What Lexis giveth, Lexis can take away. And then replace with an alternate tool.
As you may be aware, Lexis somewhat abruptly and unexpectedly ended their relationship with Watchdox, the “client portal” application that had been bundled into the Time Matters application since Version 13. Apparently this application had very low utilization rates among Time Matters customers. With Blackberry’s recent acquisition of Watchdox, the application has been plagued with service interruptions and other technical issues for those few customers using the service. According to a statement released at the end of March, Lexis was “unable to reach a mutually satisfactory level [of resolution] for our customers.”
Recognizing that document sharing between law firms and their clients, co-counsels, and other key parties is becoming an increasingly indispensable practice management tool – commonly referred to as a “client portal” – Lexis has announced that, with the release of Time Matters 15.1, their practice management software will offer full integration with Microsoft OneDrive.
OneDrive is the Cloud-based storage application bundled into Microsoft Office 365 subscriptions, or otherwise available on a separate subscription basis from Microsoft. Office 365 OneDrive users have access to their Cloud storage from within any Office 365 application, seeing the service as simply another “drive” on their desktop. Time Matters extends this functionality, by adding OneDrive as a default storage location on the TM document form. This will allow Time Matters users to upload, view, and synch documents from within Time Matters directly to OneDrive. Auto-naming, if configured in Time Matters, will continue to function as previously, including folder naming, but will place the folder and the document in the Cloud within OneDrive.
OneDrive offers its own set of security options for sharing folders and documents with external users, and reads your Outlook contact list to simplify with whom to share specific folders or documents. In this manner, documents created in Time Matters, via either the merge function or the Formattable Clipboard, can be automatically uploaded to OneDrive, and then shared with specific clients (or other external users) on a document-by-document basis. Creating “sharing groups” in OneDrive can make this even easier, by making a client’s OneDrive folder accessible to everyone who has involvement in that client’s matter.
I am not convinced that this new capability in Time Matters 15.1 will completely remove the need for a true client portal application integrated with Time Matters. Applications such as Legal Anywhere Connect (more to come on that promising application soon) offer a much more robust solution for firms that do a significant volume of document sharing with clients. For the “casual sharer” who only occasionally needs to send a “review and approve” document to outside parties, however, this “marriage of convenience” between Lexis and Microsoft, plugging the hole in Time Matters left by the disappearance of Watchdox, should address that need quite nicely.
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Jack Schaller has been active in the field of law office technology since 1989, and has worked with a variety of commercial accounting, legal billing, practice management, and document management software products during his twenty plus years in the software consulting field. During his tenure as a software consultant he has garnered many sales and service awards for his work with legal software products. Jack is a frequent presenter at legal conferences and seminars, and is a regular contributor to TechnoLawyer and other technology publications.
Jack,
Thank you for mentioning our company Legal Anywhere and our secure client portal LegalAnywhereConnect in your article. Our HIPAA compliant system provides secure collaboration with customized workflow controls, document version control and user access controls to matter and case related documents. LegalAnywhereConnect integrates with leading document management systems and is a more secure means for attorney/client collaboration vs. sending documents through standard email.
Totally agree with your position that integrating with OneDrive doesn’t solve the issue for lawyers when it comes to securely sharing documents with clients. I’m particularly concerned with the fact that OneDrive connects to Outlook to determine who to share the documents with. One of the main reasons to use a secure client portal is that traditional email, which in nearly all cases lacks significant encryption (and pretty much never offers end-to-end encryption), which increases the risk to the client’s confidential data while in transit. Given that lawyers have been a little slow in adopting the most effective digital security, putting client documents into Outlook where they could easily be sent by standard, low-security email by mistake (or out of convenience) is not something to be considered lightly.
More firms are waking up to this, and beginning to take security and confidentiality more seriously, but too many firms still fall prey to “convenience”, using the tools they know in the way they have “always” used them. I think that will change more rapidly as the client portal market matures, with easier to configure and maintain products, and pricing becomes more competitive.
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