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.