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.

Time Matters and the Perils of Inheritance

Time Matters has featured what it calls “inheritance,” namely when you create a type of record based on another record, certain information is “inherited.”  Thus if you create a billing record based on an appointment, or on a given matter record, some of your fields are already filled in.

This is generally speaking a very convenient feature, but there is a significant glitch that has affected versions of Time Matters prior to version 9 (where it was fixed). That is, if you create a billing record based on a Matter record, the “staff” that is inherited is not the person creating the record (as it is elsewhere), but the attorney assigned to the matter. In many cases, therefore, this information will have to be changed.  And since people are used to having their own information filled in automatically, this is a door wide open to error - your time will be credited not to you, but to the responsible attorney for the case.

There is a workaround that may work for you, depending on how you have Time Matters configured.  Create an alternative field that will contain the Responsible Attorney information and empty out the Staff field. Set security so that you cannot enter information in this field. Then, when you create a billing slip, the information of the person creating the slip will be filled in automatically.

You will have to make other adjustments - to column displays, reports, possibly formattable clipboard, and so on, so you should through all the ramifications for your system before implementing it. However, it can in some cases plug a significant hole.

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.

List of Time Matters Tips & Tricks

In the last seven months of blogging, I have posted a number of “tips & tricks” concerning various programs.  Since by the nature of blogging, these tend to get lost over time, I am re-posting the list of “tips & tricks” for Time Matters.

Calculating a Person’s Age in Time Matters 11/20
Time Matters 9 - User Defined Records 10/10
Software Formerly Known as Time Matters Released 10/03
Stop Mousing Around - Time Matters Shortcuts 9/20
Live Answer Time Matters Support - At Last!  9/7
Time Matters 8 SR2A Available for Download 8/17
Timer Functions in Time Matters, PCLaw and Amicus 8/7
Time Matters In/Out List 7/13
Time Matters Crashes - Hyperthreading 6/26
Time Matters / PCLaw Autotext/explanation codes 6/20
Internal Instant Messaging - Time Maters and Amicus 6/09

Calculating a Person's Age in Time Matters

It is possible to create a field in Time Matters that calculates the age of a person.  Assume you have a field for the person’s date of birth, say field 3 in area 3 of the contact form.

Then create  a calculated text field with the following calculation:

  '&AGE(DEFORMAT(CON:CON1_03_03,@D2)) &'

where “03_03" is the date of birth field and the operator is: Appended. The second field should be listed as Text, but left blank. The grammar must be exactly precise (if you cut and paste the above it should work)

Note that if the date of birth field is not filled in, the person will be listed as being 2007 years old - at least for another month or so, until they turn 2008.

Time Matters 9 - User Defined Records

Arguably the most powerful new feature in the software formerly known as Time Matters is the User Defined Record. In the past, a variety of kludgy workarounds involved “adapting” E-mail or ToDo records when firms needed to list things like:

Assets for Estate practices
Medical records for PI and similar practices
Service Lists for large litigations with large numbers of parties/defendants
Store locations for large retailers the firm represents
Actors in a case

With TM9, however, it is easy to create User Defined Records to meet these needs. Each user defined record has its own lists, set of codes, etc. and even a Power View. Thus it becomes much easier to track this information. In addition, User Defined Records are available for merges, HotDocs integration, etc.

So if your firm needs this sort of listing, it might be worth the price of admission to upgrade to TM 9.

Software Formerly Known as Time Matters Released

Time Matters 9 has officially been released by Lexis Nexis.  Like PCLaw, TimeMatters is being de-branded and is now officially known as Lexis Front Office Powered by Time Matters 9 (LFOPBTM9), or “the software formerly known as Time Matters.”

The changes to TM 9 are very heavily cosmetic.  Time Matters fans used to make fun of Amicus Attorney for its “eye candy” -- but now Lexis Nexis is pushing heavily in that direction. While “cosmetic” is a matter of taste, most of the cosmetic changes are a step in the wrong direction, in my opinion. The new “wizards” and similar items actually lead people to be less productive and less well-trained in actually using the application. In the past, most firms that already used Time Matters simply wanted to turn them off as fast as possible. “How Do I Get Rid of this Junk” was a polite rendition of the general sentiment. And while they might be useful for the first half-dozen times a new user needs to create a new record, they get annoying very rapidly. Lexis would have been better off fixing problems with how the program functions (WAPD - “Working As Poorly Designed”) than investing heavily in software botox. In particular, despite the acquisition of PCLaw, there have been no serious improvements in the link with PCLaw, and in some respects it is worse than before.

As with any mature program, new changes are hard to come by (another argument against yearly upgrades). There are only a few actual improvements to the program: the previous limit of being able to select only 6 codes has been eliminated; the ability to archive related records when archiving a matter has been improved; and the security exceptions function will be significant for larger firms with highly detailed customized security options. One real, though limited, improvement is the addition of User-Defined forms (similar to Phone records or Notes). These would enable a firm, for example to maintain a List of Service, or Medical records, or individual stores of a large retailer.

So if you are already on v. 8 there is really no pressing need to upgrade unless one of the substantive changes has been something you have been wanting. If you are on previous versions it should be considered, simply because with every new release on old release is “sunsetted,” that is, no longer supported. In this case TM 6 will no longer be supported after December 31, 2007.

With the release of TM9, Lexis Nexis’ yearly ritual of churning its client base has now been completed.  See you again next September.

Stop Mousing Around - TimeMatters shortcuts

Like many other programs, Time Matters makes use of a large number of keystroke shortcuts. The list can be found centrally in Help if you look for “Hot Keys” in the Help Contents.

You can open almost any list with an F-key.  They start at F3 and move up. Find the ones you use most often. Thus Contact is F5 and Matter is F6. As usual, the shortcut keys are listed on the menu dropdowns, so if you go to File | New Record, you will see a complete list.

One of the most useful is the lookup hot key - F2. Instead of having to click on the lookup button, just hit F2.

Ctrl-A opens the Auto-Entry form list for a given function. You must be in the “Add” screen for this to work.

Tagging records in Time Matters does not conform to Windows standards. Instead, Ctrl-T tags all the records in a list and Ctrl-U untags them.

Shift-T will tag a single record. If you hit Shift-T to tag one record, then continue holding down the Shift key and hitting T you can tag consecutive records.  Very useful if you want to tag a small set of records.

The date calculator is reached with Shift-F12. While this is not at all obvious, it is the sort of thing that once you learn it, it is extremely useful.

The In/Out list (if you use this) is Alt-Shfit-L

Note that in Time Matters, like many other programs, the shortcut keys are listed next to the menu item on the drop-down menus (but not the icons on the button bar)

Live Answer Time Matters Support - At Last!

The new Lexis Nexis support plan for the software formerly known as Time Matters has drawn a lot of fire along the lines of  “They’re killing Time Matters.”

This is misplaced.  What is tech support, after all? Aside from all the mixed metaphors about blood-sucking vultures feeding off carrion, in a word, tech support is insurance just like any other kind of insurance: car insurance, home insurance or malpractice insurance.  The reason you have insurance is that when you need it you REALLY need it. If your server is down or your database hopelessly corrupted, you must have tech support, it is not an option.

Similarly, a firm carries malpractice insurance not because they plan to commit malpractice (hopefully), but because if they were to need it, they would REALLY need it. You DO carry malpractice insurance don’t you? 

Tech support is like that.

The new Lexis Nexis tech support is overall in line with the general industry standard that tech support costs 20% of the cost of the product with one very important exception.

If you look at PCLaw tech support, it is closer to 25% of the cost of the product. HOWEVER, with PCLaw you get upgrade protection, that is, you never have to pay for upgrades from one version to the next. Historically, tech support was always a profit center for PCLaw, so when Lexis jacked up the price over the past few years, it was basically pure gravy.

Time Matters support does not include version upgrade protection, so that in addition to support, users are soaked for yearly software upgrades as well.  By way of comparison, Worldox document management support is about 20% of the cost of the product AND includes upgrade support.

Lexis would do well to align its TimeMatters support with the PCLaw model, including upgrade protection.

Time Matters 8 SR2A Available for Download

SR2A is now available for download from the TimeMatters Service Center. This release should go a long way toward resolving crashing issues with previous versions of TM (especially those that gave a “c55runx.dll” error. The older versions had serious compatibility issues with newer duo-core computers and those that came with hyperthreading turned on.  The new release replaces the “c55runx.dll” with “c60runx.dll” (corresponding to the new version of the Clairion database).

If you have been experiencing crashing you should definitely try this release.  If you had fixed your crashing issue by turning hyperthreading off and associating TM with a single core (see my June 26 post on crashes and hyperthreading), it would be worth undoing those changes and seeing of the new release fixes the issues. If you continue to get errors, but they are NOT for c60runx.dll then you have a different set of issues - obviously this release is not a “magic bullet.”  In that case, you should probably go back to turning hyperthreading off. However if you get c60runx.dll errors they should definitely be reported to tech support so that they can resolve any remaining issues.