LTO: Case/Practice Management Software Defined – How can you tell a CMS from a PrMS?

06
Jun
2012

Taylor Gould

Featuring Andy Adkins, CIO of Steptoe & Johnson PLLC and founder of the Legal Technology Institute

CMS, PrMS, what are these acronyms and why do you need to know?  As a legal technology newcomer, I have now learned that these refer to Case Management System and Practice Management System.  But what is the difference between these? Who better to ask than Andy Adkins, CIO of Steptoe & Johnson PLLC and widely recognized expert on case management, having written “The Lawyer’s Guide to Practice Management Systems,” published by the American Bar Association’s Law Practice Management Section.

Case Management System?

According to Andy, a Case Management System (CMS) can be defined a number of ways, but the easiest definition is that a CMS provide legal professionals with a set of tools to help manage the front office.  This includes managing clients and cases, the ability to track case status, calendaring features, generating documents from commonly used templates, and reporting.

Practice Management System?
On the other hand, a Practice Management System (PrMS) combines the power of the CMS with back office functionality, such as time & billing, general accounting, and conflict checking.  However while the two systems work hand in hand, they are not co-dependent and an office can have a CMS without a PrMS and vice versa.

What’s in a True CMS?
There are many products on sale today that are marketed as CMS or PrMS.  In order to be considered a true CMS the product’s features should include: Client & Case Database, Calendaring and/or Docketing,

Case Notes, Document Generation/Assembly as well as a reporting feature.

If you are just hearing about this for the first time and are thinking to yourself that using these products would save you hours of time, you are right – but they are not a magic wand or panacea.  It is not a simple as the “plug and play” or “drag and drop” methodology that we employ with applications and peripheral devices today.  It is also not as fast as swiping your credit card or clicking “add to cart” and “checkout.”

Implementation?
Implementing a case management system has the potential to improve efficiency and reduce the amount of time the average legal professional spends on non-billable activities.  It also creates an electronic and central location for client data—the era of “the file” can now be replaced.  However, in order to have the software work for you, proper research needs to be conducted to determine which system is right for your needs and budget.

Want to know more about case/practice management from Andy?  Tune into LTO tomorrow and Friday, when I’ll be running two more posts on this topic, covering how to select and get buy-in for a CMS or PrMS at your firm (Thursday) and how to handle, budget and train for an actual implementation (Friday.)

Click here to participate in a quick snap poll about case/practice management.