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| Practice Mangager 8.0 | Case Management |
| Practice
Manager 8.0 is a tightly integrated case and document manager designed for law firms and
corporate legal departments seeking to interface and track complex and varied types of
information. A third-generation program, Practice Manager exudes maturity in a demanding
market by providing a stable and cohesive product. Targeted for use by firms and legal
departments with two to 85 attorneys, its goal is to manage information in a familiar and
comfortable format. The program is carefully tuned to operate with the most widely-used time and billing systems, accounting packages, document assembly programs and scanners. The program's tight fusion with Novell's GroupWise and Microsoft's Exchange simplifies the creation of a complete firm-wide database, making information exchange instantaneous. Calendars, dockets, assigned tasks, pending items and past-due items can all be viewed, filtered, assigned and recategorized in a common sense fashion. All information is maintained in one table within the database, providing a stable, speedy operating environment. I tested the program on a 133 MHz Pentium laptop with 64 MB RAM and never encountered so much as a hiccup. The program's capabilities initially seemed intimidating; it comes with a manual the size of the Manhattan Yellow Pages. But when I opened the program, I found a familiar interface: matter listing. Since matters are most of what we lawyers deal with, this was rather comforting. Matters are the foundation of Practice Manager. Like a paper file, the program permits you to organize information into folders. The matter listings include entity, document, workflow, groupware and time slot listings, as well as auxiliary screens for forms. Matters can be sorted and filtered in a myriad of fashions. Filters can be applied and removed to make information simple to find. You can also instantly determine the status of a particular matter. One unusual component: This program lets you create not only matters regarding clients, but firm administrative and personal matters as well. You can track personnel information like vendors and suppliers, your children's teachers and any special anniversary. These matters can be made private, so only you can see them. Outstanding information requests can also be tracked, and follow-ups scheduled. Each time you use the program, a time and expense slip can be created for billing purposes. The program can also remind you to create a time slip. Practice Manager provides full document
management within the program. Litigators will especially appreciate the ability to
readily create new documents, and scan, profile and log incoming ones. Interestingly, even
though Practice Manager boasts a fairly robust document management system, the company
apparently recognizes that firms using other popular document managers such as
SoftSolutions and PC Docs wouldn't want to change. There- My favorite feature of the program was the "workflow" feature. Similar to rules-based docketing, except more elaborate, you outline the flow of an entire matter, even if you don't know exactly when something is supposed to happen. In other words, you can schedule tasks to be performed, but you can also set up question-and-answer sessions that will help you analyze your case or matter. I found this latter feature to be even more attractive than the ability to program the performance of certain tasks automatically. Like any good database, training is important with Practice Manager. Any firm committing to this program will have to make a genuine commitment to staff and attorney training, both in time and money, to maximize the program's performance. |
Profession Management Technologies Inc. (706) 353-8496 www.pmti.com Windows $1,995 plus $300 per workstation Reviewed by Denise Ward, attorney, Grean & Ward, Port Chester, N.Y. PROS CONS VERDICT |
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