The Web and I Masters Time Matters

The Web and I is working on a special installation of Time Matters for an esteemed attorney client. Time Matters is a Customer Relationship Management product from Lexis Nexis designed especially for attorneys.

The Software

One of the differences is that there is an entity called the Matter or Case which tracks court cases and legal matters. There are built-in roles for most of the parties a law office will deal with, and there is strong billing capability built right in. Some of the third-party document generating programs attorneys like to use like Hot Docs and others are supported by Time Matters.  There is robust synchronization between Time Matters and Outlook as well. Once installed, maintenance can be done remotely. In fact this client we are installing Time Matters for now is over a thousand miles away! What we can do is install and load the software with all data, customizations, and options, and then all you need to do is plug it in. No technical support needed, other than us, and we can log in remotely and fix problems. Repairs, as you will see under hardware, can be done by anyone in the office.

We are not affiliated with Lexis Nexis except that we install and service their products, so I did not go to their advertising place to say something nice about Time Matters. I really love the synchronization capabilities, the interactivity with document tools my clients already like and use, the wonderful service at Lexis Nexis if there is a problem and one more important feature. Regular Customer Relationship Management software does not include anything to perform or track legal research. So many attorneys are already using Lexis Nexis as their legal research source. Right in the software you can simply hit the Lexis Nexis buttons and do your legal research and have it attached to the case record.  For an attorney, this is a great gift and time saver.

The Hardware

The Dell PowerEdge T620 has a 9 Terabyte SAS Hard Drive Array with a special hardware controller. This means that the RAID services are done through firmware and the drives are set at the BIOS level: that level of machine that is below the operating system and resides on the motherboard itself in chips. That special combination of drives and a RAID Array Controller help provide fault-tolerant, redundant, and speedy disk service. The drives are also hot-swappable. If my client has an outage, an employee needs to simply pull out the bad drive and plug-in a fresh one, all without shutting down the server. The same is true for the power supplies. The twin 750 watt power supplies can also prevent failure. For power failures, there is power backup that will automatically shut everything down safely. For those that want to keep  a small office going and don’t mind a 2000 lb battery system, I can keep your office of ten running for an afternoon. Power failures being rare enough not to cause the loss of significant work in most offices, so a smaller system is fine. Larger companies are best served by a large battery backup and a diesel generator. We can source, deliver, and install these as part of your total disaster management plan. In addition, we recommend off-site backup. This ensures that in a disaster your server and everyone’s work can be up and running in one business day in case of the complete destruction of your facility. We never let our clients lose their data. Memory and CPU power is also important, sporting 24 cores of Xeon processing power, the model we are using has 16 GB of fault-tolerant RAM.

The database

The database is Microsoft SQL Server 2012. This is a wonderfully reliable and robust database, and it stores not only your data but all of the case documents you store in Time Matters. The 2012 Edition is the latest from Microsoft and considered the industry standard by most credible systems engineers.

To find out more, call one of our experts at (646) 853-0573.