We’ve discussed SaaS before on our blog, exploring the undeniable growth of the industry, and explored some of the issues raised by leaders in the legal technology community.

Our Legal SaaS friends at Nextpoint posted the following video on their blog Frank. We thought it was a great, simple, minute-and-a-half explanation on Software-as-a-Service, and underscored the difference between modern SaaS providers and old-school ASP providers of yesteryear.

1. Date Calculator: Available when you are setting a statue of limitations. You can find this in the Add Matter wizard and on the Edit Matter screens. Learn how to use it at our Online CRE site, Rocket Ops: http://www.rocketops.net/pages/Date_Calculator.html.
2. Improved To-do Lists: Now, when you assign a matter to a to-do item, you can click on the matter and navigate immediately to the Matter Dashboard. We also cleaned up the look of the to-do lists a bit.
3. Edit Matter screen: In addition to adding the Date Calculator to this screen, we now allow for you to change your matter billing type to Hourly, Flat Fee, or Contingency.

Thank you to our Rocket Pilots who provide us with feedback on our legal SaaS application and help shape the direction of Rocket Matter. We will continue to roll out changes and improvements based on your suggestions!

1. Stop Checking Email: You heard me right, stop checking it. At least, not all the time.

2. Don’t Check Email First Thing In The Morning.

3. Filter, Filter, Filter.

4. Respond When You Read.

5. Keep It Short and Sweet.

6. Have Multiple Accounts.

The trend in the business software community is undeniable. 2008 is the year of SaaS. Nicholas Carr blogged about the surging movement towards SaaS under way in business software as described in a study by McKinsey & Company:

“A new study, to be released today by McKinsey & Company, reveals in some of the clearest terms yet the sea change that is under way in business software. The consulting firm surveyed more than 850 corporate software buyers, from firms of all sizes, and found that software-as-a-service is rapidly “becoming mainstream,” with three-quarters of software buyers saying they are “favorably disposed to adopting SaaS platforms” for software development and deployment.”

Globally - Each user has a default rate.
Matter Specific - Certain matters can now be set up with their own rates per user.
Item Specific - Change your rate on an item by item basis for maximum flexibility.

To set a Matter Specific rate, follow these easy steps:

1. Navigate to the Matter Dashboard.
2. Click on Edit Matter.
3. Next to the radio button for “Yes, this matter bills hourly”, click on the “Set Custom Rates” link.
4. This will bring up a dialog showing the billable rates of your timekeepers, with the ability to override rates on the matter level.

“How could this be?” we thought. “Surely there’s an XML standard or ISO adherence for legal software.”

It turns out there are standards, but the market leaders for practice management don’t adhere to them, putting the end-user in a position where they cannot migrate their data from one solution to the next.

Rocket Matter has decided to embrace the open standards, publicize them, and to try to advocate their wider adoption in the legal software industry.

One of the standards is LEDES, or Legal Electronic Data Exchange Standard. It’s a standardized, defined way of moving client, matter, and billing data around, directly addressing the needs of legal practice management and time and billing software.

When LEDES is combined with the iCalendar format (for calendar information exchange) and vCard (the standard for contact data), the only thing standing in the way for data migration are non-compliant legal software companies.

1. Month Chooser on User Dashboard: This is the first of many calendaring improvements we will gradually be rolling out. Now you can quickly view any date’s activities from your Dashboard.
2. Edit Matter Relationships: In your relationships sections on your Matter Dashboard, you will see a link to Edit Relationships. This allows you to quickly link contacts in your system to your existing matters.

Please take a look at the following video on our Rocket Operations (RocketOps) support site. You will need Quicktime if you don’t currently have it installed:

The topic of mind maps has been explored recently on the SOLOSEZ listserv. Nerino Petro, PMA for the State Bar for Wisconsin, offered some great advice and tidbits:

“I’ve found it to be helpful when in meetings with ideas or thoughts
coming from a number of different folks. It’s easy to ID topics and
subpoints and group them together. So you could have a mindmap with
topics for each issue with subpoints for pro and con issues and the
comments and thoughts for each one. You can easily move them around and
group them as needed.”

Nerino uses the products MindManager and Gyronix. He likes the export feature of MindManager. A simple mind map flattened into a Word file might look a little like this (Nerino’s example):

1 Breach of Contract
1.1 Elements necessary to Prove
1.1.1 Existence of Contract

Hope this helps take mind mapping from the theoretical to the concrete!

It’s a brave new world we live in, where attorneys can select their platform of choice to run their law practice management software. With Rocket Matter, you can run Linux, Mac OS X, or any variety of Windows flavors and enjoy fully functional practice management and time and billing software.