Docketing

View important events and deadlines either in LawBase or in your current calendar

LawBase provides you the ability to track important deadlines for each matter or contact. It reminds staff of critical dates, docket dates and important deadlines, firm wide or for one case, and produces “ticklers” before the deadline. LawBase allows users to view these critical dates from either within the matter or contact as well as from the calendar.

This shows a view of all the deadlines related to the Jeffrey Jones matter. By double clicking on any individual task you can see the full detail of that critical date.

This shows the detail for the “Trial Date” critical date. Unlike either Microsoft Outlook or Groupwise, LawBase does not make an artificial distinction between “tasks” and “appointments”. Rather, LawBase realizes that something can be both a task and an appointment. The trial date detail shown above is a good example. The trial date is an appointment, you need to be in court at that time. However, you also need to prepare for the trial ahead of time. In LawBase, you can create both of these reminders with a single entry.

Additionally, you can assign this task to as many individuals or groups of users as necessary and you can easily display which of those users are responsible for completion of that task.

Finally, you can email this Critical Date to anybody else that needs to know. This could be to somebody in the office as a notice that you have added something to his or her calendar or to somebody else in the outside the office that needs to know that a deadline has been set.

Calendar – Once the information exists in the critical dates section of any matter, you may want to view the information on a more personal basis of “What do I need to do today?” LawBase comes equipped with a calendar function that allows you to view what you need to do.

The LawBase calendar provides multiple views (i.e. year, month, week, day and schedule) of your calendar. Above is an example of a day view of your calendar. It will display your appointments on the left hand side of the calendar while displaying your tasks, or critical dates, on the right hand side of the calendar.

The task list will display all critical dates that are due today, are overdue and you have not completed the task or are due some time in the future and you have asked the system to remind you ahead of time. You can view the detail of any critical date by double clicking on the specific task that you want to view.

Appointments can display in a variety of colors depending upon the type of appointment that it is. For example, all trials could be displayed in red, while motions could be displayed in blue so that you could quickly view the type of appointment based upon the color.

In addition to the standard views that are provided by other calendar applications, LawBase also provides a “Schedule View” that allows you to see multiple calendars side by side. In this way, you can quickly see where multiple people are scheduled to be. This can either be done based upon pre-assigned groups or on an ad hoc basis.

Synaptec has long believed in working with other leading software applications on the market, and in this area, we have developed interfaces that allow sharing information from LawBase to other popular calendar applications such as Microsoft Outlook®, Novell Groupwise® and Lotus Notes Calendar®. With these optional interfaces, LawBase can allow users to keep the calendars that they are already using and eliminate any duplicate entries of important deadlines because they flow automatically from LawBase.

Information entered into LawBase automatically creates an entry in your third party calendar. These include both LawBase appointments and Critical Dates. The information is automatically transferred to the calendar in Outlook. An appointment in LawBase becomes an appointment in the Outlook calendar and a Critical Date in LawBase becomes a task in Outlook.

By design, the information flows from LawBase to the calendar. This allows you to tightly control who will have the ability to make changes to this calendar item. Thus, you can limit changes to your docketing department or clerk. Our interface with Microsoft Outlook® allows for a bi-directional transfer of this calendar and task information. The information from LawBase can then be transferred from your calendar to a Palm Pilot or other PDA device.