La firma de abogados USA Zelle, Hofmann, Voelbel, Mason & Gette LLP (www.zelle.com) ha implementado el paquete de Business Intelligence de Hummingbird para mejorar sus sistemas de control de minutas por cliente, gestionar datos de diferentes aplicaciones, integrar diferentes aplicaciones y simplificar la elaboración de informes financieros por parte del departamento de contabilidad. La firma tiene unos 75 abogados. Hummingbird tiene oficinas en España.
NOTA DE PRENSA HUMMINGBIRD USA
TORONTO, ON, and LawNet, PHOENIX, AZ, Aug. 23 – Hummingbird Ltd. a leading global provider of integrated enterprise content management (ECM) solutions, today announced that Zelle, Hofmann, Voelbel, Mason & Gette LLP has successfully deployed a customized matter- centric business intelligence (BI) solution using Hummingbird BI, to consolidate its reporting procedures and simplify report creation and distribution. The Hummingbird solution enables the firm to more easily collect, analyze and report on financial and operational data, from its multiple legal applications and data sources, offering the firm a more timely and accurate view of its business, improving strategic planning and overall decision making.
Hummingbird BI is seamlessly integrated with the Hummingbird Enterprise technologies deployed at the firm, including Hummingbird DM and the Enterprise Webtop, ensuring a secure environment to solve their information consolidation, distribution and dissemination challenges.
Headquartered in Minneapolis, Zelle Hofmann is a dispute resolution and litigation law firm with six offices across the United States. Hummingbird BI provides the firm with a customized matter-centric data model and a comprehensive set of pre-built reports that are specifically designed for the legal industry. Zelle Hofmann attorneys can access data across its multiple reporting systems easily and quickly, conduct on the fly queries and analysis, and generate reports on time and billing, client or matter-related, financial, practice area or attorney-based data. The attorneys and partners benefit from Hummingbird BI’s user-friendly graphical user interface to create superior financial reporting capabilities quickly and efficiently, thereby improving productivity.
«We use four different tracking and reporting products at our firm and they are not interchangeable. The out-of-the-box reporting solutions do not give us the exact data we require and our accounting department often found themselves spending hours combining data from multiple reports to create the report they wanted,» said Warren Knowles, technology implementation manager, Zelle Hofmann. «With Hummingbird BI we are able to consolidate our reporting procedure, providing on demand flexibility and improve delivery to attorneys.»
Simplifying Report Creation and Distribution
A long-standing challenge facing the firm’s accounting department has been the ability to easily and accurately report on financial data. One important report widely used across the firm is the Working Timekeeper Report that displays how each attorney spends their time – both billable and non-billable – over a given period. Zelle Hofmann uses this report to ensure that attorney time is being spent according to the time budgeted.
Previously, the Report combined six different Elite reports into a spreadsheet. Working with Hummingbird, Zelle Hofmann developed a BI solution: using BI’s easy yet powerful ad hoc queries, staff can combine all the data into a single comprehensive report that is now easier to read and analyze. With Hummingbird BI, the time to compile the Working Timekeeper Report has been reduced from hours to minutes.
Zelle Hofmann uses West km as a link to internal documents stored in its Hummingbird DM system, via Westlaw searches. When the attorneys search Westlaw, the same search will simultaneously query the DM system and specified documents subcategorized to be in that search will be returned with the Westlaw results. «For marketing reasons, our CFO wanted to be able to provide a measurable result to our attorneys of what West km was doing for us and how often it was being used,» said Knowles. «However, our standard Westlaw usage report doesn’t discriminate between Westlaw activities and West km activities.»
With Hummingbird BI, administrative staff are able to query into the West km database and develop a simple report that shows how many West km specific activities were performed outside of Westlaw with activities broken down by user, date and matter. This way the firm can actually measure the number of times existing work product and its information is used for legal research thus saving client’s money when fee earners reuse work product.
Genifax, Zelle Hofmann’s electronic fax system, is used for all inbound faxes. It provides electronic distribution of faxes directly to the attorney’s e-mail. In order to provide accurate billing reports, the firm needed to keep track of inbound faxes, for example, how many incoming faxes, how many pages per fax, and which attorney received the fax. This information is recorded in the Genifax database, however Genifax cannot provide a report of these statistics. Using Hummingbird BI, administrators were able to create this simple report and make it accessible via the BI Web interface. The BI report can specify city of origin, number of faxes, number of pages per fax, average pages per fax, or all of the above.
«We use Hummingbird BI to create reports the users really want, reports that give them the data in the way they’ve always wanted to see it,» adds Knowles. «Hummingbird BI allows us to compile data into more complex and comprehensive reports that significantly cut down on processing time and paper. Reports that used to take hours to compile and organize are now done in minutes. Additionally, the easy-to-use BI Web interface allows us to let anybody run these reports, not just users familiar with our financial system, which frees up valuable time for our accounting staff. We plan to extend Hummingbird BI use to provide more functionality to the end users, to automate the distribution of monthly reports and other time consuming processes.»
Looking Ahead – Future Deployments
Zelle Hofmann has more plans for its Hummingbird Enterprise deployment. «In the future, we hope to expand on the BI potential by using it to cross report on multiple databases at once. Some immediate plans are a DM/West km merged database model, which will allow us to collectively report on document activity in both West km and DM simultaneously,» said Knowles. «A DTE/Elite merged BI model will allow accounting to quickly identify and report on missing or erroneous time entries. We also plan to use Hummingbird BI to tap into the extensive and complex Elite Conflicts index in order to easily and quickly provide client conflict and relationship information to attorneys.»
«Hummingbird has a proven track record in helping law firms get the answers they need, when they need them and in meaningful formats to accelerate time to knowledge and improve overall decision making,» said Andrew Pery, chief marketing officer and senior vice president, Hummingbird Ltd. «Hummingbird BI enables law firms to report on matter-centric information quickly and easily throughout the entire lifecycle, from intake through final disposition. Hummingbird is committed to providing the best solutions to the legal sector for reducing risk, measuring profitability, increasing productivity and improving efficiency.»
Warren Knowles from Zelle Hofmann will provide a live demonstration of their Hummingbird BI solution at LawNet 2004 at the Hummingbird SIG Session: «Hummingbird Enterprise Suite – Bringing all the Pieces Together,» August 24th, 10:30 a.m. – Noon, in Grand Canyon 3 and 4.
About Zelle, Hofmann, Voelbel, Mason & Gette LLP
Zelle, Hofmann, Voelbel, Mason & Gette LLP is a premier national dispute resolution and litigation law firm with rich and diverse experience in high-risk, high-stakes cases. The Firm excels at handling complex litigation and disputes on a national and international basis. With over 75 attorneys the Firm represents both defendants and plaintiffs in its trial and dispute resolution practice. The Firm’s broad litigation experience includes antitrust, banking, business torts, class action, commercial, employment, environmental, ERISA, financial services, insurance coverage, intellectual property, mass tort, mold claims, personal injury, product liability, professional liability, reinsurance, securities, subrogation-third party recovery, unfair business practice and unfair competition litigation. Zelle Hofmann’s attorneys are organized into groups that practice in particular areas and draw on resources from all our offices, across the country. Most Zelle Hofmann attorneys have experience on both sides of the table, which gives the Firm a distinct advantage in developing trial and other litigation strategies.
Zelle Hofmann has offices in Boston, Dallas, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, San Francisco and Washington, D.C.; and in Shanghai and Beijing, People’s Republic of China, in affiliation with the Chinese law firm of ZY & Partners.
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