Law Technology

Smart Advocate - The Best Program that's NOT being Sold

I’ve had a strange odyssey in my search for case management programs. I knew I needed to upgrade, but honestly didn’t know how to manage my firm. I knew how to practice law, but not how to manage my practice.

No problem, I thought. I’ll just get the best program out there, use the examples they have and then adjust and modify from there. It turns out that none of the case management software companies know anything about case management. That seems somewhat odd and surreal, but it’s true. You would think that they would compile a ‘Best of’ reports that seem to be the most popular for people and see the common interests, but they don’t. That’s not saying anything bad about any of the programs in particular, but against all of the software companies. I would ask about management reports and they would say “Yep. Got them”. Yes, but what……”Anything you want. We have a report writer that can do anything you want”. Yes, but what….”Anything you want. We have a report writer that can do anything you want”. Okay. It was a bit disheartening, so I decided to write some of my own management reports and learn how to manage a firm on my own. It’s actually not as hard as it looks. Things that wake you up in the middle of the night worrying about, that’s what you need to design a report for.

Anyways, there’s a lot of programs out there. Needles was the top of the line for a number of years, but I now believe that TrialWorks has knocked it off the perch and I like TrialWorks the best. My only gig with TrialWorks is that they are rabidly pro-MicroSoft. They use Outlook for their calendar and e-mail. I really prefer not to be in MicroSoft if I can avoid it and don’t use Outlook. I know the days of avoiding MicroSoft are long gone and as a lawyer don’t want to fight a losing battle on that, but we would have to switch everything over to Outlook.

I paid half of TrialWorks and they converted my TimeMatters data, but because of some trials that came up all together and some other issues, we held off on doing a final install on TrialWorks and starting to use it.

In the meantime, I saw Smart Advocate. While I liked both Needles and TrialWorks and thought that TrialWorks was by far the better of the two programs, neither one really grabbed me. Neither one reached up, grabbed me by the throat and said “Oh my God. You HAVE to have this program”. Smart Advocate did.

I have a picture in my mind of what a case management program should look like and do. TrialWorks and Needles did a lot, but there was a lot they didn’t do. Not Smargt Advocate. It matched almost exactly the picture I had for a case management program in my head. (And for an ex-programmer, that’s saying a lot).

THere’s a lot of features I like about Smart Advocate. The primary ones are I like the main overview screen, but I especially like that when a client comes in, it establishes a client specific mini-website that will automatically update the client. When you get the accident report in and save it, it will automatically e-mail the client and they can go to ‘their’ website and look at and/or download a pdf version of it. As you get the meds in, it will post a copy of the medical records to the client website and notify the client automatically be e-mail.

These are all automatic notifications and postings. This is all done without your staff having to do anything different, special or extra. The client will be kept up to date and can get a copy of all of their medical records without you having to make extra copies.

I strongly, strongly believe that the web-based approach is the way to go in the future. That’s a huge feature for keeping clients updated and informed. As far as I know, Smart Advocate is the only program doing it.

I also had heard about Smart Advocate about 2–3 years ago from an person doing legal outsourcing to India, who had been helping them with the program (or possibly had people working with the program). He said that the program was amazing and would blow the doors off anything that was commercially available.

So, I held off on finalizing TrialWorks and contacted Smart Advocate. They were very nice, but said they were doing a series of their first installs in-town (New York) and surrounding areas, so they could run out there and fix the problem if they needed to. Okay. Sounds good.

So, I gave them a month and called back. It appeared that they had a programmer on staff that was doing all of the in-house stuff and then also doing the work (and modifications) on installs for other firms. The firm didn’t give this programmer any additional assistance to work on technical issues for the programs sold, or even for a secretary / salesperson / trainer. In fact, when you called, you got the law firm and the receptionist didn’t even know anything about the software being sold.

I waited from April through December for a total of nine months. I was finally told that they had decided not to sell it outside of New York as they couldn’t support it otherwise. I found that a bit odd. We have broadband and a tech savvy crew. Our primary tech guy is in Myrtle Beach, but does 95% of his work remotely and I’m sure they could deal with any issues remotely as well. I was told that a lot of people were calling and wanting the program, but that a single programmer could only do so much at a time, monitoring the installs and making changes and upgrades to the inhouse programs and that they had a stack of people clamoring for the program.

I sent an e-mail to Jerry Parker, the senior partner of the firm and never heard back from him. So……after an abundance of patience, I decided it was time to move on. I was sort of shocked to learn that I had been waiting 9 months. I had thought it was about 6 months, but I referenced the date on the initial post about Smart Advocate in my e-mail to Jerry Parker and realized it was about 9 months.

I received an e-mail from TrialWorks inquiring about going live and finishing the TrialWorks install. I asked them about a web-based solution and if it was in the works or at least in the intermediate future to have a client specific website and never got a response.

So…..what to do. My thinking is that the web-based solution is the best, but Smart Advocate doesn’t want to sell their program and TrialWorks won’t have that feature. I would have to believe that some program will have that feature in the next 2–3 years.

While I still believe that TrialWorks is the best program on the market and recommend it to people on a regular basis, switching case management systems is a major undertaking. I don’t think it’s smart to switch case management systems twice within a five year period. So, I’m going to hang out in TimeMatters until an appropriate web-based solution comes along.

I’ve upgraded from TimeMatters 6 to TimeMatters 9 and also upgraded our Out of the Box templates. We’ll work on getting exactly the reports we want and to put some time and effort into making the program work like we want it to. We’ll switch to a good web-based solution when it becomes available.

And that’s what I’ve been up to on my ‘case management summer vacation’.

I really do hope that Parker and Waichman decide to get serious about selling Smart Advocate and decide to run that as a business as opposed to a side hobby and I can buy that program. As it is, it makes it difficult to put my entire firm on a program where the people writing it are only half committed to.

Full post as published by South Carolina Trial Law Blog on February 10, 2009 (boomark / email).