Look I supported a few different legal platforms in that role and while I hated it, it was also the best.
Heres what a lawyer does:
1. They bill for time writing emails and on phone calls
2. They bill for time reviewing emails.
3. They bill for printing (and faxing if they are diehards)
4. They also bill for the time they are face to face with a human.
They also need to gather all the data, much of which flows in and out via email (or fax if they hate you) related to the case in a single space.
The sad state is that 80% of this can be achieved in outlook without much effort. Setting up an external application to capture all this shit is quite difficult, and generally requires mail to be run through it in some capacity. The question is, why reinvent the email client. (Sadly they reinvented the pdf reader) I have seen some lawfirms literally saving out every email as html, and uploading it with billing stats to a third party app. Its easier for me to support but the user experience can be awful.
The user already exists in Outlook, they already understand outlook. A few buttons in the ribbon (Mostly File this under X open case, time me, and bill this customer) make more sense from a user perspective.
From a support perspective its an absolute nightmare. Microsoft absolutely wont take a support case about an addon with shit memory management. And the addon provider will usually blame Microsoft.
Heres what a lawyer does:
1. They bill for time writing emails and on phone calls 2. They bill for time reviewing emails. 3. They bill for printing (and faxing if they are diehards) 4. They also bill for the time they are face to face with a human.
They also need to gather all the data, much of which flows in and out via email (or fax if they hate you) related to the case in a single space.
The sad state is that 80% of this can be achieved in outlook without much effort. Setting up an external application to capture all this shit is quite difficult, and generally requires mail to be run through it in some capacity. The question is, why reinvent the email client. (Sadly they reinvented the pdf reader) I have seen some lawfirms literally saving out every email as html, and uploading it with billing stats to a third party app. Its easier for me to support but the user experience can be awful.
The user already exists in Outlook, they already understand outlook. A few buttons in the ribbon (Mostly File this under X open case, time me, and bill this customer) make more sense from a user perspective.
From a support perspective its an absolute nightmare. Microsoft absolutely wont take a support case about an addon with shit memory management. And the addon provider will usually blame Microsoft.