Digital White Papers

ILTA WHITE PAPER: NOVEMBER 2015 WWW.ILTANET.ORG 33 With a sense of accomplishment, Alicia's thoughts returned to her genealogy and what Alice had told the king. Alicia chuckled and turned her attention to bringing the law firm into enlightenment with a modern financial and practice management system. ENLIGHTENMENT Centralizing financial and practice management in a law firm is not an overnight affair. It requires an enterprise business management system (EBMS) that includes knowledge of the firm's needs, the status of data in existing systems and its transferability to the new system, access to firm assets and resources, and training (training the trainers then users). To drive efficiency, the technologies used for the new system must interoperate on day one with existing computer and network infrastructures and adjust to new computer domains as the firm expands into other jurisdictions. Most large law firms should look for an EBMS running on Microsoft Windows platforms (.NET) using a component-based service-oriented architecture (SOA). SOA will prove to be an agile and more manageable solution with an integrated development environment and well-defined tools that can quickly respond to client and firm needs. Service-oriented design patterns provide the agility to add and or change components with less risk to change management within the business. Services for workflow and business rules provide a common place to manage and expose the plumbing to connect the business to processes often referred to as business process management (BPM) solutions. Every transaction or interaction in the new system should be workflow-enabled, without changing the pages or programming underlying business objects. Isolation of the presentation layer from the business rules and workflow services, for example, provides maximum agility to change and/ or adapt to a mobile, cloud-first technology solution. Validate that the system uses best practices in design to enable Web/mobile pages or forms to become part of a process controlled by a process manager. A simple process would display a page and write the results to a database. A more complex process would apply a set of business rules to the page and route the page for approval. Following approval, output is written to the database. Collaboration in an EBMS is ad hoc workflow. A workflow is built on business rules that send a process along a predefined set of tasks. A collaborative or workflow design tool can contain pages of fields that support multiple inputs and allow editors to send the pages to each other for comment and update. One lawyer receives a task, acts on it and returns the task to continue the process. Users customize workflows by managing tasks such as data pages at the application layer without changing the underlying business logic. ONCE AND FUTURE KINGS: FINANCIAL AND PRACTICE MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS TO RULE THEM ALL Service-oriented design patterns provide the agility to add and or change components with less risk to change management within the business.

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