Why are more and more firms changing to LegalSuite?
I have been at the helm at LegalSuite for over a year now and both our user and client base has grown dramatically during this period. Today, nearly 7000 people use LegalSuite on a daily basis to manage their legal practices and the number is growing month by month.
This is a feat we are quite proud of, considering the current economic climate, and as Chief Operations Officer, I was interested to find out why. What are we doing right? What had caused the sudden interest in LegalSuite?
After conducting some ad hoc investigations and interviewing a number of our clients, I learnt the following.
Firstly, our clients reported to me that they are very happy with our after-sales service. With only 21 members in the LegalSuite team we are by no means the biggest in the market, but we seem to be able to provide the level of service and response times that our clients appreciate.
This has largely been achieved with the help of a bit of modern technology. Most of our clients are linked to our support centre
via Remote Desktop or SimpleHelp. If there is a problem, these programs allow our staff to dial into a site, take over the client's computer and fix the problem almost immediately.
Secondly, they said, the program "works in real life". Apparently many of our clients are beginning to use more and more of the management tools built into the LegalSuite program. Many of them say they are seeing results in the form of better productivity and less mistakes. They say they are now able to manage a large number of Matters simultaneously because they rely on the LegalSuite program to bring them to their attention when they need attending to.
It was re-assuring to get this type of feedback because "Management by Exception" is one of the cornerstones which LegalSuite was built around.
Management by Exception is basically a principle that allows you to manage a large number of Matters by only showing you the exceptions. This can be better described as “Only show me the Matters that I need to attend to today”.
In LegalSuite this is achieved in four ways:
(a) Reminders are the key to managing a large number of Matters.
Basically, Reminders tell an Employee what he/she needs to do on a daily basis. As each Reminder is completed, the Employee ticks it off as “done”.
Any undone Reminders are carried over to the next day.
Many Reminders are created automatically for the user when they perform certain tasks within the program.
For example, when a Letter of Demand is printed, a Reminder is automatically created to check if you had a response from the debtor in, say, 10 days time. This file can now be forgotten. Ten days later, however, the Employee will check their Reminders for the day and be reminded to check if any response was received from the Debtor. If there was no response, the Employee then prints a Summons and another Reminder is created “Check for response to the Summons” in, say, another 10 days time.
And so the process continues.
If set up correctly, Reminders can be a very effective way to ensure that a Matter is attended to on a regular basis.
(b) Alerts show you any Matters that might need your attention because a situation has arisen that you may not be aware of.
When you load the LegalSuite program, it examines each Matter and checks for certain criteria such as a Matter that is about to prescribe, a debtor that didn’t meet a promise to pay, a bond that is taking too long to register, a trademark that need to be renewed, or secretary who is falling behind on their Reminders etc.
(c) Unlike an Alert (which examines the database for any ‘red flags’) an Event is triggered when something happens while you are working within the program.
When an Event is triggered, a number of tasks can be performed automatically by the program.
For example, you might want to by notified via sms when a bond of over a million rand comes into your firm. Or you might want to get an e-mail every time you receive a new instruction from an important client.
Events are very effective in giving real time feedback on Matters that need your attention.
(d) Finally, despite all these checks, LegalSuite also ensures that no file “falls through the cracks” by allowing you to draw a report showing any inactive Matters i.e. files that are live but which have no activity on them.
These simple tools are allowing our clients to increase their productivity, improve their service delivery and, as a result, become more profitable.
More importantly, many of them have said that LegalSuite has given them “peace of mind”, i.e. they are confident in its ability to manage their Matters and rely more and more on the program to tell them what to do and which Matters to attend to.
They say they can now delegate many of the more onerous tasks to less skilled employees and have more time to attend to more lucrative tasks or ones that require the expertise for which they were trained.
This was high praise indeed. I finally understood why more and more firms were enquiring about LegalSuite. Our clients, it turned out, were becoming our best salesmen!
This was very satisfying to learn and I realised that after 22 years in the field, LegalSuite has matured into a program that not only offered good value for money, but also gave real benefits to those who used it properly.