If you think it’s expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur.

The original post follows:

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From a very interesting discussion on Solosez recently. The question came up about how to configure and customize case management software to best streamline a practice. One poster made the point that they couldn’t afford professional consulting services and were wondering about DIY approaches, sharing area of practice “templates” from others (in this case, they were specifically referring to Time Matters software).

Here were my thoughts on this and why the most expensive decision a firm can make – of any practice focus and any size – is NOT to professionally deploy key practice tools like case managers:

“Those of you who have seen my live CLEs may have heard my presentation on how to profit from the use of technology. One of the basic lessons I have tried to get across for over two decades is something so utterly fundamental it still amazes me when it comes across as shocking. That is:

Lawyers should avoid representing themselves pro se on their tech and practice management issues.

It’s so simple. And while there a few exceptions, think of what it means when tech.savvy lawyers like Andy Simpson, Steve Terrell and others here are smart enough to know where their abilities reach their limits and when it makes sense to call in a professional.

Every hour a lawyer spends working on tech issues, trying to “save money” by not hiring a professional, costs whatever you bill by the hour. And the odds of that lawyer solving the technology or practice management problem as quickly as a professional would are very, very low. Further, the odds of getting something more complex right, varying of course from person to person depending on expertise with the application or situation, are relatively low in most situations.

Let’s put numbers to it to illustrate this (and trust me, I’ve seen this played out HUNDREDS of times in field):

Scenario: you have an uncustomized out of the box Time Matters or Amicus installation. You decide you want to customize your system for the five primary practice areas you work in: estate planning, family law, bankruptcy and personal injury.

You bill for hourly work at $200 per hour (and your flat fee work averages about $250/hour if all goes the way as planned)

You have never worked with any consultants on your case management project – you essentially just clicked install, hoped for the best and found it better than Outlook, but it has never really fit any of your practice areas.

You, like many firms, have an inadequate data backup system – incremental backups only, Travan tapes, never perform test restores (a recipe for The Perfect Digital Storm).

You begin without having any backup of your current case management system, nor all the contact and client info you’ve entered and worked with for nine months. You don’t realize this however. You’re full of enthusiasm for the customization project, because it seems like it would be “fun.”

You spend two full days – initially just the evenings after work, but then it seems like if you spend just a little more time, you’ll finally figure it all out. So now you decide to “invest in your practice” and spend two otherwise billable work days on your customization efforts. So you’re about 16 otherwise billable hours into this ($3200 to $4000 time value at your rates).

And now you come to a critical realization – you’ve trashed your system – you can’t even access the existing data because you’ve changes data fields in function, form and order. You have a scrambled mess. You try to restore from your backup from four days earlier. Because it was an incremental backup, there’s no way to restore the entire case management database. You slump down on the floor and mutter “holy $&^#, what have I done?”

It’s all too common – it really is folks. I’ve seen this mortifying picture over and over and over and over again. Because I’ve been called in to rescue situations like this . . . it’s been a large part of my career.

So let’s look at comparative costs – the pro se approach above v. a professional approach with assistance:

Pro Se Approach:
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Cost in lost billables during working hours – $3200 – $4000

Time that still has to be spent attempting to unravel the mess (lawyer spending MORE of his/her otherwise billable time on the software vendor’s tech support time): another full day (if he/she’s lucky) – $1600 – $2000.

Time spent after the vendor phone support option fails having to pay a consultant just to get them back where they were before this “money saving” attempt: another $2000 gone, never to be billed.
Total cost to lawyer: $6800 to $8000.

And please, let’s all agree that time not billed has the precise same effect on one’s P&L as writing a check. Money not coming in decreases your top line, while a check written increases expenses. Either way, the net effect on profit is the same – it reduces it. So you absolutely don’t have to write a check to “spend” money. It’s $6800 to $8000 out of the “pro se technologist” lawyer’s pocket.

End result – hopefully no data will be permanently lost and the lawyer will get back to where he/she started from. In other words, no net accomplishment.

Professionally Assisted Approach:
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