Rosie's Ramblings

By Sandra Rosenzweig
     
      Linkin' Logs
      We're here today to discuss practice management. You know, logging every call, linking to every document, to each matter, and to the client. Keeping all those files and phone numbers secure. Encrypting all email messages and linking them with client, matter, and output. Synchronizing with PDAs (preferably Windows Mobile PCs) to track billable time outside the office as well as maintain identical calendars and phone books on both your handheld and your desktop. Monitoring phone calls as part of timekeeping. Automating your timekeeping and expenses so you can get your bills out by the fifth of the month and, if you're lucky, get paid before the end of the month. That sort of thing.
      You also need to take notes on each call. I know that this, like trust accounting, is a lot of work, but wouldn't it be great to, say, tell a caller, "My notes say this. What do your notes say?" One way to take these notes is to always keep open the NotePad app that is built in to most Microsoft operating systems. Save each note to a telephone log folder and deal with them at the end of the day. The problem is that each note just sits there, unlinked to a client or a matter or anything else. Furthermore, filing and linking each note to each client and matter at the end of a busy day just isn't going to happen.
      Don't start running to CompUSA or NewEgg just yet. You can solve this problem with your Microsoft Outlook 2000 (or any newer version). The first step is to set up Outlook's Journal application to become the spine of your practice-management system. The Journal will track every call, every brief, every bit of downloaded research and store the info in the client's Contacts entry. You just have to make it happen. Go to the Tools menu. Toward the bottom of the menu items, click on Options. Look down the resulting dialog box to Contacts, and, inside that, Journal Options. In that dialog box, check off which items you want automatically recorded in your Journal--check off E-mail Message at the very least. Now cast your eye down to the Also record files from sub-box. Click on all of the Microsoft programs you use in your practice (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, etc.). In another dialog sub-box, check off which contacts to track, and then select what you want to open when you double-click on a journal entry: either the journal entry itself, or the item referred to in the journal entry. Then click on the AutoArchive Journal Entries button and click the radio dot next to Do not archive items in this folder.
      I wanted Journal to work with other apps besides the four members of the Microsoft Office Suite listed above. So, I edited my registry. But don't do as I do, because if you make a mistake you could crash your entire computer. I went to Start, Run, and then typed "regedit" into the empty space and hit Enter. When the registry appeared in front of me, I expanded the left-hand list to find the My Computer\ HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Shared Tools\ Outlook\Journaling entry. Within Journaling, I found keys listed for the various types of journal entries, including Conversation, Document, E-mail Message, and several others. The right side of the screen displayed the values (instructions or content) for each of those keys. I had to create a new key for each type of document I wanted to link using Journal. So I right-clicked on Journaling and selected New, then Key, and then I entered the name of the new key (the name of the app you want to include in your journal). Then, working in the right-hand panel, I specified two values of the new key: The Description value of each key is a so-called string value--just a few words of text, usually the same as the name of this new key you're creating. The Large Icon is also a string value--a number, in brackets, between 1 and 20 or so, such as [3]. Each number represents a different Outlook icon for your journal entry to help you tell newly journalized apps apart. Because I didn't and still don't know which icon responds to which value, I experimented. First [1]. Nope, wrong. Then [2], then [3], then ... And that's how I got a couple of my other office (as opposed to Office) programs linked to my Outlook journal entries.
      I now had a simple but eminently usable practice-management tool that tracked every event in each client's matter. Had I been working in a law office, I would have wanted to place all this information in a public journal folder so everyone else in the office could consult my notes and the work I've already done.
     

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