. These are “widgets” that live on your desktop (a la Vista). Wells Anderson has a video examining the Desktop Extensions in detail. It’s worth taking a look at the video, which can be downloaded from Well's site. (keep in mind that Wells has always subscribed to the “three monkeys” school in analyzing Time Matters, although he does admit that “For most customers [using v. 9 Enterprise], Desktop Extensions alone probably would not justify spending more money’).

I suspect that some people will love the Desktop Extensions and others will find them intrusive and annoying and simply turn them off. But that’s what options are all about.

All in all, if you are currently on Pro, you should definitely upgrade. Otherwise it may not be worth it. Hopefully, LexisNexis will also release a list of bug fixes, so that users can get a better idea of what went on behind the scenes. Especially if you are linking TM to other products (such as PCLaw) I would wait before upgrading until the links can be fully tested.

Comment on LexisNexis Shakeup

Two months ago, on July 2, I blogged on a “LexisNexis Shakeup.”  A couple of days ago Frank Rivera posted a lengthy comment, centering on Charlie Rogers and Loretta Rupert. Click here to see it.

Frank was the main programmer in developing the “World Edition.” He quit almost immediately on Lexis’ acquisition of Time Matters and struck out on his own, forming Houdini Esq., “A Feature Rich Web-based Legal Case Management Suite.” Houdini is aimed at larger organizations, but has recently released “Solo,” restricted to just a single user license. 

Frank is one of a number of former Lexis employees who have struck out on their own. Interestingly, they frequently offer consulting to other consultants, since they probably have a better knowledge of the program than many (most?) of those who stayed behind.

Another example is Steve Stockstill who formed DataEquity and has a web site entitled “Practice Better.”
Steve was the manager of development at Time Matters. After quitting following the release of TM v. 8, he continues to program in the TM orbit, and has written a very useful program called Mobile TM, marketed through Tom Rowe’s “Out of the Box.” Mobile TM lets you download TM information to a PDA in near real time, as opposed to the chronically unsatisfactory synchronization process. His consultant services advertise as “the consultant’s consultant” (a not unjustified claim). Steve is  typical of the brain drain Lexis has encountered.

The latest entry in this increasingly populated field is The Alliance Professional Consulting Group. www.alliancepcg.com They publish a newsletter “by CICs for CICs” and also advertise consulting and even a maintenance plan parallel to that of Lexis Nexis. They also offer independent SQL support, which is beyond what many Lexis consultants are capable of. This group seems to be run by Bill Ayers, who was the Customer Support Manager for Time Matters for the last seven years (both pre and post LexisNexis involvement).

The thread that runs through these groups is that they are run by formerly senior people at Time Matters and they offer “consulting for consultants.”  Recognizing that LexisNexis tech support has become increasingly hopeless, they are leveraging years-long knowledge of the product to both assist consultants as a business models. If you run into a problem they are definitely worth calling.

An anecdote on the “increasingly hopeless” characterization: I was taking to tech support about a particular issue a while ago and the tech obviously didn’t have a clue. So out of frustration I said “of course you don’t know, you’re just a newbie.” He was very indignant and said he had been at Lexis for two years.  Two years! Wow! And I’ve been supporting their products for over 10 years, as have most of the senior people, such as those listed above, who have struck out on their own. This is what I mean when I talk about “brain drain” at LexisNexis.

PCLaw v. Time Matters: Can PCLaw Do It All?

There seems to have been a recent uptick in inquiries along the line "Do I really need Time Matters?" Can't I do everything I do with TM just with PCLaw? (Manifestly, this corresponds to increased dissatisfaction with Time Matters and LexisNexis).

The generic answer is pretty simple: If you have an extensively customized Time Matters setup (for example, do you have custom fields on the "Additional" tab?), and make substantial use of chains and triggers, then the answer is "No, you would not be happy with PCLaw." However, if you use TM mainly as a calendar and rolodex for contacts and matters, then PCLaw may be able to do what you need. As usual, the devil is in the details.

Calendar and Chains (Linked Events).  PCLaw has an excellent calendar, on a par with Time Matters. And while TM can be customized almost any way you want, PCLaw has a built-in "location" category (where is the appointment taking place), and is much more geared to billing time than TM is. PCLaw will let you create and store "linked events" (what TM calls "chains"), and notify someone of an appointment.

Triggers.  PCLaw does not have triggers (where one event "triggers" another).

Customization of Matters.  While TM puts everything "up front" on three screens, PCLaw does let you create a series of "Custom Tabs" that can be associated with a matter or type of law. As you might expect from a billing and accounting program, these are heavily oriented toward billing items. However, while you do not have options such as calculated fields, phone, social security number, web or email fields, the options you do have include dates, yes/no, etc. You have lookups of PCLaw fields but not customized lookup tables as with TM. However, if you wished to set up a Custom Tab to display all the dates for particular kinds of court matter for example, you could do so easily and display it all in one place (which you cannot do in TM).

Documents.  PCLaw will let you create merge documents which are similar to TM's merge documents. In terms of usability, they are somewhere in between formattable clipboards and merge documents in TM and will also let you access fields in your Custom Tabs. They will work with WordPerfect, but must be created in Word.

Timers. If you make use (or would like to make use) of timers. PCLaw lets you start timers from Word, Excel or Internet Explorer to track and bill time spent in those applications. TM does not do this.

And of course, in terms of overall time and billing functions, PCLaw is miles ahead of TM's Billing Matters (which is in the process of being discontinued by LexisNexis).

Data Import. You may have trouble getting existing data into PCLaw. When it links with Time Matters or Amicus, it imports the clients, but not any other contacts. However, there is a little-known utility called “pclawdi.exe” which can be downloaded from the PCLaw download site (http://support.pclaw.com/techpage.asp). You may have to fight with tech support to get the product key (it is a 25-digit key which was used prior to v. 8.20c, not the current 40-digit key), but the utility itself is free. You can import basic information – contacts, clients, matters and calendar items. Not complete, but a big step along the way. You will not, however, get any custom field information in your current program (on the other hand, if you have a lot of custom field information chances are PCLaw will not do what you want).

So the answer is.... it all depends on what you are looking to do. If you make a list of the five things you wish your current system would do, but doesn't; and another of five functions you absolutely can't afford to lose, and compare the result with some of the details above, you will be in a much better position to make an informed decision.

Another Shakeup at Lexis Nexis

Once again, Lexis Nexis has undertaken a significant shakeup of its Practice Management division. The heads of Front Office and Back Office, Charlie Rodgers and Loretta Rupert, respectively, are out or sidelined (Loretta is reportedly in “social networking” whatever that is – besides spending your day on FaceBook). So whatever you thought of Charlie and Loretta, the last remaining “industry people” at a management level in the Time Matters structure are gone. Rob Metcalfe, who was brought in to “integrate” PCLaw is gone. The “Global” practice management group, headquartered in London, is dissolved and has been brought back to the US. The various Front Office/Back Office subdivisions have been fused and are now headed by Jacob Paransky (who knows nothing about the actual programs). Initial reactions to the new overall head of Practice Management, Phil Livingston, seem to be very positive. Livingston remade himself as a money man and CFO after being a third string tackle on the 1981 Oakland Raiders SuperBowl team who according to his bio “specialized in the practice squad” and is not even listed on the 1981 Oakland Raiders roster.

This is yet another sign that LexisNexis is absolutely clueless as to what to do with Time Matters (relatively speaking, PCLaw is in much better shape). Just about everybody at a managerial level with industry experience is gone, and the marketeers and bean counters seem to be in charge. So, a piece of advice: when you have a ship drifting in the middle of the ocean, rudderless, the way to fix it is NOT to bring in a bunch of (say) automobile engineers and bean counters who don’t even know what a rudder is (replacing the rudder will be expensive, after all). One of the smartest things the new managers and executives could do would be to schedule and take the 3-day Certified Independent Consultant class. It would teach them the product and also some of the issues involved in getting the most out of it.

The more serious issue, however, is whether Lexis has lost control of the Time Matters code, which seems increasingly likely. What does this mean?  In a large, complex program such as Time Matters, any particular line of code is linked to, refers to, and has an effect on, other parts of the code. These links are known as dependencies. So if you change one line of code to fix a bug, you have to look at all the dependencies to see what other effects that change may have. Losing control of the code means that you have no way of knowing when making one apparently small change to fix a particular problem will have much larger and unexpected effects elsewhere, essentially creating new bugs. (The “butterfly effect” applied to software.) This is manifestly what happened in the infamous 9.3 service release, where “fixes” wound up corrupting data.

If you believe that computer products, like people, have life cycles, the conclusion may well be that Time Matters has reached, or is nearing, the end of its natural life cycle.

Guts and Glitz

As more software companies move to yearly updates, they are forced to add “new features” (glitz) in order to make the updates attractive. This frequently conflicts with fixing older problems (guts).

And since most of these programs are mature, the “new features” are tending to be less and less compelling as a reason to upgrade. Users are understandably annoyed at paying for “updates” that are little more than bug fixes.

This problem is compounded by the fact that LexisNexis, for example, recently laid off half a dozen developers for both Time Matters and PCLaw. And a recent story in the Seattle Times  (May 7) reported that Lexis has laid off 35 developers in Bellevue Washington (out of 300 there) and that the jobs would be outsourced. The lost jobs for Time Matters and PCLaw reportedly will also be outsourced. 

Outsourcing is not just a matter of the talent of developers (which may well be superior) but of the historical knowledge of a program’s code base. In the case of Time Matters or PCLaw, developers who have worked on a product for 5-10 years know where the bodies are buried, the workarounds, kludges, etc. New developers don’t.

So a recent query on the LN CIC list serve wanted to know when PCLaw would go to a full SQL base without recourse to the c-tree underlay and with full server side processing (this structure by the way is the reason why the non-SQL version of PCLaw is still superior to the SQL version). The answer is: very unlikely. But there WILL be “new” functionality, which may or may not work so well.

These supposedly “infrastructure” decisions concerning developers, tech support, etc. have had a direct result on customer satisfaction, which has plummeted for Time Matters in the last couple of years.

If Lexis does manage to release Time Matters and PCLaw 10 this fall, my advice would be: wait at least 3 months before you actually do the upgrade.

And Lexis is not alone. Gavel and Gown has dived into the same quicksand pit of yearly releases which feature careless oversights and incomplete functions. For example, you can’t make any of the new shipping “daily” displays (which look pretty slick) your default in Amicus 2009 – you always have to select a different one (you can create a copy of one and make that the default, but then you have to do it for every PC). And the new Custom Records which could be a tremendous feature in the Premium Edition, does not allow users to generate usable reports, which renders the feature largely useless in the sense that any data in Custom Reports will have to be double entered somewhere else in order to get reporting – contradicting one of the mantras of all practice management programs that you only ever have to enter data once anywhere and it is accessible everywhere.