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Productivity at Law Firms

Technology Boosts

Uberall Law helps deal with the challenges of managing and growing a law practice

typical day of a partner in a law firm includes lot of administrative work including opening and closing files, checking conflicts for new engagements, recording billable time spent on meetings, conference calls, verifying client billing, payment follow-ups, approving out of pocket vouchers, work instructions to associates and teams and follow-ups, recruiting, managing client relations, etc. Apart from this, the regular legal advisory and law practice work. If not the partners, then there would be dedicated staff for doing some of these functions and coordinating with partners and senior counsels with lot of manual work everywhere. As a result, all resources have to wait overtime and firms spend lot of valuable billable hours in such administrative work. With the advent of technology, law practicing firms have opted for a smarter option. They now want technology to handle most or all of the manual work, so they can concentrate on the legal practice and bill more. They can concentrate on increasing the productivity of the firm rather than managing manual process and tasks. However, all these functions are important, and for automating them with accuracy, there is Uberall Law, the collaborative legal practice management system which handles a number of office functions without any manual efforts. Legal firms can now capture more billable hours and automate and grow their law practice business. We are going to see further, what challenges a law firm faces for running successfully and how ready technology like Uberall Law can assist firms to manage and grow their practice more efficiently.

Solution by Uberall Law: Uberall Law enables law firms to capture and bill every minute they work on the client weather they are in office or on travel and automatically capture and bill all expenses incurred on telephony, travel, courier, printing, photocopy and court expenses. With automatic time entry for all daily actions, the process of billing time has been greatly simplified down to few mouse clicks. Uberall Law integrates with printers, EPABX, mobile phones and photocopy machines to capture and bill expenses as and when they occur. Time and expenses can also be easily recorded with Uberalls Time and Billing application for mobile phones.

Challenge 2:

Accurate and on time client Billing

Solution by Uberall Law: There are various traditional billing models that exist today including one time fixed fee, hourly billing, blended (team) rates, milestone based, activity based (different rates for document drafting, court attendance, etc) and retainership fees. There are various alternative fee arrangements including combination of the above like hourly + flat fee, threshold based, contingency/success fee and value based billing. Uberall Law provides a solution to this complex issue by automatically collating and tagging all the required timesheets and expenses for the given fee arrangement for further partner review. Partners or senior resources can now easily see the automated draft bills on their console and approve the same. Also, out of pocket expenses like telephone calls, courier charges, travel, counsel fees, etc can be accounted for instantly without

Challenge 1:

Accounting every billable hour and expense

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having to wait for admin staff to manually collect and tag the same against the respective matters. monitor productivity for all their matters, resources and clients across all their offices. Instant snap-shot of various activities happening across the firm including, new clients, new matters, billing and outstanding, client and resource productivity, work in progress, net billing and realization rates, growth in billable hours etc.,

Challenge 3:

Increasing Resource Productivity

Solution by Uberall Law:

Uberall Laws calendaring module sends automated alerts Ready Analytics provide greater details of every dimension and reminders about all the important dates and milestones of the firm functions including Billing, Realization & Outincluding court dates, arbitration hearings, meetings, etc standing, WIP, Productivity, Performances and Finance. well in advance so that the resources are better organized. The firm and individual calendars are also automatically Challenge 6: updated so that all the calendars are in sync. Multi Office ManageUberall Law is a very powerful tool for ment any law office and an asset that increases Forms and documents related to in value with each passing day. It is very Solution by Uberall Law: litigation, patents, trademarks can intuitive and enhances efficiency in manbe automatically generated thereLaw firms are now rapidly aging complete law practice including by saving lot of time and efforts. matters, clients, conflict checks, calendarexpanding across different ing, time, expenses, resources, billing and cities and geographies and Challenge 4: information management. Reports generstaying in touch and fully ated are clear, concise and helpful in makconnected with every team Locating, Sharing inforing different types of analysis. I would across cities is a challenge. mation/ documents and recommend this product to law firms of Knowledge management any size who want less stress and more Uberall Law is designed as peace of mind in running their firms. Solution by Uberall Law: a multi office collaborative Mr. Ravi Singhania law practice platform which Knowledge-sharing, capturing Senior Partner keeps all the offices fully contime is non-billable, and it is Singhania & Partners LLP nected with each other. With hardly a performance. Its hard Uberall Law, it is now possifor lawyers to see the intrinsic ble for teams to be spread across different geographies and value of many of the practices that knowledge managers try it is now possible to view the workload and assign tasks to to enforce. Uberall Law Knowledge Management Solution any of the associates across multi offices. has been designed to ensure that the best knowledge across the organization is captured, shared and reused rather than Challenge 7: starting each engagement from scratch. Then time will be saved, efficiency created and costs of production will drop Managing Technology and IT infrastructure as the quality of deliverables is improved. Solution by Uberall Law:

Ready-to-use templates are centrally available for reference and Uberall Law facilitates easy search and retrieval of all previously used documents so that lot of the time is saved in drafting specific agreements.Intelligent search option enables associates to quickly locate information from various reference Sections including articles, CLE, presentations, forms, Word bricks, opinions, legal Insights, precedents and templates.

Ever changing Technology landscape including, Managing Servers, System Software, Databases, IT Infrastructure, Technical Teams is always a challenge with Law Firms. Regular data backups, security access rights management, document management, system upgrades, inter-office connectivity etc is a time consuming and specialized task. Uberall Law offers a cost effective, ready-to-use and easy-toadopt cloud (Internet) hosted setup on state of the art data centers which offer bank grade security including data center security, network security, host security, software security, application security, customer data security and personnel security. 1. Unlike the popular belief, the Cloud provides a better standard of confidential data protection than most law firms can provide on their own IT setup.

Challenge 5:

Monitoring the law practice in real time

Solution by Uberall Law: At the heart of Uberall is the Law Practice real-time Dashboard, analytics and ready reports that provide complete insight of their law practice at their fingertips. Partners, senior associates and team leaders can now track and

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2. The Cloud offers a better standard of privacy for communications than traditional E-mail communication. 3. The Software as a Service (SaaS) or pay per use models that Uberall offers is more economical investment than developing or implementing traditional software. 4. Data in the Cloud is accessible anytime and is safer than on your laptop. Uberalls cloud implementation requires no hardware/ software/infrastructure and is a simple and ready-to-use solution and requires zero installation. Uberall Law is also available as an on-premise solution if required.

Challenge 8:

Managing Growth
Solution by Uberall Law: Growing law firms need an infrastructure that would support managing a large matter load and just as important, a system that could grow with the firm. Further, you would require a system that could be accessed from anywhere in the world so that lawyers can manage their matters on the move. Besides offering clients with an immediate access to spectrum of legal expertise, these growing firms also need to continue providing personalized attention and quality service, but with the ability to manage more cases which geographically spread across the world. Uberall law is a highly robust and scalable and collaborative enterprise tool utilizing advanced web and database technologies.

Challenge 9:

Client Relationship Management

Solution by Uberall Law: Managing and strengthening the client relationship is a big challenge for all growing law firms and they require an effective CRM strategy that would centralize a firm's collective information and experience about clients, prospects, and contacts, makes this information accessible to all authorized users including partners, associates and support staff apart from helping them to manage their prospects, opportunities, potential and marketing campaigns effectively. Uberall Law CRM provides and effective Client Relationship Management (CRM) technology tool to firms to track, monitor, and quantify business development progress. Various features/modules offered Uberall Law CRM include Event/Campaign Management, Opportunity Management, Proposal Generator, Experience/Deal Tracker, Client Relationship views and related analytics

Uberall Law Solutions are available for all full service, corporate, litigation, specialized and Intellectual Property firms of all sizes. Over 2,500 lawyers are using the solution in India currently across large, medium and small law firms and Uberall Law is fast becoming the most preferred technology solution for all successful firms. Uberall also has a range of other ready solutions for General Counsels, Corporate Legal for litigation/matter management across jurisdictions and Compliance Departments for managing all statutory and regulatory compliances. About Uberall Solutions (I) Limited Uberall is a technology focussed specialised Software Product Development Company in India. By combining innovative technology and best services practices, Uberall's domain expertise, proven technology, point-and-click customization, integration skills and best user experience, ensures full functionality, with ease of use.

60 | November 2011 | LegalEra | www.legalera.in