Legal Practice Management Software Standard Features

Features, only available as expensive add-ons with other systems, often come as standard with LAWFUSION Practice Management. To find out how these features can help your firm, please visit our Legal Practice Management Software page. The following features, although not an exhaustive list, are found within the LAWFUSION Practice Management system:

• Fee Earner Desktop
• Time Recording
• Microsoft Integration
• Marketing Suite
• Practice Wide Diary and Overview System
• LAWFUSION™ Post Room
• Conflict of Interest and Anti-Money Laundering
• Priority Action List
• Centralised Document Register
• Search and Retrieval
• Online Case Tracking
• Phone System Integration
• Support Services

Fee Earner Desktop

The Fee Earner Desktop (FED) is the nerve centre of the LAWFUSION Practice Management system. Once logged into the FED, front and back office staff have access to all the tools available, subject to permissions or privileges.

The Fee Earner Desktop provides easy access to the back office Microsoft SQL Server database, used by the entire LAWFUSION suite of legal software applications. The FED allows users to use and interact with up to the minute information from the accounts or the client database. In addition, it allows easy integration with standard office products, such as Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Laserforms etc.

The FED has been designed to be as intuitive as possible with an easy "point and click", drill down, user interface, giving quick access throughout.

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Time Recording

Fast and accurate representation of time spent on cases ultimately results in increased billing and increased revenue. Unlike other practice management systems, LAWFUSION Practice Management incorporates a full time recording facility as standard. The system caters for multiple methods of recording time, and has a comprehensive range of monitoring, reporting and management tools to ensure maximum efficiency.

• Automatically record time in accordance with your firm's charging structure, e.g. if the file is legal aided then LSC legal aid national or London rates are used.
• Capture Fee Earner time through a number of methods. Time can be recorded by on-screen multiple clocks, by automatic recording by case or e-mail management or by manually inputting from timesheets.
• The booking of non-chargeable time is catered for as well as recording for work prior to an account being opened.
• Easy to use, suitable for most levels of staff expertise.
• You can record the time of a phone call direct from the telephone system (subject to the compatibility of your telephone system).
• Monitor Fee Earner time usage through the Fee Earner Target System.

For more information visit our time recording software for solicitors page.

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Microsoft Integration

LAWFUSION Practice Management also integrates with third-party applications such as Microsoft's Office. E-mails, tasks, appointments, documents and spreadsheets can be created within LAWFUSION and automatically saved against the case/matter file. In the same way they can also be saved to the case file directly from the appropriate Microsoft application. Use of familiar tools such as Microsoft Office Excel, Word and Outlook enables you to reduce the time and cost of development and helps you to maximise your return on investment and increase your IT efficiency.

Visit our Microsoft Integration page to find out more.

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Marketing Suite

With the right tools it is much easier than you may think to retain clients and grow your practice through effective marketing. The LAWFUSION Practice Management marketing suite can help you to develop and monitor highly targeted marketing campaigns. It also enables you to maximise the information you already have by helping you understand where your current business comes from and identifying your most valuable clients.

• The marketing suite allows you to send letters, e-mails and mail-shots to your clients and contacts, using information contained in your client, matter, contact and case management records.
• The extract process allows you to specify the criteria for your mail-shots. The results can then be filtered before producing your final output format. You can use an unlimited number of mail-merge letters and e-mails or even produce labels, special offers, flyers, etc.
• In order to cross sell other legal services you could, for example, extract all clients who have not reviewed their will for 5 years or you could extract clients that have recently moved house. You can also filter contacts who are not your clients, e.g. all estate agents in your chosen area.
• You can record your clients and contacts business interests, personal interests, specialisms and any publications you wish to send them.
• You can also record information about your business client’s year-end date, turnover, business area, identity type (self-employed, plc, private, etc.).
• All marketing activity is logged against the client and contact. You can also indicate whether that activity has been successful in attracting new business.
• LAWFUSION Case Management can prompt fee earners to ask clients about cross selling opportunities, e.g. on completion of a property purchase or sale a Will update service can be offered automatically or the fee earner can receive an automatic reminder to offer the service.
• LAWFUSION can be configured to suit different marketing needs for different departments.
• LAWFUSION keeps a record of introducers or sources of business and you can also drill down to analyse the cases from a particular introducer.

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Practice Wide Diary and Overview System

LAWFUSION Practice Management includes a full Practice Diary and Task Planner for individuals, case files and, where applicable, court and tribunals.

• A centralised diary system, allowing all users to view each other's schedules (provided thay have relevant permissions).
• Includes a fully featured task creation and scheduling system with links back to the case.
• The diary and task planner are also synchronised with Microsoft Outlook and can be exported to your Laptop, Ultra Mobile Phone (Windows Mobile) or PDA, which gives the constant availability of information wherever you are.
• The Diary Overview system is totally configurable and allows users to view appointments made in their own and other user’s diaries and is particularly useful for tracking Court, Police Station, and Prison, Hospital and Tribunal appointments.

See our Practice Diary and Task Planner page for further information.

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LAWFUSION Post Room

LAWFUSION Post Room simplifies the process of managing your incoming mail by allowing you to scan everything to a central location, and letting the software do the rest. From now on you can easily share and search your critical business post items. Furthermore, you can eliminate misfiling mishaps, missing documents, and errors from your administration systems.

LAWFUSION Post Room is easy to use and includes:

• An integrated package of scanner (if required) and software to add to your existing LAWFUSION™ Case Management System.
• A software delivery system to ‘Push’ the documents electronically to the correct department / Fee Earner.
• An easy indexing mechanism to place these documents into the appropriate case file in the LAWFUSION Case Management System.

Please visit our LAWFUSION Post Room page for more information.

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Conflict of Interest & Anti-Money Laundering Compliance

Recent money laundering regulations for businesses place emphasis on management control and the need to carry out proper forms of risk assessment. LAWFUSION Practice Management software guides you through setting up your contacts, clients and matters so that conflict of interest and anti-money laundering checks are performed before any work is undertaken.

• Conflict of interest and anti-money laundering checks are recorded against contacts for reporting and Lexcel compliance.
• Documents presented for anti-money laundering can be scanned to the contact as proof for future reference.
• We also provide an automatic integration to CallCredit for external client verification if required.
• Where anti-money laundering checks are incomplete or out of date a reminder system automatically highlights these on a daily basis.

Please visit our featured article on anti-money laundering for more information.

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Priority Action List

Sometimes, with so many things happening it is difficult to keep on top of the really important things. That’s when you need a PAL. The PAL (Priority Action List) constantly probes the LAWFUSION systems to provide all staff with an up to date list of priority actions.

Amongst some of the business-critical issues, the PAL can automatically warn you about impending limitation dates, files approaching their credit limit, files that are due for billing, overdue bill payments and anti-money laundering compliance issues.

The PAL system is highly configurable and the following are just some of the features:

• Allows you to view and deal with tasks that need to be actioned today either for yourself (the default setting) or for another user.
• Supports notifications of the status of an account, matter or case, e.g. you can be notified when a matter is approaching a work-in-progress limit, lock limit or disbursement limit.
• Your system may be configured to launch the PAL when first logging onto Fee Earner Desktop.
• You can view previously unacknowledged items, i.e. those that you have not dealt with already, or just current items.
• Subject to privilege, you can view someone else’s PAL.
• PAL entries are generated automatically by the system.
• Subject to privileges, users can create Automatic Action Criteria which will enable them to action items automatically after a pre-determined period of time, e.g. criteria can be created which will automatically remove Overdue Debts after say, 14 days.

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Centralised Document Register

The long term storage and subsequent retrieval of your clients’ most important documents should not be left to chance. LAWFUSION Practice Management uses a centralised document register system for recording and tracking the storage details of wills, deeds, share certificate, archive matters and other documents that you firm holds for your clients. Our centralised system enables all of your users to access critical information quickly and conveniently.

• Integrated with your case files so that it indexes everything under the correct client record in your database.
• Logins and logouts are fully audited.
• Comprehensive details relating to each document are indexed so that any pertinent issues or warnings, like a lease expiry or will review can be flagged up automatically.

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Easy Search and Retrieval

LAWFUSION Practice Management allows users to easily search and retrieve any electronic or hard copy records stored on the file. This saves time and is extremely effective, ensuring important documents and information are never lost or misplaced.

Subject to security levels set at administration level, you will get immediate and up-to-date access to all critical data stored in multiple applications and data sources.

• Find clients, matters, suppliers, nominals, transactions, bills, credit notes or any other records you might need, in seconds using intuitive “query-by-example” enquiry screens.
• If the exact information you need to search on is not to hand, the system can also handle partial or “fuzzy” searches.

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Online Case Tracking

During the working day the typical legal practice will receive many calls from their clients wanting to know the current status of their legal matter. All too often, partly because of the overwhelming workload experienced by their solicitor, clients do not receive timely feedback on their case.

With the LAWFUSION Case Tracker service, your clients can get their answers quickly and easily from the Internet without having to contact you directly. Due partly to the unparalleled flexibility and customisation provided by LAWFUSION’s powerful workflow engine, as each matter is progressed details of changes can be published to the Internet and can then be viewed securely through any Web browser. Your client is provided with up to date information on their case 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Visit our LAWFUSION Online Case Tracking page to find out more.

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Phone System Integration

LAWFUSION Practice Management can integrate with IP based telephone systems to:

• Dial contacts directly from LAWFUSION.
• Automatically opens a case file when someone calls.
• Telephone numbers appear as hyperlinks which can be clicked on to call the contact. You can also contact internal staff using this method.
• When an incoming call is detected the caller display dialog appears showing all clients, contacts and suppliers that match the incoming telephone number.

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On-line Help, Professional Training and Support

Select Legal Systems are committed to continually improving customer care and quality of service. We have a very loyal and growing client base because we strive to improve on our high client satisfaction rates each year. We are particularly proud of being rated consistently high in the "ongoing support" and "quality of training" categories of the Law Society Software Solutions Guide.

• Professional training and reference manuals come as standard.
• For more “hands-on” staff, the system includes comprehensive context sensitive Windows style on-line help.
• All users have access to our support portal. This provides a knowledge base, access to the latest manuals, our bi-monthly “Did you know flyers” and all of your support calls.
• Your firm does not stand still and neither does LAWFUSION. New processes are added regularly and usually distributed free of charge to all our clients.
• All this is backed up with professional support from our experienced and highly qualified members of staff.

Visit our LAWFUSION Support Services page to find out more.

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Benefits for You

This page contains details of just some of the features in LAWFUSION Practice Management. For information on how your firm can get immediate benefits from implementing LAWFUSION Practice Management in your firm, visit our Legal Practice Management Software page.