December 6, 2002

Technology donation provides big boost for law students

In the diligent and justify-every-minute world of the attorney, it is very difficult for lawyers to understand aspects of their practice that are not under their immediate control. Dealing with clients and courts must be the highest priority, leaving the needs of the practice itself somewhere else in the scheme of operations.

If management of staff, marketing of the firm, and tending to the health of the business of the practice cannot be understood via the quick study, most practitioners just move on to the next pressing matter. As far as the business of the practice, this can have negative to dire consequences specifically with accounting.

After almost a decade of working with attorneys and their staffs in the effort to use accounting software, Ann McMahon of Professional Publications Services, Inc. (Pro Pubs), dealer for TABS and PracticeMaster, kept seeing the same problems. She saw attorneys who just did not understand accounting. "Because of this lack of understanding, they hired improperly for jobs like billing, payments, and accounts receivable," says McMahon. They then further aggravated the problem by making unreasonable demands on staff through their lack of understanding of what was required. Finally, they found themselves down the road, losing significant amounts of money or having money stolen from them. They just did not grasp how important accounting activities were to their very survival."

After years of this repetitive scenario, McMahon began looking for a way to make a difference. She reasoned that accounting needed to be part of legal education just like filing a motion or handling a jury. Toward that end, she made a call in 1997 on the Loyola Law Clinic and met Professor Luz Molina, then acting director.

Molina had the same concerns. "The Law Clinic's purpose is to provide for the indigent and to also provide law students real world experience in doing so," says Molina. "I asked to see Ann because I wanted to see the students learning to at least enter their time into software as they went about their cases and to keep timely case diary entries. Our challenge was how to get this done with the limited budget of the Law Clinic."

When requests for outside financial help to achieve the goal fell on deaf ears, the two women decided to make it happen on their own. Molina was able to convince the school to purchase PracticeMaster (then Case Master) practice management software from Pro Pubs as well as services to train staff in the use of PracticeMaster and to establish various custom reports in the software to allow the clinical professors to keep tabs on their students and cases.

With PracticeMaster in place, McMahon's company, Pro Pubs, provided a $1,400 donation in 2001 to Loyola that make the purchase of TABS time and billing software possible. TABS would account for student attorney time and productivity.

However more licenses were needed for all students and staff to utilize, not only TABS, but the PracticeMaster software. PracticeMaster now offered the attractive feature of allowing students to take their case information with them on their laptops and then synchronize their case information with the school's main installation on the campus network upon their return. It was at this point that McMahon contacted Software Technology, Inc. (STI), manufacturers of TABS and PracticeMaster and asked if they could help.

Ken Merkt, executive vice president of STI says, "We are glad to donate to Loyola the increase in TABS and PracticeMaster licenses." The STI donation is $7,100 in software licenses and a $2,055 annual for support and maintenance, leaving Loyola to pay only the $995 annual balance. "This will amount," states Merkt, "to an 'in-kind' donation of $2,055 annually and a savings this year of $9,155."

The "in-kind" donations continue from Pro Pubs as McMahon provides time entry training during orientation for new law clinic students as well as assisting Molina with on-site support of TABS and PracticeMaster. The School of Law can proudly state that it is the only law school in the Southeast offering its students a chance to learn accounting as a vital part of their daily practice.

"Here at Loyola," says Molina, "we teach our students the Jesuit ideal that they must succeed to help themselves and then, with their success, they must help others. Learning the importance of software in the practice will go far to help our students attain this ideal."