Law Office Management
Law Office and Case Management on the Macintosh (Part 2)
24/09/09 22:48 Filed in: Daylite
Beyond the Rolodex and the Desk Calendar
In part 1 of this article, I introduced Marketcircle Inc's Daylite 3 application. Generally speaking, Daylite is a customer relationship management (CRM) application. If the term "CRM" is a little technical, you might be familiar with either Sage Software's ACT!, Now Software's Now Up-to-Date and Contact, or Microsoft's Entourage. All of the aforementioned applications either are, or contain aspects of CRM. If that still doesn't clear things up, here's a simple description: a CRM application basically helps you mange your customers (or in the legal world, clients), your calendar, your tasks, and more, all in one application (or an integrated suite of applications). Stated another way, a good CRM application can centralize many of the tasks we as lawyers do each and every day.
Historically, there has been somewhat of a dearth of good CRM applications on the Mac platform. In fact, CRM has been one of the key weaknesses of the Mac platform for businesses with a very customer centered workflow (e.g. sales). However, the fine folks at Marketcircle have single-handedly obliterated that weakness with Daylite. In fact, I happen to believe that Daylite is not only the best CRM application on the Mac platform (a recent resurgence in the Mac platform has yielded several competitors), but the best CRM application on any platform. That said, let's take a look at what Daylite can do--or more specifically, what Daylite can do for your law practice.
Essentially, the core Daylite application handles four major areas. Those areas are calendaring, notes, contacts, and project management. Setting aside some of the more advanced features for a moment, it should be fairly obvious how each of these areas are critical to managing a busy law office. Unless your office is total chaos, I imagine that you've got some sort of system for managing each of the aforementioned types of information. At this point, you might be thinking, "but I already have a system for managing my contacts, calendar, etc., why would I want to switch?" And, that's a great question.
Perhaps the simplest explanation of Daylite's strength is that it basically integrates all of your important information. Of course, "integration" is somewhat of a five-dollar tech-term so I'll attempt to break it down a bit better. In the legal world, your clients are one of your primary groups of contacts (there are many others as well: lawyers, court attendants, expert witnesses, etc.).
Of course, if you've got a client, you probably have a legal issue that is related to your client—e.g. John Anderson's divorce. Moreover, you might have an appointment related to the client's legal issue—e.g. a 10:00 AM hearing on Thursday regarding John Anderson's divorce. To go one step further, if you have an upcoming hearing regarding John Anderson's divorce, you probably have (or will have) some notes regarding that hearing. The key here is that all of the foregoing information interrelated.
Allowing you to visualize and benefit from this type of connection is where Daylite really shines (pardon the pun). Instead of dealing with a multiple separate stores of information (which are, in fact, very connected in the real world) Daylite centralizes your information in one application. Moreover, Daylite makes it easy to interconnect or "link" people to meetings, clients to cases, notes to clients and/or cases, or almost any other connection that you can imagine while keeping all of your information immediately and easily accessible.
I've already indirectly mentioned some of the applications of Daylite in the law office in this section of the article. However, I'll expand on those concepts and show you exactly how to exploit the connections that I've just mentioned in the next segment of this article. Read on...
In part 1 of this article, I introduced Marketcircle Inc's Daylite 3 application. Generally speaking, Daylite is a customer relationship management (CRM) application. If the term "CRM" is a little technical, you might be familiar with either Sage Software's ACT!, Now Software's Now Up-to-Date and Contact, or Microsoft's Entourage. All of the aforementioned applications either are, or contain aspects of CRM. If that still doesn't clear things up, here's a simple description: a CRM application basically helps you mange your customers (or in the legal world, clients), your calendar, your tasks, and more, all in one application (or an integrated suite of applications). Stated another way, a good CRM application can centralize many of the tasks we as lawyers do each and every day.
Historically, there has been somewhat of a dearth of good CRM applications on the Mac platform. In fact, CRM has been one of the key weaknesses of the Mac platform for businesses with a very customer centered workflow (e.g. sales). However, the fine folks at Marketcircle have single-handedly obliterated that weakness with Daylite. In fact, I happen to believe that Daylite is not only the best CRM application on the Mac platform (a recent resurgence in the Mac platform has yielded several competitors), but the best CRM application on any platform. That said, let's take a look at what Daylite can do--or more specifically, what Daylite can do for your law practice.
Essentially, the core Daylite application handles four major areas. Those areas are calendaring, notes, contacts, and project management. Setting aside some of the more advanced features for a moment, it should be fairly obvious how each of these areas are critical to managing a busy law office. Unless your office is total chaos, I imagine that you've got some sort of system for managing each of the aforementioned types of information. At this point, you might be thinking, "but I already have a system for managing my contacts, calendar, etc., why would I want to switch?" And, that's a great question.
Perhaps the simplest explanation of Daylite's strength is that it basically integrates all of your important information. Of course, "integration" is somewhat of a five-dollar tech-term so I'll attempt to break it down a bit better. In the legal world, your clients are one of your primary groups of contacts (there are many others as well: lawyers, court attendants, expert witnesses, etc.).
Of course, if you've got a client, you probably have a legal issue that is related to your client—e.g. John Anderson's divorce. Moreover, you might have an appointment related to the client's legal issue—e.g. a 10:00 AM hearing on Thursday regarding John Anderson's divorce. To go one step further, if you have an upcoming hearing regarding John Anderson's divorce, you probably have (or will have) some notes regarding that hearing. The key here is that all of the foregoing information interrelated.
Allowing you to visualize and benefit from this type of connection is where Daylite really shines (pardon the pun). Instead of dealing with a multiple separate stores of information (which are, in fact, very connected in the real world) Daylite centralizes your information in one application. Moreover, Daylite makes it easy to interconnect or "link" people to meetings, clients to cases, notes to clients and/or cases, or almost any other connection that you can imagine while keeping all of your information immediately and easily accessible.
I've already indirectly mentioned some of the applications of Daylite in the law office in this section of the article. However, I'll expand on those concepts and show you exactly how to exploit the connections that I've just mentioned in the next segment of this article. Read on...
Law Office and Case Management on the Macintosh (Part 1 - Introduction)
24/09/09 22:40 Filed in: Daylite
Introduction
I've been a Mac guy for as long as I can remember. That said, it should come as no surprise that, as the person in charge of IT for my firm, we've always been a Mac based law office. Of course, a large part of the legal world (and the world at large) relies primarily on Microsoft Windows as their operating system of choice. And, because the legal services industry is relatively small, the proliferation of Windows can cause some problems for the Macintosh using attorney.
One long-standing challenge has been the search for law specific Macintosh software. This challenge can prove to be especially problematic for lawyers that limit their practice to a specific area (e.g. litigation, collections, etc.). Although Apple's switch to Intel along with the generous contributions of members of the legal community (you might be familiar with the excellent work of Mr. Randy B Singer at www.macattorney.com) have made have made this less of a hurdle than it once was, this can still be a difficult area for many attorneys.
Like Mr. Singer, I hope that my effort will enrich the world of the Mac-using attorney, but in a slightly different manner. Rather than focus on the breadth of Macintosh software available in the marketplace, this series of articles is going to focus on a specific piece of Macintosh (in this case, Macintosh-only) software that has the potential to significantly improve the mac-using law practice. The application to which I am referring is Marketcircle Inc's DayLite 3.
If you're not already familiar with DayLite, I would suggest that you head over to Marketcircle's website and have a look around. It's not only a great application from a great Mac developer, but it's also the software which I'll be focusing on in this series of articles. Read on...
I've been a Mac guy for as long as I can remember. That said, it should come as no surprise that, as the person in charge of IT for my firm, we've always been a Mac based law office. Of course, a large part of the legal world (and the world at large) relies primarily on Microsoft Windows as their operating system of choice. And, because the legal services industry is relatively small, the proliferation of Windows can cause some problems for the Macintosh using attorney.
One long-standing challenge has been the search for law specific Macintosh software. This challenge can prove to be especially problematic for lawyers that limit their practice to a specific area (e.g. litigation, collections, etc.). Although Apple's switch to Intel along with the generous contributions of members of the legal community (you might be familiar with the excellent work of Mr. Randy B Singer at www.macattorney.com) have made have made this less of a hurdle than it once was, this can still be a difficult area for many attorneys.
Like Mr. Singer, I hope that my effort will enrich the world of the Mac-using attorney, but in a slightly different manner. Rather than focus on the breadth of Macintosh software available in the marketplace, this series of articles is going to focus on a specific piece of Macintosh (in this case, Macintosh-only) software that has the potential to significantly improve the mac-using law practice. The application to which I am referring is Marketcircle Inc's DayLite 3.
If you're not already familiar with DayLite, I would suggest that you head over to Marketcircle's website and have a look around. It's not only a great application from a great Mac developer, but it's also the software which I'll be focusing on in this series of articles. Read on...