Legal Help | Lawyers | Clients | News | Law Articles

Law Office and Case Management on the Macintosh
by George Qualley IV

Beyond the Rolodex and the Desk Calendar
In part I of this article, I introduced Marketcircle Inc's Daylite 3 application. Generally speaking, Daylite is a customer relationship management (CRM) application. If the term "CRM" is a little technical, you might be familiar with either Sage Software's ACT!, Now Software's Now Up-to-Date and Contact, or Microsoft's Entourage. All of the aforementioned applications either are, or contain aspects of CRM. If that still doesn't clear things up, here's a simple description: a CRM application basically helps you mange your customers (or in the legal world, clients), your calendar, your tasks, and more, all in one application (or an integrated suite of applications). Stated another way, a good CRM application can centralize many of the tasks we as lawyers do each and every day.

Historically, there has been somewhat of a dearth of good CRM applications on the Mac platform. In fact, CRM has been one of the key weaknesses of the Mac platform for businesses with a very customer centered workflow (e.g. sales). However, the fine folks at Marketcircle have single-handedly obliterated that weakness with Daylite. In fact, I happen to believe that Daylite is not only the best CRM application on the Mac platform (a recent resurgence in the Mac platform has yielded several competitors), but the best CRM application on any platform. That said, let's take a look at what Daylite can do--or more specifically, what Daylite can do for your law practice.

Essentially, the core Daylite application handles four major areas. Those areas are calendaring, notes, contacts, and project management. Setting aside some of the more advanced features for a moment, it should be fairly obvious how each of these areas are critical to managing a busy law office. Unless your office is total chaos, I imagine that you've got some sort of system for managing each of the aforementioned types of information. At this point, you might be thinking, "but I already have a system for managing my contacts, calendar, etc., why would I want to switch?" And, that's a great question.

Perhaps the simplest explanation of Daylite's strength is that it basically integrates all of your important information. Of course, "integration" is somewhat of a five-dollar tech-term so I'll attempt to break it down a bit better. In the legal world, your clients are one of your primary groups of contacts (others being other lawyers, court attendants, expert witnesses, etc.). Of course, if you've got a client, you probably have a legal issue that is related to your client—e.g. John Anderson's divorce. Moreover, you might have an appointment related to the client's legal issue—e.g. a 10:00 AM hearing on Thursday regarding John Anderson's divorce. To go one step further, if you have an upcoming hearing regarding John Anderson's divorce, you probably have (or will have) some notes regarding that hearing. The key here is that all of the foregoing information interrelated.

Allowing you to visualize and benefit from this type of connection is where Daylite really shines (pardon the pun). Instead of dealing with a multiple separate stores of information (which are, in fact, very connected in the real world) Daylite centralizes your information in one application. Moreover, Daylite makes it easy to interconnect or "link" people to meetings, clients to cases, notes to clients and/or cases, or almost any other connection that you can imagine while keeping all of your information immediately and easily accessible.

I've already indirectly mentioned some of the applications of Daylite in the law office in this section of the article. However, I'll expand on those concepts and show you exactly how to exploit the connections that I've just mentioned in the next segment of this article. Read on...

qbfirm.com | desmoineslawoffice.com | ialawoffice.com | qualleylaw.com

Copyright 2008

NOTICE TO THE PUBLIC:
The determination of the need for legal services and the choice of a lawyer are extremely important decisions and should not be based solely upon advertisements or self-proclaimed expertise. This disclosure is required by rule of the Supreme Court of Iowa.
A description or indication of limitation of practice does not mean that any agency or board has certified such lawyer as a specialist or expert in an indicated field of law practice, nor does it mean that such lawyer is necessarily any more expert or competent than any other lawyer. All potential clients are urged to make their own independent investigation and evaluation of any lawyer being considered. This notice is required by rule of the Supreme Court of Iowa.