IP SOFTWARE
• Provide easy user access to the firm’s contact management system (InterAction®)
• Provide a solution for financial reporting, payment disbursement and cost recapture that integrated with the firm’s accounting system (Elite®)
• Integrate the docketing system with the firm’s New Case® process within Metastorm®
• Ensure that the system performed well for the firm’s then 21 offices across the United States through Citrix®
• Select a company willing to ‘go the extra mile’ to provide these integrations and to assist us in converting the dockets for lateral hires who would bring dockets with them.
Once these goals were stated, there were two soſtware vendors in final contention. A second formal presentation by each was made to the committee. Tese sessions were day-long intense exchanges of ideas and possible solutions.
Te firm chose Patrix and its product, Patricia®. Mehrdad Assadi, Patrix’s chief technology officer, was named project manager. Deborah Warner was named the Patrix liaison to the firm. Assadi and the committee recognised this would be a significant undertaking, so a two-day planning session was held to finalise the project plan and the Data Conversion Manual. Tese team members were key players because of the breadth of integration that was planned and because the firm had nine different dockets to manage. Each integration element was addressed separately at these meetings and stakeholders from the accounting, records management, marketing and IS (for Interwoven®, Payne®, SQL, roll-out and training) were named. A seven-month roll-out date was set.
Te Patrix contingent initially spent a week at Duane Morris and met with the department stakeholders, along with the IS committee members. At that time, the integration with each of the soſtware applications was detailed. Potential problems and technical issues were discussed along with possible solutions for each. Te game plan was put in place.
Each of these integrations had its own challenges. For Elite® and New Case®, it was necessary to devise a way to:
• Let the users make payments to foreign associates through Patricia® and capture those expenditures in the firm’s accounting system
• Let the users make payments to the patent and trademark offices through Patricia® and capture those expenditures in the firm’s accounting system
• Provide a utility to synchronise Patricia® records with the accounting records in Elite® via a
unique identifier 68 World Intellectual Property Review September/October 2010
www.worldipreview.com
• Provide a method to populate both Patricia® and Elite® with client/matter information when a new case or new matter was opened, and
• Enable disbursement tracking for reconciliation and cost recapture.
For InterWoven®, Payne® and InterAction®, the challenge was to provide an integration that would enable the users, while in Patricia®, to:
• Create a user-specific, office-specific letter from a template (Payne®) that was populated by the
user’s selection of contact information from InterAction®
• Populate it with the pertinent information from the Patricia® database records, and
• Automatically store it for later search and retrieval in InterWoven®.
This was accomplished by making use of application programming interfaces provided by each soſtware vendor, enabling integration objects to be accessed and operated within the Patricia® graphical user interface acting as native Patricia® functions. Once again, this allowed us to provide a solution where users could operate in a unified environment for all daily tasks.
“ THIS COLLABORATION HAS RESULTED IN HELPING DUANE MORRIS MEET THE NEEDS OF ITS CLIENTS MORE EFFICIENTLY THAN EVER BEFORE.”
Finally, a conversion utility had to be written to bring the nine datasets into the master Patricia® database. To make the transition from the previous IP software to Patricia® successful, the conversion task was identified as the major single milestone. In order to make the conversion efforts efficient and reduce project delay, Patrix developed a custom conversion tool capable of handling the diverse databases. Te conversion tool had the ability to load all nine datasets into one centralised Patricia® database. Te conversion tool loaded all nine datasets in one task and each data set had its own conversion definition set out in the soſtware. Tis approach allowed the IP group to load the Patricia® database with the old data as they completed data cleaning tasks without unnecessarily straining technical resources.
In the final analysis, this collaboration has resulted in helping Duane Morris meet the needs of its clients more efficiently than ever before.
Te use of Patrix and Patricia® has allowed the firm to offer a centralised and continually evolving IP docketing solution. Te service has received favourable feedback from both attorneys and clients since its inception, and has made the firm more competitive in the legal marketplace and better able to serve and anticipate its clients’ needs in the future.
Lewis F. Gould Jr chairs the IP practice group at Duane Morris LLP. He can be contacted at:
lfgould@duanemorris.com
Laura Bandrowsky is practice support director at Duane Morris LLP. She can be contacted at:
lbandrowsky@duanemorris.com
©
iStockphoto.com / kutaytanir
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