Does It Compute?

Guest Blog: Steve Stockstill on Time Matters Mobility

I’m happy to present a 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 a “mobility” application for Time Matters, “MobileTM,” for several years. Steve recently joined the web-based practice management program Advologix as Chief Technology Officer.

Time Matters Mobility, Too Little Too Late

by Steve Stockstill

I recently sat through the Time Matters V11 preview webinar which focus primarily on a new mobile application for Time Matters. I’ll get straight to the point; this product should not be released by a software company hoping to be taken serious about their product design competency. Lexis is continuing to prove their inability to innovate within the Practice Management software market.
While the rest of the industry has been mobilizing, Time Matters has let their mobile functionality become obsolete. If you haven’t bought a new phone in the last three years you’re OK; Time Matters will still sync via cable to your older phone (Palm, Blackberry or Windows OS). Version 11’s new “mobility” features are woefully inadequate for the vast majority of Smartphone carrying professionals.
Woefully inadequate:

1) No Calendaring - how can a mobile application not have calendaring? OK, so they say they will release it in a service release, next Christmas? Nice planning.

2) Of the 18+ record types in Time Matters, only 3 are supported; Contacts, Matters & Billings.

3) Boasts of creating billing records – Really?
    a. Someone at the office has to edit the billing to complete the data entry.
    b. What if you make a mistake? You cannot edit or delete the entry on the Smartphone.
    c. Only supports simple (qty * rate) billing.

4) Data Lists and Forms are hard coded with no customizations. They hope you like what they chose for you.

5) All connections pass through the Time Matters centralized “Kill Switch”. Prior to version 11 when you purchased Time Matters you own a perpetual license when your AMP expires. Not so for this new addition. The “Kill Switch” is designed to cut you off when your amp expires and you continue to use Time Matters.

What could have been:

Unfortunately the Lexis Nexis (Practice Management) business model does not support integration partners. A policy in deep contrast to most software business models, especially in the era of open design and software services. I should know, I have been working for three years to show them how effective and synergistic a customer focused partnership could be. As many know my firm, Data Equity develops mobility products for Time Matters. Oddly enough, we never received a courtesy notification that mobility was being added to Time Matters; so much for good will. The real losers here are the customers and Reid Elsevier shareholders. Companies like Data Equity will simply choose to partner with companies focused on customer satisfaction. Likewise many customers and industry professionals are fleeing Time Matters for products like Practice Master and AdvologixPM.

Having previously sunset very core functionality in the Time Matters product family, Billing Matters and Time Matters World (browser) Edition, it appears the core product is being set to pasture. Version 10 included very little new functionality and version 11 is nothing more than a simple service release. Prior to the Lexis Nexis buyout, Time Matters customers were accustomed to more functionality in a free service release.

What's Going On With LexisNexis?

The Orange Rag has reproduced a press release from LexisNexis International announcing that it is developing a mid- and large-firm Practice Management /Financial Management program in Britain.

Here is the core of the announcement:

"LexisNexis International announced it has signed an agreement with Microsoft to develop a legal-specific practice and financial management solutions platform, using Microsoft Dynamics AX, to meet the precise accounting needs of modern law firms. The LexisNexis practice and financial management solution will address the needs of mid-tier and international firms alike. Already in development, the solutions are scheduled to be in beta testing throughout 2011, with general availability planned for 2012 in the United Kingdom and across Europe."

This is apparently designed to replace other Lexis software that has had significant problems, such as Axxia. Comments have been glowing and positive. However, this overlooks the fact that LexisNexis sells books and research; their experience with developing and maintaining software has been rather dismal.

From a Time Matters perspective, things do not look so rosy.  First, Lexis is continuing a trend of investing internationally rather than in the U.S. If they expect the program to go into beta in 2011, massive resources will obviously be devoted to it. Secondly, Lexis is going after the big-firm market, trying to compete with Aderant Expert and Elite. They have little or no software experience in this area.

Even if you assume that by pawning off the underlying development on Microsoft that Lexis will be able to leverage its putative “legal expertise,” it is unclear that they will be able to make this work.

All this reinforces the impression that Time Matters will be left to rot on the vine in the U.S.  When the cash cow runs dry, what will happen? Lexis is apparently developing some sort of SaaS version of Time Matters. but by the time it is done (if it ever sees the light of day), the more powerful SaaS Practice Management programs, in particular Advologix and HoudiniESQ, will have a serious head start on them. (Remember the Time Matters World Edition).

Lexis Nexis Update

Ever since I decided to stop dealing with Time Matters, I haven’t blogged about LexisNexis.  However, there is a fair amount of information coming out of the recently concluded consultants’ conference in Las Vegas that is worth reporting.  Since I wasn’t there, this is second-hand, but the information has been confirmed by more than one source, all of them trustworthy.

Apparently Loretta Rupert, the Senior Director of Community Management at LexisNexis gave a speech referring to me by name and stating that my blog was “very damaging” to Time Matters and one of her tasks was to control the damage.  As the saying goes: “truth be my defense.” I don’t see people disputing the accuracy of my posts, and a number of consultants and users have thanked me for “telling it like it is,” even if they think it would be impolitic for them to do so. So if I seem to be labeled Public Enemy No. 1, the truth is that LexisNexis is its own worst enemy.

Reading between the lines, it seems that Time Matters is at the end of its product cycle and will basically be allowed to wither away, although a version 11 is supposed to be forthcoming early next year.  It will include a “mobile app” based on Microsoft Azure and akin to Steve Stockstill’s Mobile TM application, but bi-directional. But the version demonstrated at the conference did not include a calendar, which is a key ingredient of any such application. In addition, MS Azure is an immature product and the jury is still out on how good it will really be. True, it shows a lot of promise, but who wants to deploy v.1 of any Microsoft product?

LexisNexis is still pushing to develop an SaaS application, but it is unclear how long that will take, and a number of other applications have a serious head start on them, including Advologix (ex-Time Matters developer Steve Stockstill is the CIO there) and Houdini, Esq., headed by Frank Rivera (who originally was a key figure behind the Time Matters World edition, the first effort at a Web-based version).

As people have known for a while, the link between Time Matters and PCLaw is broken, apparently as a result of a failure to communicate between the respective development teams.  LexisNexis doesn’t seem to know how long it will take to get it fixed. It seems that if you create new matters in PCLaw to take advantage of the automatic client numbering, they do not get pushed across to Time Matters correctly.

They have (finally!) indicated that they will be moving toward an 18-month development cycle due to the inability to maintain reliable yearly releases.  This is actually good news, although people who have paid their Annual Maintenance fee may find they haven’t gotten very much for their money. In addition, it is unclear whether the bean counters will insist on annual releases to justify the Annual Maintenance Plans.

More generally, it appears that Time Matters sales are seriously declining and that there is a significant backlash against the cost of the Annual Maintenance Plan and especially the punitive reinstatement fees.  However, this kind of model is becoming more and more frequent as companies move toward SaaS-type subscription models, so it is unlikely to change.

Sayonara Time Matters

I have been involved with Time Matters for about 10 years, 7 of those as a CIC (Certified Independent Consultant). Many people are aware that I was unceremoniously excommunicated from the CIC program by the late unlamented Charlie Rogers just days before the CIC conference in 2007 for criticisms of LexisNexis.

I had drafted an article on the state of LexisNexis in February of that year (2007) and finally published it my blog in February of 2008 as “Acquire, Merge, Destroy.”  I published a followup a year later, and numerous articles since then

Sad to say, most of the analysis in those articles has been borne out, and many of the predictions have come about.

Since that time, I have continued to recommend Time Matters as one of the best products on the market.  More recently, to the increasing number of people who have asked me about switching, I have advised them to sit tight for a year or two.  Their existing software (assuming it is reasonably up to date with a version that supports Windows 7) will perform well for that amount of time, and by then other options may be available, SaaS programs such as Clio or Rocket Matter will have matured and it may be easier to switch (Amicus, for example, recently released a Time Matters conversion option).

However, with the brain drain of Time Matters programmers, including with some programming apparently now being outsourced, with senior Quality Control people having left, I now believe that LexisNexis is no longer capable of maintaining the original quality of Time Matters. The latest fiasco with Service Release 3 for TM 10 was the final nail in the coffin. This is an objective assessment, independent of the more subjective issue of whether the current leadership is adequate to the task or even has the desire to maintain Time Matters at the quality level it was under Bob Butler. Given the number of Time Matters consultants who have more or less surreptitiously been looking around for other options, I believe this assessment is widely shared, if not expressed.

A number of third party vendors have solutions that will make Time Matters work decently, but then you are looking at a significant additional cost on top of the program and maintenance.

I recently received an invoice to renew my Annual Maintenance Plan and was also contacted by email to the same end. Over the past several years, Time Matters’ pricing has become increasingly predatory in an effort to churn additional money out of existing customers who may not be in a position to do anything about it.  However, since I do not depend on TM for my daily work, I am not in that position.

In fairness to LexisNexis, predatory pricing seems to be the way the industry is going. Amicus seems to have started down that path as well, and of course if you purchase Word 2010 there is no upgrade pricing from previous versions – the first time this has happened. And don’t forget, Microsoft has about an 80% profit margin on Word and Windows.

I have therefore decided not to renew my maintenance and not to upgrade to TM 11 when it comes out.  Sayonara Time Matters.

As a consultant, where do I go from here?  For me, that decision is colored by the fact that within the next couple of years I expect to substantially reduce my business, focusing mainly on Worldox and Amicus (I will be 70 in September).  If I were 10 years younger, I would probably link up with PracticeMaster and a couple of the SaaS programs in addition to the other software I support.

TM 10 SR 3 - LexisNexis Does It Again

Many people remember the disastrous Service Release for Time Matters 9 which wound up corrupting data. LexisNexis pulled the Service Release after less than a week. On a smaller scale, LexisNexis has done it again. SR3 for TM 10 was supposed to update a number of links to other programs, including Worldox GX2, Timeslips 2010, PaperPort 12, HotDocs Player 2010 and, most importantly, Word 2010.

But only a week after SR3 was out, Loretta Rupert had to go public advising firms using Word 2010 not to install the Service Release. It seems that digital signatures were missing on macros, some key dialog boxes did not appear and, most importantly, the release crashed both Word and Time Matters when implemented on a a 64-bit operating system.

None of these functions are particularly obscure, and the difficulties of running 32-bit apps such as Time Matters on 64-bit systems are well known. Any programmer doing a simple code verification should have stumbled on them.

Once again the brain drain of programmers and outsourcing of some programming functions have made themselves felt. And what about Quality Control, you say?  After all, these are basic issues. Oh yeah, some of the key QC staff has left as well.

Now of course, virtually nobody is actually using Word 2010 as yet, so the problem is largely theoretical. That is not the issue, however. This sort of error raises the question of whether LexisNexis has the capacity to put out reliable releases, independent of whether they have the leadership personnel or indeed the willpower to do so.  It increasingly appears that the answer to this question is “No.”

Lexis Nexis: 1984 Revisited

Most software programs have some sort of Privacy statement in which they say they will not give away your personal information to anyone, except maybe third parties whose software integrates with theirs.  The Amicus Attorney statement is fairly typical in this respect. It reads, in part:

    “We use the personal information we collect from you for providing you with information, products and services that we believe to be of value to you. ...
    “In general we do not disclose your personal information outside of our company. However, if you purchase a third party product from us, we may provide your contact information to the developers of that product so that you can be notified of updates and upgrades to that third party product. ...
    “At times we may be required by law or legal process to disclose your personal information.”

In the wake of the Annual Maintenance Program for Time Matters and PCLaw, the Lexis Nexis privacy statement is rather dramatically different:

    “Credit Investigation and Approval. You hereby authorize LexisNexis to make whatever credit investigation it deems appropriate in order to provide you with the Products and Services. By this order, you further authorize LexisNexis to exchange any information received in the course of such investigation. LexisNexis may request reports from credit reporting agencies or others. If you ask whether a credit report was requested, LexisNexis will tell you and if a report was received, LexisNexis will give you the name and address of the agency that supplied the report.”

For the full statement, see the Lexis site here.

In other works not only do they run a credit report in order to let you have the privilege of purchasing their software, but they reserve the right to give any information about you to ANYBODY AT ALL under the guise of a “credit investigation.”  1984 revisited anybody?

LexisNexis AMPs up the Revenue

Today is the last day firms can subscribe to the Time Matters Annual Maintenance Plan without a penalty.

Leaving aside the merits and cost of the AMP program, let’s look at the penalties (I just found out about this yesterday).  If you let the deadline go by, and then want to subscribe to the maintenance plan, you have to pay a penalty.  It turns out that the penalty goes back NOT to May 1, but to when you first let maintenance drop. If I understand correctly, the penalty is $12.50 per month per user for the entire time you have been without support.

So a 10-user firm that has not had support for 2 years, would have to pay $12.50 x 10 x 24 months, or $3,000 ON TOP of the AMP fee going forward.  Since historically, Time Matters had a model in which many firms depended on consultants for support, this can be a pretty hefty figure.  It may in fact turn out to be cheaper to re-purchase the entire program from scratch than to just implement maintenance now.

Time Matters Conversion to Amicus

It has always been possible to convert from older versions of Amicus to Time Matters (albeit not always totally cleanly), but it has never been possible to convert from Time Matters to Amicus.

Now, faced with mounting client dissatisfaction with Time Matters and the looming May 1 deadline for the expensive LexisNexis Annual Maintenance Plan (AMP), Gavel and Gown has announced a conversion service from Time Matters to Amicus Premium Edition (both SQL based). For $995 Gavel will convert your Time Matters, although with a caveat that “if their database requires unusual services an extra charge may apply.” Presumably this refers to extensive customization, features like User Defined Records and so on.  Nevertheless, for the first time a Time Matters firm has a realistic option to convert to Amicus.

In addition, for the month of may, Gavel is offering 50% off Amicus licenses for firms that convert.  So for a 10-user firm, the cost of conversion plus licenses would be $4,180 not including support/maintenance.

Amicus has gotten significantly more expensive than Time Matters, but offers more support options: an annual maintenance plan similar to the LN plan, yearly tech support, or no support at all. If you have a Certified Consultant, you may have other support options as well.

This option may not be for everyone (the more highly customized your Time Matters is, the less likely a conversion to Amicus would make you happy), but it is an option that has never realistically been available before.

The State of LexisNexis

It’s been a while since I’ve written about Lexis Nexis. Interestingly, several people have written with observations or questions about what I think may be going on.

The first thing to note is that LN continues to push PCLaw as the low end practice management, complete with baseball hats and ad campaigns on Craig’s List using slogans like “Practice Manager for hire: 23 years experience. 31,393 references. Loves doing everything you hate to do.” While there are also ads for accounting, note that this one does not even mention time billing and accounting.

There have also been concerted efforts to combat bad publicity. Loretta Rupert, former chief architect of the failed Billing Matters program, is  reduced to answering questions on a listserv whose existence used to be studious ignored by LN and most Certified Consultants. We are assured that everything is (or will be) just fine, and if Service Pack 2 for Time Matters 10 did not fix a lot of issues (the Worldox link, for example), these will be addressed in SP 3.

Even mentioning SP 3 raises an interesting question: if Time Matters 11 is to be out this fall (which would be in line with their normal schedule), how do they have time for SP 3? Does that mean that TM 11 will be delayed (gobbling up those Annual Maintenance Plan fees in the meantime)?

But all that is window dressing. Time Matters faces a deeper problem typified by a recent “Technorelease” in Technolawyer by “Seven Second System” a grouping of consulting firms. The main headline says it all: “Can Time Matters really be Easy to Use? — WE DID IT! Plug-ins for Time Matters. No Learning Curve and Transformative Features!”  A major problem with Time Matters (and many other software programs – Lexis is not alone in this regard) is what might be termed “checklist features.”  These are akin to “paper certifications” for consultants – you have the paper saying you are certified, but do you really know anything in real life?  A feature appears on a “checklist” for advertising purposes, but does it really work, or work reasonably?  Maybe, maybe not.

This has led to a vibrant cottage industry of programs designed to compensate for the lacunae in Time Matters functionality. These add-ons put Lexis in something of a bind, because often in order to make something work right, you have to modify some of the Time Matters code.  Steve Stockstill, formerly the Director of Software Engineering for Time Matters, recently posted a Letter to the Time Matters community highlighting the dilemma: “Having been explicitly told not to modify the Time Matters database, Data Equity is unable to adequately provide two-way database services for our Time Matters add-on products.”  The bottom line here is that Lexis is not willing to allow the third party development community to do what is necessary to enable Time Matters to work better.  Even if there are obvious problems with letting a third party mess with your code (voiding warrantys, unverifiable results, etc.), This is another short sighted position by the LN leadership.

Three Time Matters Tricks

Time Matters is an extremely powerful program that can be extensively customized. The downside is that in order to do some of the customization, you have to know one or more of a variety of programming languages (html, java). Hence the growth of consultants specializing in these areas. 

I am not a programmer, so I have to be content with talking to people who are and/or making a little collection of items that need specialized code.  Here are a couple of items.

First, you want to link an address to Google Maps.  Here is the code to link a field to Google in a PowerView (note that this may also be available in one of the Desktop Extensions in TM 10):
<a href="http://maps.google.com/maps?oi=map&q={CON:CON1_02_03} {CON:CON1_02_04} {CON:CON1_02_07}" target="_blank">(Main Address Google™ Map)</a>.

Once again, this illustrates the difference between TM and Amicus: Amicus has this function built in to the Premium edition, but uses MapQuest instead of Google. No way to change that: it is what it is.
 
A second item would be to convert a numerical date into a descriptive date.  To do this, customize a field to be calculated and enter the following:

Text                 '&FORMAT(EVE:DATE,@D4)&'
Operator          appended
Text                 (blank)

This translates the Event Date field 01/01/2010 into January 1, 2010

Another trick I posted a couple of years ago is the ability to calculate a person’s age. Here’s that one:

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.

Note that if the date of birth field is not filled in, the person will be listed as being 2010 years old.