We have been LexisNexis® Certified Independent Consultants (CIC) since 1997 providing planning, implementation, customization, training and support for Time Matters® nationwide. 

As experienced CICs, we can help you develop a plan to get the most value from Time Matters® for your investment.

• Customized Time Matters screens to track the information that is important to your areas of practice.
• Organize all case related information giving everyone access to cast of characters, events, dead lines, documents, phone calls, billing details, and so on.
• Give everyone access to every staff member’s case related emails.
• Use standardized file naming and saving rules to ensure everyone saves documents according to firm policy.
• Scan documents and save trips to the filing cabinet with paper-less office features.
• Use the information in each case to automatically and accurately generate letters, pleadings, etc. in seconds. 
• Wirelessly synchronize your contacts and calendar to your iPhone, Palm Pre, Blackberry, or Windows Mobile phone.

Whether on site or online, our Consultants have been delivering successful training sessions for years. With today’s technology, you can connect to one of our CICs and work ‘hands on’ with them wherever you are located.

For new installations we recommend a group session to establish goals, build excitement, and get everyone on the same page. This is followed by a budgeted amount of one on one training and Q/A time for each staff member. We have used this training method successfully for a number of years.  There are also free (with your AMP or LNTPA subscription) training videos from LexisNexis® available online that offer additional training value.  We do our best to guide you to these resources when appropriate.

The document management features included in Time Matters® are extremely valuable. The idea is to make all case documents easy to find by attaching them directly to the case information in the program.  There are four types of documents to consider:

1. Electronic documents produced by the staff using a word processor, Excel and so on. Time Matters® adds the capability to save documents directly to a case from each of these programs.
2. Paper documents that are produced outside the office and are sent to the firm to be reviewed edited and returned. The best example of this is interrogatories to be answered.
3. Electronic documents sent to the firm via email, web download, or heaven forbid - disk. These are typically in Adobe Acrobat or word processor format. These documents are stored in Time Matters® much like electronic documents produced internally.
4. Paper documents that are produced outside the office and are physically sent to the firm to be reviewed and stored. These documents typically go in the paper file were that must be manually pulled and refilled re-filed each time they are needed.

You already have a large store of existing electronic documents for your currents and past cases. These can easily be attached to each client case using a manual drag and drop procedure.  This is very easy to do, but it is a manual process and will take some time.  Consider doing this only for your current open cases.

As new electronic documents are created, either from scratch or by editing old documents and using “Save As”, they are easily saved directly to a case Time Matters using the auto-naming feature. Rather than depending on each staff person to consistently create client folders and document names, use auto-naming to automate this process. The staff person simply specifies the case, gives a document description and the system files the document away based on predefined rules.  The document is instantly available to anyone in the firm directly from the case file.

Many firms we talk to are interested in document scanning as a way to recover some storage space. Unfortunately “back file scanning” is typically slow and expensive. For a project like this to be successful consider getting a large extremely fast scanner and hiring a temp to run it, or simply pay a scanning service to do the job.

On the other hand, it’s very reasonable for a firm to scan documents on open cases as they come in day-to-day. Be aware, even the smallest firm will not get the job done effectively with a cheap scanner from a Sunday circular. You must invest in a “sheet feeding” scanner - meaning a scanner that will accept a stack of paper to be scanned, not just a single sheet at a time.

Some firms prefer to put a scanner on each person’s desk.  The SnapScan products are very popular for this.

We’ve also seen a lot of success, and typically recommend, using an office copier that offers scanning capability. This requires everyone go to the copier when they need to scan something, but the copier scanners are typically much faster than desktop scanners.  Plus it is less expensive to add scanning capability to a copier than to purchase some number of desktop scanners. It’s an issue of scale. We can discuss the options and help you make the best choice for your firm.

Whatever you choose, be sure the system is capable of creating PDF documents as output.  You can then use the purchased version of Acrobat, or with the newer versions are of Time Matters, the free Acrobat Reader to save your scanned PDF directly to a case in Time Matters®.

The goal of the scanning we’ve talked about so far is to make electronic pictures of paper documents so they are readily accessible on your computer. In other words, we are replacing a trip to the filing cabinet to retrieve a piece of paper with a couple of mouse clicks to see a picture of that piece of paper. 

Many people don’t understand why they can’t edit the text once they have scanned a document.  Think of that scanned document as a picture.  The computer sees dots on the screen, not characters. If you want to edit a scanned document (interrogatories for example) you must first process it with some OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software so the computer will recognize the picture of the scanned document as a page of editable text. There are a number of OCR products available and we can help you make a selection.

Many of the document automation concepts are explained in the Advanced Customization section. That section covered the field information in Time Matters®.  This section will discuss some of the details of using that information to create documents.

Time Matters offers two different methods for automatically creating documents. Both offer unique benefits so you may choose to use both in your project.

Many consultants tend to prefer this method for creating automated documents.  It is a very powerful and useful feature. Everyone understands how did you use the clipboard to copy and paste text in a document. Time Matters’ Formattable Clipboard extends the power of the clipboard by allowing you to pre-load formatted text onto the clipboard ready to be pasted. This formatted text could be the contents of a letter, a fax or a pleading. The real power of the Formattable Clipboard is its ability to include client and case information from Time Matters in the text as it’s loaded onto the clipboard.  So for example, you could create a letter to your client requesting last year’s tax returns and the letter would automatically include the client’s name and address etc.  Once on the clipboard, this letter can be pasted into a document to be mailed or directly into an e-mail message.

While the Formattable Clipboard is flexible and easy-to-use, it does have limitations:

• Once a document is created it’s still up to the user to properly name and save the document to the case.  This is trivial if the user takes advantage of the document auto-naming feature as they should, but the choice is left up to the user. In contrast, Merge Templates create the document and automatically save it all in one step.
• Precise document formatting is more difficult with the Formattable Clipboard than with Merge Templates. Merge Templates allow you to use font and alignment settings as well as tables to precisely format and place your text.  This is much more important in a pleading than in a simple letter. NOTE: There is a way to use tables in Formattable Clipboard, but it is not specifically designed to do this.
• Using Merge Templates in Word (or WordPerfect) makes the built-in power of the word processor (including macros) available in the document creation process. This is most effectively used in complex documents.

Merge Templates in Time Matters are a little more involved to set up than Formattable Clipboard templates, but once configured they are very easy to use to create precisely formatted documents.  The Formattable Clipboard loads text on the clipboard and is typically dropped on a blank page.  Merge Templates start with a skeleton document (a template) that is formatted to look exactly the way you want it to look. During the merge process Time Matters pushes client and case information to predefined locations in the document then automatically saves the document using the auto-naming rules.

There are a number of tricks to know and ‘gotchas’ to be aware of when designing and creating Merge Templates. We have developed very specific rules and guidelines for effective template design. Nearly every paralegal we’ve worked with has asked that we train them to become merge template experts.  This seems like a good idea but once the initial push to create a library of templates is over the paralegal typically forgets most of what they learned. Creating templates isn’t that complicated, but there are enough steps that it’s easy to get lost if you don’t do it frequently. 
Our solution to this problem has been to develop a library of generic templates of various types.  A paralegal can use any of these templates as a starting point for a new, similar template.  Our prepackaged templates will shorten a paralegal’s learning curve, but most firms prefer to outsource the initial push on templates for the project to us.  This frees the paralegals up to deal with other project details and learn to use the new system. 

The issue comes back to overwhelming the staff with new responsibilities versus introducing a mostly complete system that solves their problems on ‘day one’.  The paralegals get real value from templates that are already customized for the firm and in place.  Once they have some experience and are more comfortable with Time Matters it isn’t difficult to teach them how to create new templates from the ones we’ve supplied.

Both of these Time Matters document automation capabilities are valuable and offer different benefits in different situations.  We can help you choose which technology to use for each of your needs.

Securely and reliably access your office, your email, your documents and your Time Matters from home, court or while traveling. With our remote access solutions your office is always at your fingertips.

Don’t pay a monthly subscription fee for a service to remotely access your office PC over the web! We can inexpensively setup the remote access technology included for free with the Windows you already own.

If you have remote offices we can provide a Terminal Server configuration that will allow your remote workers to reliably access Time Matters®, client documents, emails and even the printers in both offices.  Best of all your data stays in just one place where it is secure and can be easily backed up.

Matters in Motion offers data conversion services to move your existing information from your old program to Time Matters®. When you are ready to make the move to Time Matters®, our extensive data conversion experience can take the worry out of the transition with our data conversion solution.

Data conversion means pulling information from any existing programs and putting it into the new system. Sometimes this is as simple and straightforward as pulling all names and e-mail addresses from everyone’s e-mail program.  A slightly more complex conversion would be to migrate all of your client names and addresses from your accounting program.  We have many years of complex data conversion experience and can convert calendar data, case data and so on.

One benefit of data conversion is the staff will be very excited to see all of their client contacts available the very first time they see the program. They can receive training on the “go live” day and immediately start doing productive work. Compare this to the depressing alternative of announcing that everyone will stay late for the next week doing manual data entry of contact names and addresses.

This mention of manual data entry does bring up an important point. Automated data conversions can almost always be accomplished given enough time and money.  If we can accurately convert 1000 names and addresses in two hours then you are certainly ahead of the game.  But sometimes conversions are too complex to be done this quickly.  That’s why we typically estimate 1-3 hours to examine your data and make a recommendation.  Sometimes we are able to complete the entire conversion during this initial examination period.  If not, we will give you a range of hours required to complete your more complex conversion. Sometimes this is the best way to go.  However, sometimes you will be better off to simply hire one or two temporary workers to manually enter the data.  We will give you the information you need to choose the most cost effective plan.

Again we work with the point person during this phase of the project. They should know enough about the existing programs and what information needs to be converted to guide us in our efforts.

Relatively complex conversions are best done in multiple passes.  We copy data from the old system, setup a procedure to massage and convert it, and then import it to the new system. This is all done well before the actual “go live” day. This allows everyone to examine the final product and make any adjustments necessary to the process.  We can dump the data converted in the test from the new system, make adjustments, and go through the procedure again, as many times as necessary until everything is just right.  We do one final conversion of the real data just before “go live” day.

There is one unique piece of the total solution we can offer to a firm practicing civil litigation, where medical bills, medical records, subrogation payments, lost earnings, firm expenses and so on must be managed.  To automate this type of work successfully you need a system that will allow you to enter the details (medical bills or service dates for example) and let the system deal with keeping the math updated. You need a system that will always show the current damage and expense totals, at a glance. For some cases, you need the ability to dig into the details behind a specific charge or expense so you can easily explain and justify them to the opposing party. All the details and calculations should come together on revealing reports, including a Settlement Statement ready for the client’s signature.

Time Matters is a very flexible program, but its ability to be customized does not include any option to handle complex mathematical calculations. We developed an add-on product called CaseWORTH to fill this need.  CaseWORTH isn’t technically a feature package.  It’s a separate software product that works with Time Matters to complete the big picture for civil litigation firm.

You can learn more about CaseWORTH at www.caseworth.com

Spending too much time at the office?

Would you like today’s appointments and yesterday’s performance numbers in your email inbox on your iPhone, Blackberry or home PC?

Whether you are the managing partner or an associate MatterFX keeps you in touch with Time Matters®, the nerve center of your firm’s operations. Calendar, billing, document production – whatever you can think of – if it can be tracked in Time Matters® it can be delivered to your email inbox automatically, effortlessly.

Developed by experienced legal IT consultants for lawyers on the go, MatterFX comes with a great set of email reports and can be extended to track what matters most to you.  Here are just a few included reports:

• Your Daily Calendar
• Phone numbers for today’s appointments
• Staff Productivity yesterday, this week and last 30 days
• Firm billing yesterday, this week, last 30 days and year-to-date
• Case Load report shows firm growth as historical trend of new cases vs. closed cases

Delivery of reports can be tailored to your needs. Want your calendar in the morning and productivity reports in the evening – no problem! Want your calendar at 7:30 and Noon – done!

You and your staff invest the effort into managing your world with Time Matters®. Get the most value from that goldmine of information delivered where and when you need it!

MatterFX – What do you want in your inbox?

You can learn more about  MatterFX at www.matterfx.com

Have specific needs, but no software program to fit those needs? Our custom software development solution can give you the information you want, where you want it.

A user interface is the part of the software you “use”.  It is the screens your see, the buttons you click, the fields where you enter information.  Time Matters is very customizable, but if you want your Time Matters to look and operate just so, we can design a custom user interface to meet your needs. Years ago it was common to hire someone to write custom software from the ground up.  That simply isn’t economically feasible anymore because robust and flexible systems like Time Matters are common.
	Our custom interfaces offer value by building on top of the powerful Time Matters engine.  So we aren’t building from the ground up.  Our custom software adds value to existing products by building a custom skin or look and feel for the commercial product.
Would you like to discuss how a custom interface for Time Matters® might help your staff be more productive with less training and chance for errors?  Contact us here.

The dashboard in your car constantly reports information about the health and status of your vehicle.  We can build a custom dashboard to constantly report information about the health and status of your firm.  See staff productivity, billing status, case load trends, important deadlines, running SOL list, or really anything you want or need to know. Would you like to be able to put your finger on the pulse of your firm at a glance? Contact us here.

Our TMJustice product is an example of an alternate skin over the powerful Time Matters engine.  It is designed specifically to allow prosecutors to securely share Time Matters case information with various law enforcement and justice entities, such as a sheriff's office, jails, city police stations, courts/judges and a clerk's office. These entities need access to the prosecutor’s case information so they can coordinate their efforts.  TMJustice allows these entities to see information like defendants, case numbers, assigned prosecutors and defense attorneys, charges, incarceration status, next hearing date, next trial date and so on. Some entities also need all, or carefully restricted, access to case documents. Preconfigured views allow case information to be easily filtered and grouped as each user requires. Authorized users can export the case data to PDF or Excel. New TMJustice portal users require practically no training to find the information they need in seconds.

Would you like to discuss how you might securely share your Time Matters® information with co-counsel, selected clients, remote offices or just for your own convenient access?Contact us here. Click here to watch a short TMJustice demo video. Contact us for a live demo of the product or to discuss how to use TMJustice in your firm. NOTE: TMJustice is just one example of how Matters in Motion can build a custom portal to Time Matters for secure use on the web or just on the PCs/Macs in your office. If you want to see your Time Matters® information on a Mac, a custom web portal is an option for you.  If you like the capabilities Time Matters® offers but wish it looked “just so” contact us to discuss our custom development services.

We can develop links to share information between Time Matters and other programs like Outlook, QuickBooks, and so on.  Unlock and use your data where you need it.

Would you like to share your information between Time Matters and another program? Contact us here.