Does It Compute?

Don't Use Time Matters 12!

The following important notice has been posted on the Time Matters Support Site.  Don't implement TM 12.

While bugs are par for the course, new bugs in previously stable functions that haven't changed are pretty unusual. This would tend to confirm what I have been saying for a while:  LexisNexis has lost control of the Time Matters code. 

Further, for such a serious bug you would think that they would put out a hot fix, rather than waiting for some indeterminate time for a service pack. But maybe LexisNexis doesn't really care that much of attorneys miss court dates....

Should I Become a TimeMatters Consultant?

A young consultant recently wrote me asking whether I thought it was worthwhile getting certified in TimeMatters and working with a TimeMatters oriented consulting firm.

The short answer is: No. For two reasons. First if I were starting out all over again, I would get involved in cloud computing. That’s where the future is. The money may not be as good as with traditional fat clients, but that’s where everybody is going. It is extremely unlikely that we will see another fat client program emerge to challenge LexisNexis, Amicus, Tabs/Practice Master, etc.

The second is that although I have not been involved directly with TimeMatters for several years, in following the listservs and talking with fellow consultants, it seems clear that TM is going nowhere.

New versions continue to sport inexplicable bugs. Bugs are normal in any new version, but you generally expect them in new features. Apparently TM 12 has a bug in the calendaring routine which prevents dates (read: court dates) from scheduling correctly if they fall on a weekend.  “The software ate my appointment” is not generally an acceptable excuse as far as judges are concerned.

I continue to believe that since there are no programmers left at TimeMatters who have any historical knowledge of the code (i.e., older than 2-3 years) and since TimeMatters has outsourced some programming, that they have lost control of the code and could not really fix it even if they were willing to invest the time and money to do so, which there is no evidence that they are willing to do.

Lastly, there are repeated rumors that LexisNexis plans to spin off TimeMatters. At the NY LegalTech show, in the huge LN booths, TimeMatters and PCLaw were reduced to sharing a single terminal. That tells you something.

Time Matters Continuing Disintegration

With the announcement that Jonah Paransky has moved from the LexisNexis Practice Management division to CounselLink, and the failure so far to appoint any new head, LexisNexis Practice Management has become leaderless. (Whether the move was voluntary or not is unclear.)

Further, Lexis has terminated (fired) the last remaining developer from the original TimeMatters team. So now there is absolutely no institutional knowledge of the TM code that goes back further than about 4 years. To say that this leaves TM rudderless would be an understatement.

So it is understandable that there have been rumors that the Practice Management division is up for sale.

The mantra among consultants used to be “there’s plenty of work for everybody.” It is perhaps a sign of Time Matters’ declining fortunes that consultants have turned carnivorous. Tom Rowe’s OTB Consulting has recently sued one of its former clients, the Doan Law Firm, as well as Frank Rivera’s Logicbit, makers of Houdini, Esq, for dropping Time Matters and the OTB Bankruptcy add-ins and switching to Houdini. I didn’t manage to plow through all the way to the end of the documentation, but here’s the link: http://logicbit.com/groups/esquire/weblog/0e9fa/

I am not in a position to assess the merits of the case, but on the face of it, suing a client for failure to continue the use of your software is a pretty sad state of affairs.

Things will only get worse.  As the number of clients who have either dropped the software or refused to pay LexisNexis’ extortionate  “Annual Maintenance Program” rates grows, so too will the rate at which the old software no longer integrates with changes to the operating system or the adoption of new versions of software that previously integrated with Time Matters or PCLaw. I find I seem to be getting an increased number of inquiries in the form: “I am using Version [X] of [Time Matters, PCLaw] and it no longer does [Y] or integrates with my new [Z]. I refuse to pay the AMP. What can I do?” Unfortunately, the answer is in the form of one of a variety of truisms: Suck it Up, Bite the Bullet, Fish or Cut Bait, etc.

I have somewhat changed my views on the subject of what to do. I used to say: “Well, despite the flaws, these are still the best programs around, so just pay up.”  Now I am more inclined to say: limp along if you can, and in the meantime most of the web-based programs have 30-day trials. Aggressively seek out the trials, put all your data for one or two clients into the trial version for a month and see if they will do what you need.

For example, Seth Rowland recently pointed me in the direction of a new web-based practice management program, Action Step, out of Australia/New Zealand.  For a first take, see Seth’s blog. 

Will LexisNexis Be Sold to Bloomberg?

A recent blog raised the interesting issue of whether Reed-Elsevier will spin off LexisNexis and perhaps sell it to Bloomberg. In the last year or two, Bloomberg has hired away a number of LexisNexis executives, including Lou Andreozzi.

The blog quotes a Bernstein Research report to the effect that the LexisNexis problems are “intractable.”

Another possibility would simply be to spin off Lexis Nexis and divest all the products that were acquired during the LexisNexis buying spree of five plus years or so ago. This might include TimeMatters, PCLaw, Juris, CaseMap, Interaction, Redwood, etc.  They already sold HotDocs.

Steve Stockstill on Billing Matters

I’m happy to present another guest blog by Steve Stockstill. Steve was a core developer of Time Matters programs for 8 years, and had risen to the position of Director of Software Engineering for the Time Matters business unit before he left in August 2007. Steve’ s company, Data Equity, has offered enhancement products for Time Matters and Billing Matters for several years.

Dead Cat Bounce

I waited a few weeks to see how the news of the Billing Matters end of life cancellation would resonate. There was a brief flurry of positive conversation but a significant lack of details and no roadmap has deflated the hopes. Most of the Time Matters consultant community is cautiously optimistic and waiting to see how well Lexis can execute a third attempt at visioneering their acquisitions from the mid 2000’s. The corporate mantra has been that Billing Matters will not be sunset because …. “we are listening to our customers and consultants”. The reason is likely due to their inability to execute the strategies needed to end the life of Billing Matters.

Follow the Money

In the last few years the competition has caught and in a few cases surpassed Time Matters. In turn, Time Matters customers have been moving to other practice management products. In addition to losing customers, it would not be surprising that a loss of renewals for Billing Matters has further contributed to the revenue decline. In other words customers may continue to renew Time Matters but look elsewhere for a billing solution.

It’s no secret that when a company acquires multiple businesses in the same market space, the goal is to consolidate the resources and expand the individual markets into a greater whole. Case in point: Time/Billing Matters and PCLaw. For years Lexis appeared to ignore the community while at the same time failed to execute the product visions for both PCLaw and Time/Billing Matters.
In my estimation, the decision to sunset Billing Matters was dependent on executing a likely initial acquisition strategy: create a formidable combined product using the best resources from the Time Matters and PCLaw products and engineering teams. The resulting product could offer best of breed, perfectly integrated Practice Management, Advanced Billing and Accounting.

To Catch a Falling Knife

It’s clear the Lexis Nexis talking points on the resurrection are that they have “listened to the community” and decided not to sunset Billing Matters. Why weren’t they listening in the first place? Do they suddenly understand the significance of integrated billing?

There still remains the fact that Billing Matters has essentially been untouched for several years. Data Equity has provided advanced engineering services to the Billing Matters community for many years, having done so we have learned a great deal about many key data quality metrics. In fact we have reported this information to the Time Matters engineering team. Unfortunately they weren’t listening to us either. In general they have been unwilling to acknowledge potential defects in an open way.

LexisNexis Sunrises Billing Matters

LexisNexis just announced that it would reverse it’s previous decision to discontinue (“sunset”) Billing Matters at the end of 2013 and would “sunrise” it.

Why did they do this?  The argument that LN has “listened to it’s customers” flies in the face of virtually every decision they have taken since TimeMatters was acquired.  Various tame consultants have exulted.  Jeff Krause is a little more upfront than most. He notes that the “naysayers”

“will say that LexisNexis is changing its mind - again.  They will say that this is happening because LexisNexis was unable to make the link between Time Matters and PCLaw work as promised.  Those statements may be true but the fact remains that this is the right decision.  If you believe that the original decision was a mistake, can you really fault LexisNexis for correcting that mistake?”

But was the original decision a mistake? Billing Matters has always been something of a bomb. Best reports from the time the first “sunset” announcement was made indicated that it never had more than about 5,000 users at most and more likely around 3,000.  PCLaw, by way of contrast issues serial numbers consecutively, so the highest licenses number indicates the number of firms it has been installed in (although all of them may not still be using it). That number is now in excess of 100,000. In fact, the original decision was the only rational one.

So why DID they do it?  Two reasons come to mind.

First, LN has not been very successful at getting Billing Matters users to switch to PCLaw. The attraction of a single unified code is very persuasive, and under Lexis’ management the link with PCLaw has had repeated problems (apparently in part due to lack of communication between the two programming teams). Sales of TimeMatters are down, and indications are that Billing Matters users were likely to go elsewhere. So “sunrising” Billing Matters is most likely an effort to contain losses.

The second scenario is much more speculative, but intriguing. STI’s Tabs/Practice Master combo has a unified code base. Gavel & Gown has just release Amicus Premium Billing, which integrates a single code base with Amicus Attorney Premium Edition. Lexis may well have felt pressure to have a competing option remain in the market – especially since Amicus has had a certain amount of success in converting TimeMatters client data to Amicus Attorney.

From a technical point of view, after having no one working actively on Billing Matters for 2 years or more, Lexis Nexis is likely to have problems getting back up to speed and producing an “update” that does not introduce its share of new bugs. If Billing Matters is coming back from the dead would it be fair to call it a zombie product?

Time Matters Link to Amicus Attorney (??)

Some people think I am too hard on LexisNexis. Others think I am essentially correct in my assessment but there is nothing to be gained from stating it openly.

I had the opportunity last week to listen in on LexisNexis Quarterly “Virtual User Meeting.”  Pretty routine and uneventful except when Steve Fedders, the TimeMatters Product Manager announced that LexisNexis would work hard to provide quarterly updates in order to keep links with other programs current – programs such as .... Amicus Attorney.

It boggles the mind.

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.

A Modest Proposal for LexisNexis

One of the greatest pieces of political satire ever written is Jonathan Swift’s 1729 Modest Proposal: “A Modest Proposal for preventing the children of poor people in Ireland, from being a burden on their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the publick.”

Swift’s proposal was to sell off a percentage of yearling children to the wealthy, to be slaughtered and eaten. Swift says he has been assured “by a very knowing American...that a young healthy child well nursed is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food whether stewed, roasted, baked or boiled.” He then proceeds to straight-facedly enumerate the advantages of his proposal at length.

I thought of Swift when imagining what it might take for LexisNexis to fix TimeMatters (and PCLaw). So here is a Modest Proposal to LexisNexis: that it re-hire Bob Butler to manage the Practice Management division, with a mandate to restore Time Matters to its former grandeur. This would include dropping the Annual Maintenance charge to 20% of the price of the product and abandoning any pretext to yearly upgrades (instead using PCLaw’s standard of incremental point updates) the better to be able to fix bugs and make adjustments.

I can see the following advantages to this proposal. Other consultants may come up with additional options.

•    First, there would be an immediate boost in both customers’ and consultants’ confidence in the future of the product.
•    Second, Bob would certainly insist on fixing long-outstanding bugs and deficiencies, thus massively reducing the endless grousing by disgruntled customers.
•    Third, it would increase revenues by reducing the number of customers who are abandoning the product and converting to alternatives. When PCLaw charged 20% of the base product price for tech support, the tech support department was a profit center.
•    Fourth, it would deal a blow to the competition, thus further increasing revenue. It would no doubt be satisfying for LexisNexis to put a dent in Amicus’s successful Time Matters conversion program.
•    Fifth, LexisNexis would be in a better position to hire quality programmers and staunch the brain drain that has plagued it for the past several years. It might even be able to re-hire some of the people who have left.
•    Sixth, by providing a vision and road map for the future, Bob would help reorganize the division and strengthen it in preparation for the inevitable transition to web-based programs.
•    Last, but perhaps not least, it would increase employee morale at LexisNexis and reduce the internal consternation (which I am assured exists) every time Heckman blogs, since with the improvement of the product, there would be no reason to blog about it. Who knows, there might even be good things to say.

More on LexisNexis TM Mobility

You may have seen some of the comments to Steve Stockstill’s guest post concerning Time Matters Mobility.  Friday, Mark Deal posted a monster response to Steve (it was over twice as long as the original post).

The underlying message of his post is that you should trust LexisNexis to do the right thing. Thus Mark “assumes” once, “believes” twice, “imagines” twice and “expects” once. Mobility is twice labeled a “first step” and once more grandiloquently a “vision toward the future.”

Over the last several years LexisNexis’ assurances have remained unfulfilled repeatedly.  Even Mark notes that whereas he assumed that LN would “improve their tool based on their own customer feedback,” “this has not been the case, LexisNexis has not improved on their solution.”

This is at least in part due to the pressure of yearly releases: they have to bring out “new” features, so they bring out something that is half-baked and then never actually fix it. This is fairly common among companies who have gone over to yearly updates.  Remember Desktop Extensions.

Mark parrots LexisNexis’ assertion that Time Matters 11 Service Release 1 is “coming soon” to provide calendar functionality in TM Mobility. Let’s see, TM 11 has not actually been released yet (it is in the final stages of beta testing), but Service Release 1 is “coming soon.” Gimme a break.

Microsoft is notorious for buying up companies in order to acquire their technology. Surely it would have made much more sense for LexisNexis to purchase or license superior products such as Mobile TM or TMTools rather than develop their own inferior functionality?

One of Steve’s criticisms was that TM Mobility would be cut off if you drop your annual maintenance to Time Matters. Mark defends this as common to the SaaS model: it is by subscription, if you drop the subscription you don’t get the service. This would be logical except for the fact that LexisNexis has loudly trumpeted the “fact” that TM Mobility is “free.”  Obviously it is not free, it only comes with the Annual Maintenance Plan. You can’t have it both ways.

It is worth recalling Ronald Reagan’s famous “trust, but verify” comment. When verification fails – as it has systematically for virtually all LexisNexis’ assertions of the type “we are aware of problems, we are working on it” over the past several years – trust is eroded. This is what has happened with Time Matters. It is no longer rational to assume, believe, or imagine.