Does It Compute?

The Amazon Outage

As of this morning (April 26), Amazon was still listing “Instance connectivity, latency and error rates” for a very small percentage of clients at its North Virginia center.  Thus the outage, which started on April 21 and affected a number of well-known companies, has lasted nearly 5 days. This is not the first Amazon outage: if you Google “Amazon outage” you will find entries for 2011, 2010 and 2009.  A Forbes blogger entitled it “The Day the Cloud Died” in a rendering of “American Pie.” It will not be the last.

What does it mean for SaaS products?  First, it must be said that the down time for major players such as Amazon or Rackspace is significantly less than for most medium size law firms that have their own servers in-house. Of course, this is no consolation when your provider does have an outage.  I think the difference is largely psychological: when an in-house system goes down, there is a sense that you can “do something” about it, and there is certainly someone to yell at.  Try yelling at Amazon. Doesn’t work so well.

As a practical matter, the issue is: what sort of backup system does your SaaS provider have in place?  So if there is an outage in one location, can they switch over to another location?  Do they offer, as NetDocuments does, a “backup” to in-house servers, so that if the Internet goes down, you can switch over to functioning locally? 

As Jack Newton of Clio notes in a White Paper on “The Ethics and Security of Cloud Computing,” “Geographic redundancy, or geo-redundancy, takes advantage of multiple, geographically distributed data centers. The impact of an outage at one data center can thus be minimized by automatic failover to additional data centers. ...  The SaaS provider should, at a minimum, be performing daily backups of all data and storing this backup in a secure, offsite location. Ideally, backups should be performed multiple times per day, and replicated to multiple, secure offsite locations.”

So moving to the cloud should still be on your list of options. You do, however, need to do due diligence about the provider’s security and backup options. You may find you have to pay more to get proper backup (as with NetDocuments), but like any type of insurance, it is probably worth it.

LexisNexis' Firm Manager

Several people have asked me about LexisNexis’ Firm Manager, so I decided I should take a look at it. Firm Manager is designed as a low-end SaaS practice management program for solos or very small firms. It competes with programs such as Clio or Gavel & Gown’s Credenza.

First of all, it won’t run on Firefox or Chrome. They claim that with the Silverlight Plug-in for Firefox it “should” run, but I never could get it to.

So, it requires Silverlight to run, IE and Active X (configured in a mode designated by Microsoft as “not secure”). This is not a combination I would recommend to anybody, and is a configuration most SaaS applications do not require. So, we have a bad design from the outset.

You can synchronize Outlook with Firm Manager, but only Outlook 2007 and higher. I syncrhonized 2,500 entries in about a half an hour. After the first synchronization, it took about a minute to synchronize a dozen or so new items. However, it is not clear that the synchronization just does all changes to existing entries (deltas), since it is labeled “recently added items.”

Some of the features did not work properly. For example, when I tried to assign a batch of documents to a document type (“category”) and then upload them, I got an error message that a category had to be assigned. I had to indicate the category for each individual document before I could upload them.

If you have an earlier version of Outlook, there is an contact import template, but it is beneath rudimentary. It does not provide for a person’s title (Partner, Manager), allows only for a 2-line address, only a single phone number, there is no field for notes, etc. It is totally inadequate in terms of the contact information a person normally wants to maintain.

Even with virtually no data, Firm Manager is extremely slow (a problem it shares with many SaaS products). I hate to think what it would be like with any significant amount of data.

The application sends you an email every night at 9 pm containing your existing appointments, etc.  This could be a nice idea, but for some reason it sends two emails. In addition, there have been reports of people receiving an email containing some complete stranger’s information.

Pricing for Firm Manager is in line with what similar applications such as Clio, RocketMatter or Houdini Esq. offer, at $44.50 per user per month.

Essentially, Firm Manager is a 0.9 release. The world of SaaS products changes extremely rapidly and it is very dubious that LexisNexis has the agility (or the will) to implement improvements at a rate comparable to the competitors. You would be much better off with one of the alternatives.

Amicus Premium Billing

I had a chance to look at a late Beta of Amicus Premium Billing at the Amicus Consultants conference a couple of weeks ago and have been playing around with it since then. Gavel & Gown officially announced its forthcoming release at the ABA Tech Show this week.

The program is designed centrally by former PCLaw people who were dumped by LexisNexis, so together they have closed to 50 years of experience with one of the best Billing and Accounting programs around. This gives one grounds for optimism.

Premium Billing is a single integrated code base combining both Amicus Attorney and Premium Billing. You switch back and forth from one view to another simply by clicking a tab at the left of the screen. Thus Gavel and Gown potentially eliminates the question of “integration” of two products: there is one product, one code base, but two views of the information. The interface is very Amicus-like so it will be immediately familiar to Amicus users.

One of the central bottlenecks in getting a firm’s time and billing process to be more efficient is the widespread resistance by attorneys to viewing account information and draft bills electronically. Attorneys are accustomed to marking up drafts, which is very inefficient.

Premium Billing goes a long way toward providing an underpinning to remedy this situation. First, when you switch to Billing to look at the client/matter list, instead of seeing information such as client/matter number, file type, etc., you see a mini-report about billing information: Unposted fees, WIP fees, WIP Expenses, A/R, Retainer and Trust information.  In addition, this information is totaled at the bottom of the screen. In short, the second you open the client list, you have a complete billing report on the screen. In addition, if you sub-select the list by file type, responsible lawyer, etc. the totals reflect that selection. So in a single click, the head of a practice area can see how his department is doing. If there is a large amount of unposted time, that can be pursued. Since any column can be sorted, with a single click you can see which clients have the largest outstanding Accounts Receivables.

There is no need to go through menu options: with one or two clicks, you have the essential information you need at your fingertips. As one consultant said at the conference, the program almost talks to you.

In addition, Premium Billing has an extensive series of “File Alerts.” A given attorney can be given a reminder when a client’s WIP exceeds a certain amount; when A/R exceeds a given amount, or is older than a certain number of days; when a draft bill is ready for review; when a retainer requires replenishment, etc.

When you first open the Premium Billing office, you are presented with a Navigator-style screen that lets you select from the most frequently used functions. This is convenient, but it would be nice if it were customizable.

Time Entry is essentially the same as it has always been for Amicus, but also introduces the new “Time Entry Assistant” which searches through your appointments, to dos, phone calls, e-mails, etc. and locates the ones that have not yet been billed. It then offers you the opportunity to bill that time. Yet another way that Amicus prevents billable time from “falling through the cracks.” Billing rates and categories have been considerably improved from previous versions of Amicus.

The Billing function has a lot of slick “Amicus-like” functions. For example, if you have a bill for a client with a number of sub-matters, if you expand the client information, you will see the billing information for each matter separately.

Premium Billing does not currently have an accounting piece, but it does make extensive provision for trust accounting. For the time being, it integrates only with Quickbooks.

A number of reports are built in. Previous versions of Amicus used Crystal Reports to do custom reports. Amicus 2011 and Premium Billing have switched to the Microsoft SQL Report Writer, whose main virtue is that its free. It will take some getting used to. The main advantage is that the Report Writer reports are interactive: you can “drill down” on a report, see and change the underlying information, and the changes will immediately be reflected in the report.

Of course, this IS a version 1.0 program, designed from scratch. This has the advantage that the design team has been able to take advantage of the best elements from PCLaw, Timeslips and other programs and create a unified concept. It does remain to be seen whether the underlying programming can live up to Premium Billing’s potential to be an excellent program.

Mark Twain on Congress

With the incipient shutdown of the government, it is worth recalling Mark Twain:

"Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself."

"It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress."
        Mark Twain, Following the Equator