Post by Nelson Teixeira, muchBeta’s Chief Data Officer:

LawRD’s reports are devised so that any law firm manager gets an immediate answer on data submitted to the system.

To that end, we’ve identified in the system, the main Entities to which data is associated to. These are: Clients, Matters, Lawyers, Rainmakers and Performance. These entities can be individually used as value aggregators or combined as data filters.

Next, we’ve also identified all numerical Pointers on: how much we have forecast on costs, how much are we actually spending and how much are we profiting. We have also crossed these basic pointers with invoices status and the partial amonts of these dedicated to expenses and tasks. This data allows us to know, among other important issues, the Net Worth logged in the system the Plan Accomplish Ratio or the Time Productivity.

This data analysis will enable the end user with a tool for spotting, in an analytic fashion,  the causes for an atypical billing period, a decrease on revenue, growth or slowing trends. When examining the issues we’ve mentioned, LawRD’s reports will tell us about: Who, to Whom, What, When, Brought by Whom, under Whose Responsability and the ever wanted HOW.

In order to ease the equation of problems, reports are sorted by Entities, each having four analysis groups: Money, Time, Profitability and Productivity. Every group contains a set of pointers clustered by the entity previously chosen. If willing to do so, users can also filter data through a form containing all six entities.

Example: lawyer John presents a 25% decrease on productivity for this month. Given his quite up to standard and regular performance over the past few months, I’m having some trouble pin pointing what is the cause for that. The issue may present three possible angles:

• John is losing focus and is just not keeping up with his usual performance, as the productivity report states.
• The firm is going through a rough spot. That can easily be concluded by the time line of the report on Turnover.
• Jonh is working on a matter that turned out to be a black hole. To check on this case, I must select the matter entity, the Time analysis group and the filter lawyer John. A discrepancy between the logged time and the billed time will sort the cause for this problem.

Given the large amount of data used in every report, which involves nearly all application’s data structures, we had to devise a strategy of data cache in order to simplify and streamline data selection. The sole minor issue here is that, data is not displayed in real time (updating happens every half hour), but when it is imperative, users can override this by manually updating it in a single click.

Post by Susana Gonçalves, lawyer, partner at Advogados Associados and LawRD user since 2009:

“When I first started my practice, I was the youngest in a newly found firm and for that reason I was assigned to be the middle person with the IT service that we worked with, assuming that being the youngest equaled to be the most apt to understand IT’s procedures and language. To put it into context I’m talking
about 1993, the time when Windows OS was starting off in Portuguese offices - and on its way to be the universal tool it is now - and emails were timidly sneaking into our routines.

For this reason I was compelled to become acquainted with computers and programs, solely from the user’s view point. By the time I started my own practice, experience had taught me that I couldn’t do without an effective management program, but the ones available were expensive and very limited, which led me to give up IT completely and go back to the good old timesheet on paper, later turned into Excel when it was time to bill, with all inherent lapses.

However, when I found LawRD and the help I get from its support team at muchBeta, the scene changed and now I have and effective control on all relevant management elements, effortlessly and with no significant time cost, checking on data further than I used to be able to, in the little time I have for my practice management, withstanding the assessment of team work and profitability of the resources allocated.

It stands to reason that in order to get results from LawRD there is a need for discipline when it comes to submitting data, but pretty soon it became as natural as checking my email for new messages.

One of its qualities that I couldn’t let go without mention is the easy access it enables at anytime, anywhere, thus allowing me to log any task, even at night from my home and away from the office’s bustle.

And of course I have to stress the pricing: unbeatable and the most inexpensive.

LawRD makes it easy for me to fill in billing sheets, objectively assess performance and make more time for a much better work.

Thanks muchBeta!”

LawRD is a SaaS - software as a service - application, thus delivered over the Internet. Therefore, LawRD’s users data is stored on Web servers.

It is only natural for issues and doubts on data security to arise.

Before getting to the point, here is some food for thought: it is almost certain that you already bought something or did some sort of banking transaction on the Internet. Most definitely, you use e-mail.

The commom denominator to these 3 situations: with no exceptions, they all use Web servers.

With LawRD, we have implemented industry’s best practices in order to offering the safest data protection possible. Such procedures are:

• Data storing on Amazon servers via Amazon Web Services (AWS). Amazon web servers have physical security that equals the one found in military facilities. For instance, every access, be it physical or electronic, to data centres by Amazon employees is registered and audited regularly. AWS service security was good enough for NASDAQ to lodged store it’s Market Replay service.
  Adding to this, operational security is ensured by LawRD’s development team and suported by implementing firewalls and permanently updating the operating systems that support the Web application stored on Amazon servers.

• Safe communication between users’ browsers and the application servers. From the very first access to the site, communication is protected by HTTPS protocol through a 256 bits SSL digital certificate.
  
  HTTPS and the digital certificate assure that both communication between browsers and servers is encrypted (safe from prying eyes), but also garantees that users are actually accessing LawRD’s website and not an illegal surrogate.
  
  For a more in depth  reading on LawRD’s security, please go to
  https://www.lawrd.com/html/files/en/security.pdf

• Pledge of confidentiality: for us at LawRD confidentiality is a pledge described in our Privacy Policy document: https://www.lawrd.com/html/files/en/privacy.pdf. The #5 of that document states: 5 - muchBeta will not make any of the collected information available to anyone. We will never sell, rent, exchange or share your personal information with any third-parties (…)
  Another important issue: Although muchBeta owns the code, databases, and all rights to the LAWRD application, you retain all rights to your data.

Aware that data security is vital to all web application users, we ground ourselves to the best safety practices available and keep updated using state of the art technology.