Special to the Legal Technology Blog
By Todd Gerstein, CEO, Smart WebParts
While business development and rainmaking has always been the mainstay of stimulating revenue, there are two huge areas that many firms often overlook when trying to increase their revenue: accurate and complete time capture, and cost recovery, specifically for prints and scans.
Most law firms are continuously leaking revenue and no one really notices or takes the initiative to stop it. They leak revenue in two major ways: by not billing clients for time actually spent on client work; and by failing to recover costs effectively. Fortunately, technology can provide a solution to both of these problems. Read more.
Nice article.
Would respectfully disagree with the point that desktop software can take days to load - it shouldn't.
Our product, Chrometa (www.chrometa.com), installs on a desktop in under 1 minute.
Otherwise I completely agree with the premise and thought it was presented very nicely.
Posted by: Brett Owens | October 21, 2009 at 03:37 PM
Great Article Todd.
Print and Scan capture is a vital component of any firms cost recovery system.
I encourage anyone interested in this technology to visit our website www.copitrak.com
Control Systems (Copitrak) has been providing Cost Recovery Solutions to the legal industry since 1982. This experience went into the design our Print and Scan capturing software resulting in the most efficient and feature rich platform out there.
Our scanning system will not only tracks the scan but has the ability to handle all the routing. We give users the ability to profile documents right into most Document Management systems, route scans to internal or external email, route scant to folder and OCR their Scans.
Anyone interested should contact us at info-usa@copitrak.com
Thanks
Posted by: Brandon McLeod | October 21, 2009 at 08:31 PM
What about managing the cost of legal research through a Cost Recovery system monitoring the use of electronic resources offered through the law library?
Consider the following:
"...costs for electronic resources other than LexisNexis and Westlaw rose in 2008, with the average firm spending just over $1 million, compared to some $929,000 in 2007."
Source: http://tinyurl.com/y98l3ly
Law Librarians: 'No More Sacred Cows'
By Alan Cohen
The American Lawyer
September 3, 2009
Posted by: Mark | October 26, 2009 at 09:50 AM
Mark - Thanks for commenting on my article. I agree with you that managing electronic resources is important for not only cost recovery but for time recovery too. Our product, Smart Time, can read any SQL based database to find events for time entry. Your Recovery Data Manager would be a great database for Smart Time to mine.
Posted by: Todd Gerstein | October 26, 2009 at 08:02 PM