By Neil J. Squillante
What's the biggest technology pain point for law firms? There's no official study, but our statistics suggests that organizing client-related e-mail is among the top 10 and might top the list were such a study conducted. An e-mail pain reliever may have finally arrived.
LexisNexis Firm Manager . . . in One Sentence
Launched recently, LexisNexis Firm Manager is a cloud practice management system for solos and small law firms.
The Killer Feature
The new Matter Correspondence feature enables you to append e-mail messages and attachments to a matter in Firm Manager. Matter Correspondence doesn't require an add-in so it works with all e-mail services and programs--Office 365 and Outlook, Google Apps and Gmail, iCloud and Apple Mail, all Android and iOS e-mail apps, etc.
Instead, Matter Correspondence works via e-mail. Every matter has a unique correspondence e-mail address. All e-mail and attachments sent to one of these addresses gets added to the corresponding matter. You'll find all the e-mail and attachments you've sent listed in each matter's Correspondence tab. Firm Manager provides unlimited storage so there's no limit to how much you can store.
In addition to adding these e-mail addresses to your outgoing messages, you can also file messages received from others by forwarding them. Firm Manager has long offered the ability to upload documents from within a matter, but Matter Correspondence now offers an alternative for situations when it's faster to e-mail documents.
Other Notable Features
LexisNexis has added a number of other major features since our last report. Chief among these, Money Finder brings to Firm Manager a technology that LexisNexis added to PCLaw and Time Matters a few years ago. Money Finder automatically searches calendar entries, tasks, and documents created in Firm Manager to find items not associated with time and expense entries. You decide whether to bill for each item. In all likelihood, you'll find billable events you forgot to record.
Also new, the 360 Degree Dashboard View provides an overview of your day, active matters, and your entire law firm. Google Calendar Sync eliminates having to enter calendar events twice. For example, events entered on your iPhone's Calendar app appear in Firm Manager and vice versa. Similarly, if you use LawToolBox for court rules, the deadlines it generates appear in Firm Manager.
Other features include a conflicts of interest search tool that stores and date stamps the results if needed in the future, a Matter Dashboard for each matter, time and expense entry, trust accounting, invoicing, and a Microsoft Office add-in for saving Word and PowerPoint documents to Firm Manager.
What Else Should You Know?
Firm Manager runs in desktop and mobile web browsers. LexisNexis encrypts all Firm Manager data, and houses it in data centers in the United States. Firm Manager costs $44.99 per month for the first user, and $29.99 per month for each additional user (annual plans offer a 20% discount). The subscription includes 24/7 technical support, and import of your data. You can try Firm Manager for free. Learn more about LexisNexis Firm Manager.
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