Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania – August 2, 2010 – Prosperoware LLC, a software and consultancy company focused on balancing lawyer latitude with firm governance, announces the rapid adoption of Prosperoware Milan by ten AM Law 100 & 200 law firms. Firms such as Duane Morris LLP, Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP, Hughes Hubbard & Reed LLP, a global AMLaw 10 law firm and others have adopted Milan. “The Prosperoware team is excited that we have quickly received market acceptance,” says Keith Lipman, President of Prosperoware. “This is a testament to our industry experience and our ability to rapidly solve Worksite customer’s most pressing challenges.”

Milan is a platform that improves and distributes the administration of WorkSite and increases lawyer adoption of the electronic file, or Matter-Centric Collaboration, while allowing the firm to effectively manage standards and control risk. Milan is a web 2.0 application designed for rapid deployment with minimal training.

Prosperoware Milan, the 2.0 approach to Matter-Centric Collaboration, increases adoption of the electronic matter file. Milan, the Matter Centric 2.0 approach, enables lawyers to structure and secure their matters to fit the needs of the engagement while allowing the application of ethical walls or information barriers. “Best Best and Krieger is very excited to implement Milan,” says Tim Haynes, IT Director of Best Best and Krieger. “Milan has simplified our Matter-Centric design while empowering lawyers with better management of their matters.” Milan puts the responsible lawyer in charge of the folder structure and allows him to easily secure confidential information to the matter team. Milan is the only product on the market that allows firms to easily satisfy privacy requirements.

Milan’s Help Desk module improves administration and user support for WorkSite. Administrators now have the ability to distribute limited administrative functions to the help desk, records and other departments; plus have new tools that simplify their job function. “Milan’s remote check-in feature has provided us with a double benefit,” says John Sroka, CIO of Duane Morris. “We have prevented lawyers from losing valuable edits while reducing the burden on the WorkSite administration team.”

The law firms he stole the information from face an uphill battle to restore their reputations. The assumption of confidentiality is built into any discussion between a client and a lawyer. In reality, a law firm may have only 10 matters out of 5,000 that are walled off from the general firm for confidentiality purposes. This wasn’t nearly as great a problem when we were dealing with physical files. You had to get the key from someone, and you left a trail.  But now that electronic files are ubiquitous and highly searchable, we’ve letting the fox mind the chicken coop.

Complicating the situation is that matters often don’t require confidentiality walls when they are opened but as they evolve, they do. What started out as a request for advisement morphs into a confidential M&A but the matter coding never changes.

The problem is also partly cultural. In Asia, nearly everything is confidential until it’s made public. In the UK and the U.S. nearly everything is public until it is made confidential. That’s going to change over the next decade as western countries progressively move to the Asian model to prevent the kinds of abuses Luger represents. How law firms administer confidentiality will have to change, too. Can you imagine how large a risk team you’d have to have to manage just 500 confidential matters not to mention 5,000 matters?

The solution isn’t that difficult: decentralize confidentiality processes by putting the responsible lawyer in charge of who has access to the matter. (Or someone on the matter team.) Seems logical, doesn’t it? From a software perspective, it’s a fairly straightforward to distribute security rights. The technology to do it exists: it’s built into Matter Hub, for example. As described in this whitepaper – see link www.prosperoware.com/resources – where we’ve written more deeply on the subject, Matter Hub introduces the concept of a matter owner for every matter and decentralizes and distributes process control and security control.

It’s a fact: the technology to prevent data breaches in a virtual practice exists. But the will to change how we do things, including applying confidentiality standards, seems to be glacial. Posted May 2011

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Zone Enterprise introduces a new way of social working that adapts the best features of social business software to the needs of legal and professional services firms. Zone Enterprise is agnostic: it surfaces data wherever it resides—document management systems, time & billing systems, file shares—and organizes it to automate core processes, such as Pleading Bibles, Closing Checklists, and Matter Contacts. Matters and engagements are organized behind secure social walls, where team members post comments, share information, and manage processes.

Think — Service Product. The ultimate way to make greater profits is to fundamentally reduce the costs in providing the service by creating a product. A service product is something that goes beyond a marketing brochure but requires an investment in time and money. The key ingredients of a service product are know-how, technology and process. 

An ultimate example of a legal product is LegalZoom. On this site, a consumer can fill-out an online questionnaire and create a will. This is a traditional legal service re-packaged into a product. The client fills out the questionnaire and they are mailed a will. 

Clearly in a sophisticated transaction or litigation, it will be difficult to achieve this level of automation. However, steps can be taken to reduce the effort level in any matter by automating those areas where a routine process can be developed. The investment to create a product entails setting-up a standard approach, drafting appropriate model documents, and the application of technology. Almost every type of matter has a set of standard inputs, a set of tasks that need to be performed, and a standard set of outputs. Firms that make the investment in creating service products will be able to provide high quality services at a lower cost versus today’s on-the-fly approach. The result is the firm makes more money.

Squeeze Out the Inefficiencies. Law firms also need to squeeze out the inefficiencies so that the same amount of work can be done with less support staff and more fee earners. With the result of fee earners spending their time effectively delivering services instead of floundering with wasteful tasks. Here are some ideas: 

• File email into an Electronic Matter File – the result improves the information flow and reduces the extra effort of filing and reading superfluous emails. Copying an entire matter team on every email means that every member of the team has to spend time reading each email and taking some type of action (delete, file, etc.). This wastes valuable time. With an electronic file, fee earners can come up to speed on matters as needed when they are given a task.
• Reduce Offsite storage costs – image all paper before it goes to off-site storage. It is cheap to store information offsite but expensive to retrieve it.
• Improve Document Drafting Process – losing an hour to a mis-behaving document is painful when you are billing by the hour but it is a whole lot worse with a fixed fee.
• Less Printers – Do you really need all those printers especially if people are filing information electronically?
• Enterprise Search — the ability to put your hands on the right information at the right time is paramount.

We all know that it’s not the tablet that everyone wants but what you can do WITH the tablet. That’s true, too, of Zone Webtop. Taking advantage of some of the web 2.0 technology the iPad uses, Zone Webtop removes artificial walls between email and content repositories and gives lawyers broad latitude to work on the device of their choice.

It’s a very different and freeing way of getting the job done. For example, Zone Webtop can give you a view of client-matter content across multiple systems—SharePoint, WorkSite, and file shares. More importantly, this view is not just a snapshot in time but it’s actionable. You can do the things with those documents that you need to do, like attach them to an email, without navigating in and out of systems. Simply put, web 2.0 lifts all boats because it modernizes legacy systems by neutralizing the barriers between systems and making the systems web accessible.

Here’s what a Prosperoware client says about Zone Webtop:
“Initially, what excited us about Zone Webtop was the potential savings we could realize by using it as an alternative to Citrix for disaster recovery,” says Larry Wynne, Manager, Applications Development, SchiffHardin, LLP. “However, our large staff of 360+ lawyers are equally excited about the device independence Zone Webtop provides them as well as the unified, click-through access they have to information that resides in a number of different systems.”

Web 2.0, coupled with Prosperoware’s deep legal domain expertise, enables us to give law firms more options in terms of system interoperability and user-centered workflow. That’s what Zone Webtop is all about. Users seamlessly navigate email and content repositories as if they were one application. With Zone Webtop, the content you need to do your job is always available—whether your firm is recovering from a disaster or your users are simply on the road, working at home, or in the office.

It goes without saying, of course, that Zone Webtop has also been optimized for the not-quite-ancient devices called laptops and desktops as well as the “other tablet.”