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Calendaring Software Versus Outlook

Question: We have Outlook. Isn't that good enough?

Answer: That’s like asking, "We have a 40 year old Radio Flyer wagon with three wheels and a broken handle? Can’t we use that as our company car?" Seriously, it is as dramatic a comparison as what you give up by opting for a generic personal information management system like Microsoft Outlook (which given its propensity to be the number one target for security exploitation and attention by criminals might be better titled Lookout), if you consider a modern case manager, the functional chasm between the two classes of software is vast.

• A key issue -- case calendaring v. people calendaring. Outlook and most PIM-like (Personal Information Manager) systems can easily only do the latter--calendaring dates by individual people. They are simply not oriented to tracking multiple people who may be together working on a case and want to see a "case calendar" - this can be an enormous issue that can waste huge amounts of people time in the office having to look at multiple calendars and jump back and forth.
• Case information tracking - Outlook doesn’t track much - legal case managers track enormous amounts of information. This ranges the spectrum from:
  • Related party contact information
  • Court/administrative body info
  • Insurance company info including claims adjustor contacts
  • Opposing counsel info
  • Facts of the case
  • A chronology of case-related events
  • A case to-do list with a system of sophisticated and impossible to ignore "alerts" (malpractice carriers LOVE this!)
  • "Date chaining" capabilities that permits series of related events to be tied together and automatically counted and posted (i.e. using a Statute of Limitations date as a key date and automatically counting back and posting 1, 7, 30, 60, 90, 180, and 365 day ticklers, or alternatively, a trial date and counting back all the dates on a typical trial court scheduling order and three ticklers for each) - these can save literally hours of posting time and reduce manual date miscounting errors, not to mention the ability to move the entire "chain" if a trial gets bumped.
  • Conflicts related items for conflicts searching
  • You may want to see onscreen fields tagged for tracking the Hearing Examiner, the case's assigned Claim Number, the Case Number assigned by the Worker's Comp division, etc. And all this information is very easily searchable, printable, Palm-able, etc.
• There are helpful capabilities for attaching documents to cases and being able to launch them while looking at the case being worked on.
• Conflict Checking - how many small firms have a system for checking for conflicts of interest when a new case is opened that is about as sophisticated as standing out in the hall and yelling "Anyone ever heard of ABC Corporation?" If there's no answer, the case is accepted because the "conflicts check" is done. The problem of course is that is the day that the partner who just finished a suit against ABC Corp.'s holding company is out fly fishing sans pager and cell phone ... thus ... silence from the end of the hall. Malpractice carriers HATE that method . . . they really, really do. In legal case managers, conflicts checking is actually an incredibly powerful text search system, scouring every scrap of case information in your system!
• Integration with billing systems for passing client/matter information back and forth and also for passing time entries from the case manager to the billing system. Typically a couple of months of captured time that would otherwise fall between the cracks should pay for the ENTIRE case management implementation ... easily in many cases. And this doesn't even begin to consider the efficiencies gained by the reduction of duplicative information entry.
• Easy integration of contact info with your word processor.
• Document assembly-building "smart documents" - treating the mass of information stored and track by a legal case manager as the perfect repository for assembling routinized documents, you can integrate with Word or WordPerfect.
• The Timeline/Chronology function to show the progress of work on a case is incredibly useful.
• Synchronizing with laptop/remote systems far more easily than Outlook ... the ability to send a remote update file to a branch office PC, a mobile lawyer's laptop or a partner's home PC system is nothing short of ingenious.

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