Collaborative, Efficient & in Sync: Your Current Calendar for Everything You Need.
(This is a continuation, click here to see the prior post.)
Now more than ever, efficiency and organization are crucial in a law office. With adaptations being made and additional work being created by the challenges of COVID-19, you need a calendar that can intuitively keep you on track and get you the information you need with a few simple clicks.
Beyond the standard functions of detailed office and case calendars, you need additional options in order to completely manage your daily schedule, and the complex schedules of the people in your firm.
Creating and Saving Filters for Future Use
Perhaps you want to see the calendars of the auto negligence or nursing home attorneys for the next month. Or maybe you want to view all of the motions scheduled for a specific court on the same day, so you can send one attorney to cover them all instead of the three attorneys who are scheduled to attend. Changes like this can be done easily in SmartAdvocate to help make your firm more efficient, and therefore more profitable.
Set your date range, Attending Staff, Court County, and any other filters you need, then click “Apply Filters”. You’ll instantly see all of the cases scheduled for that court on that date (or whatever filters you have set) and you can assign them appropriately.
If you find yourself repeatedly doing a particular search, you can also save those searches so you can easily re-run them without having to recreate them each time. Just set up the search so it provides the information you need, then click on “Save Filter”. A panel will pop up, giving you the opportunity to name and save the filter for easy reference in the future when you want to apply it again.
Thereafter, when you want to re-run the search, just click on Favorites (from any page in SmartAdvocate) or Filter (from the Calendar), choose the Favorite Filter you want to run, and SmartAdvocate will immediately run that search.
Note that the Favorite will not remember the specific dates you entered as the date range, but rather the relationship of those dates to the day on which you created the Favorite. So, if on December 1 you set a date range of December 1 through December 31 (31 days) and save it as a Favorite Filter and a week later you run the search again using the saved Favorite Filter, the date range will be from the date you run the search until 31 days into the future.
Most likely there is a particular calendar search you are interested in most frequently when you view the Office Calendar – perhaps the next 30 days of your own calendar or that of a group of people with whom you work. Simply save the filter set as described above, but also check the box labeled “Default Filter”. Now, every time you go to the Office Calendar this search will run automatically and you will be presented with the results. Of course, you can go back to change the filters for a particular search, as needed.
Calendar Reports
Similar to filters and searches, it is important for you to be able to pull information from your case management system with only a few clicks. Calendar Reports allows you to pull wide sets of data, so you are well informed in a matter of seconds.
SmartAdvocate comes with five pre-formatted Calendar reports:
- Adjourned/Cancelled Appointments Report
- Calendar Report
- Calendar Report Advanced
- Client Birthday Report
- Who is where tomorrow
Three of these reports are relatively static, with limited customizability. The two remaining Reports, Calendar Report and Calendar Report Advanced, each provide significant flexibility to create a report that meets your specific needs. They are essentially quite similar, except that the “Calendar Report Advanced” provides some additional filter fields, specifically: Case Status, Show Adjourned Appointments, Note Type, Case Number, and the ability to select the columns to appear in the Report.
Both Reports allow you to include Appointments, Tasks, and/or Critical Deadlines.
Subscribe to Calendar Reports
As with all Reports in SmartAdvocate, you can Subscribe to any of the Calendar Reports, so they will automatically be emailed to you or anyone else you choose on a schedule you select. Many firms generate a daily, weekly or monthly calendar that is distributed to the firm staff. Now, with many firms working remotely, getting a daily emailed report of the calendar helps your firm stay connected and in sync with each other.
With SmartAdvocate’s “Subscription” feature you can have the calendar distributed to all staff on a schedule you select (e.g., have the calendar for the next day emailed to your staff at 4:00 pm, or have the “Trial” or “Motion” calendar automatically sent to the Litigation Team).
Meeting All of Your Needs
The SmartAdvocate Office Calendar is a full service, full featured calendar that meets all of your firm’s calendaring needs. The calendar itself, as well as the exceptional calendar reports provided, can display events for a single case, a single individual, any group or department, or the entire office, all with just a couple clicks. Appointments, Critical Deadlines, and SOLs can be pushed to your Outlook calendar. A true office-wide calendar.
SmartAdvocate® is the most powerful, fully integrated case and document management system available. Initially designed by and for personal injury and mass tort litigation firms, SmartAdvocate® is now used by a wide range of litigation firms throughout the United States and Canada. If you have any questions, or for additional information, please contact us at 877-GET-SMART (877-438-7627).
