Law Technology

What Do Your Reports Say?

There’s an old joke that goes “What time does your watch say it is?” and the response is “It doesn’t say anything. You have to look at it”.

It’s the same way with reports and your cases. It doesn’t matter what reports you have or information you have on your cases. If you don’t constantly review them and keep moving them forward, you won’t get far.

Last December, I visited Cheryl and Beth Leone. Cheryl is a law firm management consultant and Beth has a personal injury practice in Raleigh, North Carolina. Beth was also Needles User of the Year a year or so back. As interested as I am in case management, I was very interested in seeing what they had put together.

They had done an impressive job of putting together the information that they needed. With Needles, it was a bit more kludgy than I would like. That means that they had to go through a number of menu structures, pull something into Excel, pull up Excel and sort it in a number of ways, rather than just have the information at their fingertips.

As an ex-computer person, the solution wasn’t as elegant as I would prefer, but the information was there. They did a great job by relentlessly reviewing their cases and moving the cases forward.

So the answer is what do your reports say? Nothing. You have to look at them.

Full post as published by South Carolina Trial Law Blog on August 18, 2008 (boomark / email).