Avoid Getting Trapped

Mohr & Anderson, a firm in Hartford, Wis., with six attorneys and 12 support staff, didn’t conduct a lot of independent research before deciding to change from Timeslips to Software Technology Inc.’s Tabs3 system, office manager Rose Thomson said.

The biggest problem the firm had with Timeslips, Thomson said, was that it just wasn’t a logical program for them.

"We had to call tech support for everything,” she said. “And we found that Timeslips corrupted easily. When something in the computer system froze up, there seemed to be a window of opportunity for corruption.”

Ready for a change, the firm made the switch to Tabs3, a widely used legal-specific time and billing system, on the recommendation of the computer management company that provides technical support for its computers.

“Our computer management company told us Tabs3 is a superior billing system and that the company could provide tech support for it,” Thomson said. “But we did call some other firms who were using Tabs3 to see how they liked it. We got their names from the computer management company, which helped the firm convert to the new software.”

Some of the aspects of Tabs3 that Thomson finds most appealing are:

• The split fee feature, which allows her to split time and fees among multiple clients paying one bill.
• The ability to group and sort clients by category numbers (e.g., all insurance carrier clients will be categorized under one number), and sort time entries by task codes (e.g., correspondence, conferences, which permits easy analysis of profitability). “We can see whether the time spent on a case or matter is appropriate for the fee charged,” Thomson explained.
• The ability to assign and sort cases by principal attorney, secondary attorney or originating attorney, which allows her to determine how many clients or cases each attorney is working on and how much business he or she has brought in to the firm.
• The option of e-mailing billing invoices to clients in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) format, a
  feature that is included in Tabs3's core product, which accommodates the requests of clients
  for convenient billing.

The conversion was handled by the firm’s computer management company, which also provided the initial training. Although the firm’s employees have not had extensive training on the software since the September 2001 conversion, Thomson said they have had enough to get going.

As with most software conversions, a considerable amount of work was involved after the physical conversion from Timeslips to Tabs3. Because much of the firm’s work is insurance-related — a type of practice that requires assignment of claim numbers to files — after the conversion, Thomson had to manually assign client numbers, review and input claim numbers that were dropped during conversion or appeared somewhere in the new system they were not supposed to be, and check descriptions of work done on the files, some of which didn’t transfer from Timeslips.

Those problems notwithstanding, and despite the fact that the conversion came at a critical time for the firm — five days before the quarterly billing cycle began — Thomson and her staff were able to get its bills out in a timely fashion. “We did the conversion on Sept. 25, 2001, five days before the quarterly billing cycle ended. But we got the bills out by Oct.13” Thomson said. “It was just me, a part-time accounting person and a secretary who volunteered to help get the claim numbers input into the system. We must have been working around the clock during that period, but it didn’t seem like it. Thank goodness for those two people.”

Thomson said she thinks Tabs3 is a more intuitive program than Timeslips. Overall, she said, it’s a “fantastic system” with an easy-to-use “Help” menu. “We don’t need to call tech support every time we need help. But when we do, they are awesome,” she said. “They really know their stuff. They can provide specific answers to specific questions.”

And she writes down what they tell her so she can look back over the information for guidance when similar problems arise.

The one drawback to Tabs3 Thomson has found is that the accompanying manual isn’t particularly helpful to her. “But that’s OK,” she said. “It’s easier anyway to pick up the phone and call tech support.”

If Thomson had to go through the process of selecting and implementing a time and billing software program again, she said the one thing she might change is to do more research into the variety of products available. “But the recommendation we got for Tabs3 was a sound one,” she said. “We were told it is a superior billing system, and it is.”

She has two pieces of advice to offer other firms contemplating such a change. First, she said, think about the specific needs of your firm when researching products and have specific questions in mind for the vendors to address. Second, recognize there is a learning curve after the conversion to the new product. While the conversion itself might be literally an overnight process, learning how to use the new software is anything but.

As seen in the February/March 2002 issue of
LAW OFFICE COMPUTING
www.lawofficecomputing.com

Excerpted from Avoid Getting Trapped: Law firms offer cautionary time and billing tales.
by Debra Levy Martinelli