USING REMINDERS TO MANAGE YOUR MATTERS

 

 

Introduction

 

Reminders can be very powerful tools to manage a large volume of Matters and form the core of the Management by Exception principle on which LegalSuite is based.

 

This area of the program has recently been enhanced and improved and this document will illustrate some of these changes that have been made and how to take use Reminders effectively to manage a legal practice.

 

What are Reminders?

 

A Reminder is basically a “message” that reminds an Employee to check on a Matter or do a particular task – sometime in the future.

 

Note: The Reminders in LegalSuite are Matter related. i.e. they should not be used to manage one’s personal appointments or remind oneself to “collect the laundry” etc.  3rd party PIM software such as Outlook are better suited for these tasks.

 

As you can see from the definition, there are four components to a Reminder:

 

·         The Message (i.e. the wording)

·         The Future Date (i.e. when it must be done)

·         Who it is assigned to (i.e. who should do it)

·         Who completed the task (i.e. who actually did it)

 

Manual Reminders

 

Inserting a reminder manually is straightforward. You simply press INSERT in the Reminders screen on the Desktop (Fig 1)

 

 

Fig 1: Adding a manual Reminder

 

 

Automatic Reminders

 

LegalSuite has the ability to insert automatic Reminders for you. These should form 99% of the Reminders on the system.

 

Automatic Reminders are generated from two sources: (1) Plans of Action and (2) the Document Assembly process. You can view these Reminders in the “Setup” Menu under the “File Management” sub-menu (Fig 2)

 

Fig 2: Viewing the Reminders

 

 

Plan of Action Reminders

 

A Plan of Action is simply a pre-defined list of Reminders that are inserted after Matter take-on.

 

Fig 3: Plan of Action Reminders

 

You specify the Plan of Action when adding a new Matter (Fig 4)

 

Fig 4: Specifying the Plan of Action

 

When you press OK, the program creates all the Reminders for you

 

Fig 5: Reminders created by a Plan of Action

 

 

These pre-defined Reminders are suitable for Matters which have a rigid and predictable series of steps (such as Conveyancing).

 

Some areas of law are less predictable and in these cases it is better to use Document-based Reminders.

 

Document-based Reminders

 

These reminders are associated with a particular Document and are inserted whenever the Document is assembled

 

They are grouped by Document Set because each area of law will typically have a different work process (and therefore different Reminders). See Fig 5

 

Fig 6: Document-based Reminders

 

To add a Reminder to a Document, you go to the “Browse” Menu and choose “Documents”. Click on the CHANGE button to edit the Document’s properties and click on the “Reminders” Tab (Fig 7)

 

 

Fig 7: Adding a Reminder to a Document

 

Press INSERT to add a Reminder and then select one from the list (or click on the … button and then press INSERT to create a new Reminder).

 

Fig 8: Creating a new Reminder

 

When this Document is next assembled, the Reminder will automatically be inserted.

 

 

Note: You can delete an existing Reminder. This can be useful in certain circumstances where an event occurs which makes a previously-inserted Reminder obsolete. For example: If you generate a Summons and then a few days later the Defendant pays the debt in full, you may want to remove the Reminder telling you to apply for Default Judgement – because it is now meaningless.

 

 

Assigning Reminders to a particular person

 

In the past, Reminders (or ToDo Notes as they were called then) were assigned to the person who owns the Matter (Fig 9)

 

Fig 9: Specifying who “owns” a Matter

 

This was acceptable in a single user environment, but in larger firms, there are often a team or group of people working on a particular Matter and some task needed to be assigned to a specific person in the team.

 

Initially we added the ability to assign a Reminder to a specific Employee but this soon caused problems because if the Employee left the firm or moved to another dept, they would still get Reminders allocated to them. One would have to then go through all the Reminders and change them. This was totally unsatisfactory.

 

We therefore changed this to allow Reminders to be assigned to a specific Role, e.g. Candidate Attorney. This proved to a be a far better solution.

 

Employees are assigned Roles in the Employees Settings screen (Fig 9)

 

 

Fig 10: Assigning a Role or Roles to an Employee

 

Since an Employee can play more than one Role in a firm, provision has been made to add numerous Roles per Employee.

 

Once all the Employees in the firm have been setup correctly, you can now assign a Reminder to a particular Role, e.g. Litigation Candidate Attorney (Fig 11)

 

Fig 11: Assigning a Reminder to an Employee who plays a specific Role

 

When this Document is next generated, the program will attempt to assign this Reminder to the appropriate person. It does this by looking at the list of Employees for this Matter (Fig 12) . .

 

Fig 12: The Employees working on a Matter

 

. . . and tries to find the Employee who has been assigned the Role “Litigation Candidate Attorney” and who is working on this Matter. If it is successful, it assigns the Reminder “Set down Trial Date” to this person, otherwise it will stop and ask you to specify who is playing this role on this Matter (Fig 13)

 

Fig 13: Specify who plays this Role on this Matter

 

 

Determining who completed the Task

 

The person who completes the task, may not be the same person who it was assigned to. When the Reminder is marked as “Done”, the program records the user’s name in the “Done By” field (Fig 14).

 

Fig 14: Specifying who completed the Task

 

Conclusion

 

As you can see, Reminders can be a very powerful tool and if setup correctly can help you manage your practice very effectively.