What Should Case Management Do?
The answer to this question depends on your particular practice. What a P.I. firm needs and what a real estate firm needs are vastly different. So the first thing to do is to make a list of your needs: do you need to track medical information, real estate information, personal information for trusts and estates, etc. Do you want the program to generate documents based on client information? What kinds of links do you want to have to time & billing and/or accounting programs (which produce still another level of efficiency)? You must then decide what trade-offs are acceptable. You can probably find a program that will do 90% of what you need. Customizing it so that it does the last 10% will be difficult and very expensive. In addition, suppose you want two features, A and B. Program One does A very well, but B poorly, whereas Program Two does B very well but is only mediocre at A. What are your priorities? Are there “deal breaker” features, i.e., features whose absence nixes the deal, n
