ARTICLE: Wexford startup launches an iPad app for lawyers

Lawyers are often among the last to adopt new technologies, says John Kuntz, founder of Bellefield Systems, a company that is pushing the profession into the digital age with a savvy (and secure) app for the iPad.

Bellfield Systems in Wexford partnered last year with ProLaw, makers of a software suite used by many legal professionals at mid-sized firms to manage business. Attorneys today need to be more accountable with their time, especially in their billings, says Kuntz.

"Clients are demanding that everything be more detailed and quicker. It has become more competitive now that clients are better educated and demanding greater efficiency."

Previously the founder of Labwerks, an early interactive website marketing company purchased by Engauge in 2005, Kuntz has assembled a diverse team that includes two other principals, Gabriela Isturiz, a native of Venezuela, and her husband Daniel Garcia, a native of Spain. The two were co-founders of eBillingHub and bring 15-20 years experience in software and legal IT to the company.

Bellefield's app and flagship product is iDocExplorer, which is available though iTunes, and securely integrates with the ProLaw document management system to deliver data through a wireless connection or 3G network. Attorneys are able to access case and matter-related documents with complete security, says Kuntz.

A second app in development, iTimeKeep, will help attorneys to track billing time on any practice management system.

"Pittsburgh, for being a small city, has some of the largest law firms in the world," adds Isturiz. "There's a big legal community here and we're trying to take advantage of that."

Link: Click Here
Writer: Deb Smit
Source: John Kuntz, Bellefield Systems

First ProLaw iPad App is Now Available through ProLaw and Bellefield Partnership

First ProLaw iPad App is Now Available through ProLaw and Bellefield Partnership

iDocExplorer Provides Secure Access to ProLaw Documents via iPad

LOS ANGELES and NEW YORK, Jan. 31, 2011 – Bellefield Systems, in partnership with ProLaw, is launching its first iPad App for ProLaw at LegalTech New York, today. iDocExplorer, available for download from the iTunes App store, will give attorneys mobile access to their matters and documents securely and efficiently on their iPad tablet. This is the first of several iPad applications being developed by Bellefield in 2011.

“We are pleased to see ProLaw’s core functionality extended to the iPad through the innovative efforts of our partners at Bellefield,” said Matthew DeVoll, vice president and general manager of ProLaw. “An increasing number of attorneys and other professionals are using these great devices in the workplace. Getting access to matter information in ProLaw from the iPad is a big advantage for many of our customers.”

iDocExplorer seamlessly and securely integrates with the ProLaw document management system (DMS) and delivers data via a wireless connection or the 3G network. Attorneys will be able to access case- or matter-related documents anytime and anywhere, and do so more quickly since they are not using a VPN or Citrix environment, yet still maintaining security and privacy.

“Attorneys will have instant access to their ProLaw matters and all associated documents, emails, and events – directly from their iPad,” said John Kuntz, principal, Bellefield Systems. “The iPad and other tablet devices are becoming popular tools that are more functional than a smartphone, and easier to use than a laptop. We are helping law firms transform these devices into powerful business tools.”

“With so many attorneys now owning iPads, the iDocExplorer now makes this toy a necessary legal tool,” said ProLaw user Rachel M. Dollar, partner at Smith Dollar PC, a premier real estate and financial services law firm in California.

ProLaw is an integrated software suite designed to automate the practice and manage the business of law. Comprehensive features simplify, streamline and coordinate the work of attorneys and staff in small and mid-size law firms, corporate legal departments and government law offices. Built from the ground-up on a single database, ProLaw combines case and matter management, as well as time entry, billing and accounting capabilities, within a complete integrated solution. Bellefield became a member of the ProLaw Alliance Program last year. ProLaw is part of the Business of Law unit of Thomson Reuters, Legal.

For more information and updates, visit the Bellefield blog at http://bellefieldnews.blogspot.com/

About Bellefield Systems
Bellefield Systems enables ProLaw law firms to improve practice efficiencies in the areas of collaboration and compliance. Our next generation software products integrate seamlessly with ProLaw, helping you to work smarter, faster and more productively. www.bellefield.com.

Thomson Reuters

Thomson Reuters is the world's leading source of intelligent information for businesses and professionals. We combine industry expertise with innovative technology to deliver critical information to leading decision makers in the financial, legal, tax and accounting, healthcare and science and media markets, powered by the world's most trusted news organization. With headquarters in New York and major operations in London and Eagan, Minnesota, Thomson Reuters employs 55,000 people and operates in over 100 countries. For more information, go to www.thomsonreuters.com.

Bellefield Newsletter, January 2011

In This Issue

Editorial Note: Welcome
New LinkedIn ProLaw Users Group
Got an iPad? Here's a ProLaw App

Take our iPad Survey

Smart Profiler New Features

Welcome to the first edition of the Bellefield Newsletter, Your ProLaw Partner.

Editorial Note

It is with pleasure that we bring you the inaugural issue of our newsletter. Your place to find out how to make your practice more efficient, learn new best practices, and to see what we are up to. We have been batting around many different names for this publication, which I will share with you, but first some background information.

The name of our company is Bellefield Systems. Bellefield translates to beautiful field; think pastures, fragrant flowers, honey bees, and green grass on a warm summer day. Our mascot is Belle the sweet friendly bovine you see here. Gaby, Dani and Myself are fun loving, hard working, problem solving, engineer types. We will decide by the next issue as to what to call this thing. The names to date:

The Bellefield Gazette

The Moos You Can Use

Belle's MoosLetter

Bellefield eZine

John Kuntz & Gaby Isturiz

NEW! Subscribe to our LinkedIn ProLaw Users Community Group

Please take this short survey and we will share with you the results once we close the survey. Feel free to forward to any of you colleagues. Take me to the iPad SurveyWe are very excited to announce the first ProLaw Users Group in LinkedIn. This group is targeted to users, vendors, consultants and other professionals that want to share ideas, exchange problems/solutions, make announcements and even post jobs. The group is NOT monitored and anyone can sign in (no approval required either).

Click here to go to the LinkedIn ProLaw Community Group and please, forward this to any other person that may also be interested.

Got an iPad? We have the perfect ProLaw App for you!

We at Bellefield just had one of those HIGH FIVE moments, we FINALLY broke the code and got our Ipad App migrated through ITunes to the Ipad and running! Driving document data from the ProLaw Back Office server to The Cloud to the Ipad - quickly and seamlessly.

Seeing your Matters in a matter of seconds - anywhere! This is monumental for us and the world of ProLaw users. They can now search and view their documents on their IPad, think about that! For a certain group of people we have taken the IPad from toy to tool, justifying the ownership of one of these fabulous pieces of technology. Want to learn more? click here

 Take our 1-minute iPad Survey HERE

You don't need to have an iPad to take this survey! We are currently conducting a study about how people in the legal industry are using or planning to use it in the future.

ProLaw Smart Profiler New Features

Profile multiple emails at once. You can really expedite your email profiling process by selecting multiple emails and profiling them seamlessly into ProLaw.

Send Prolaw Document Links. If you are collaborating with other professionals in your firm and need to exchange ProLaw documents back and forth, you can now just email the "document link" as opposed to the document itself. This feature will avoid the need to save, modify and re-attach. Clicking on the "document link" will immediately open your ProLaw document so you can start working with it right away.

Attach ProLaw Documents. Sending emails with ProLaw documents as attachments is now easier than ever. You will be able to browse to your ProLaw documents and select one or many and immediately be able to send your email.

Profile Attachment as children events. Now you have the option when profiling your emails to indicate whether you want those attachments as children documents of the parent.

Remember you can download it for free and try our products for 30 days. Ready to buy? Just go to our website www.bellefield.com or just email us at sales@bellefield.com

Thank you and let us know if you have any comments to our newsletter or if you want to contribute with an article.

Sincerely,

Bellefield Systems
www.bellefield.com

Bellefield IPad App - I feel like a kid again!

Since childhood I have been a tinkerer, always building and developing things, tearing things apart and at times, in a grandiose manner, blowing things up; think model rockets, motorcycles, computers, and the occasional very large firecracker in ponds, under trees, etc. Typical boy stuff. Fast forward to college and then to my careers and I have done the same things, but without getting a tanning from my strict Germanic mother.

There is a special feeling you get when you build your first engine and it finally turns over and starts, you develop a complicated piece of software and it finally runs without error, or the Steelers win the AFC Championship (or Super Bowl). These are all "gimme' a HIGH FIVE" moments in life. Very special and memorable moments, though they do become fewer and futher between as your personal threshold for success becomes higher.

We at Bellefield just had one of these HIGH FIVE moments, we FINALLY broke the code and got our Ipad App migrated through ITunes to the Ipad and running! Driving document data from the ProLaw Back Office server to The Cloud to the Ipad - quickly and seamlessly. Seeing your Matters in a matter of seconds - anywhere! This is monumental for us and the world of ProLaw users. They can now search and view their documents on their IPad, think about that! For a certain group of people we have taken the IPad from toy to tool, justifying the ownership of one of these fabulous pieces of technology. Thank you Steve Jobs, get well.
Stay tuned for more details.

More webinars scheduled for Smart Email Profiler

The response to the launch of our Smart Email Profiler for ProLaw has been unbelievable. We are being told by the firms using it that they are saving hundreds of hours of time and word is getting out about the ease of install and use. It is always a great satisfaction hearing that you are helping people work smarter and more efficiently.

We have been inundated with requests for demonstrations. The most efficient manner we have found is to have a 20 minute webinar showing the capabilities of the tool. We have added two additional events for the balance of October:

WEBINAR SCHEDULE

October 22nd at 3:30 pm EDT  Click to Register

October 29th at 3:30 pm EDT Click to Register 

We look forward to seeing you there!

See you at the ProLaw Users Conference!

Bellefield will be attending the ProLaw users conference at the Tamaya Resort in New Mexico on October 25th - 28th. (more info here).

The conference will serve as our formal launch for three new and exciting tools which have come out of Bellefield Labs; Smart Profiler, Document Explorer, and Launchpad. 

Come and see us at booth #6  for a demo of each of these products. We will be raffling off a loaded Apple IPad to anyone who downloads and installs a trial of any one of the three. Try the three of them to triple your chances!

ProLaw Announces Bellefield as Member of Alliance Program

LOS ANGELES, Oct. 6, 2010 – The ProLaw Alliance Program has added Bellefield Systems LLC as its latest member to improve practice efficiencies in the areas of collaboration and compliance for small- and mid-sized law firms, corporate legal departments, and government law offices that are using the ProLaw software solution. ProLaw is a suite of financial and practice management applications, from Thomson Reuters.

From the founders of eBillingHub, Bellefield has launched a suite of tools including a smart email profiler, a document organization tool, and an application interface for integrators specially designed to work with the ProLaw financial and practice management software.

The Bellefield team has a combined decade of ProLaw integration experience and two decades of developing legal software applications. The company offers innovative and targeted solutions that enhance the capabilities of ProLaw, an integrated software solution designed to automate the practice and manage the business of law.

“Our partners at Bellefield bring a unique set of talents to ProLaw,” said Matthew DeVoll, VP and General Manager at ProLaw. “They have significant user experience serving ProLaw clients and we are fortunate to have them on board.”

“We are honored to be one of the first ProLaw Alliance Partners,” said John Kuntz, principal, Bellefield Systems. “Our mission is to help ProLaw users operate their practices in the most efficient manner possible. By listening to ProLaw users and understanding how they use the system, we have developed advanced, yet practical solutions that enhance their ProLaw experience.”

The ProLaw Alliance Program creates new growth opportunities for businesses with services and applications that complement ProLaw. The ideal partner provides technical and business support and/or software add-on modules that can be provided directly to ProLaw users.Once an approved member, partners have access to a variety of marketing, technical and training resources.

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About Bellefield Systems
Bellefield Systems enables ProLaw law firms to improve practice efficiencies in the areas of collaboration and compliance. Our next generation software products integrate seamlessly with ProLaw, helping you to work smarter, faster and more productively. http://www.bellefield.com/

About Elite
Elite is a leading provider of integrated information solutions to professional services firms worldwide. Elite is part of Thomson Reuters and is a premier provider of financial and practice management systems to the legal industry and to other professional services markets, including accounting, marketing services, and management and IT consulting. For more information, visit http://www.elite.com/

About Thomson Reuters
Thomson Reuters is the world’s leading source of intelligent information for businesses and professionals. We combine industry expertise with innovative technology to deliver critical information to leading decision makers in the financial, legal, tax and accounting, scientific, healthcare and media markets, powered by the world’s most trusted news organization. With headquarters in New York and major operations in London and Eagan, Minn., Thomson Reuters employs more than 50,000 people in 93 countries. Thomson Reuters shares are listed on the New York Stock Exchange, Toronto Stock Exchange, London Stock Exchange and NASDAQ. For more information, visit http://www.thomsonreuters.com/

So much work for so little information

Every time someone purchases our Document Explorer – ProLaw Edition we get an email from our e-commerce site asking us to confirm the purchase. It is a simple “yes or no” question, but here are all the steps someone needs to take to get it answered properly:

• First of all, we visually check the email to make sure the order is not a fake. We get many fake emails and failing to identify even a single one could mean the bad guys get access to our e-commerce account. Not good, so this step is crucial.
• Once we are sure the email is not a fake, we click on the link provided. That takes us to our e-commerce website login page.
• Now we look up our password and type it in. As easy at this sounds, for security reasons we try to use very strong passwords full of numbers, letters, and other characters. So typing them is not that easy.
• Our password takes us to our e-commerce main page, where we now have to locate the appropriate order. Sometimes it is listed right there, sometimes we have to perform a search.
• Ultimately, we get to the order details page, which contains 2 big buttons: “Confirm” and “Cancel”. We are finally in a position to answer the original question. 

But none of these steps are essential when all I want is to provide a simple answer to a simple question. All these additional steps are just unnecessary fluff.

For all the benefits that hosted SaaS websites bring to us, interacting with many of them can be time consuming and –perhaps- even dangerous. Why do we have to keep repeating all these steps just to answer a simple yes/no question? Why do these applications keep using email and thus putting at risk our company's financial or confidential data?

If that was not enough, consider that by their very own nature these SaaS websites tend to change their looks, their menus, their navigation, the look and content of their emails, etc. on a regular basis. This means we have to spend even more time and effort to keep up with them and avoid succesful phishing attacks.

At Bellefield we keep imagining ways in which these micro-exchanges of information (a micro-transaction, if you will) can be made safe, quick, painless, and above all not fluffy.

In an SaaS world, terminating access to confidential data is hard to do well

We've always had attorneys and employees moving from law firm to law firm. And when that happened protecting the firm's confidential information used to be (almost) as simple as disabling their access cards and deleting their Active Directory account. In five minutes it was all over and the ex-attorney or ex-employee no longer had access to email, time and billing system, back office databases, or even the office bathroom. The hardest park was wrestling them out of their leased parking garage card.

Alas, in today's world of hosted applications (SaaS) revoking access privileges is not so simple anymore. Let's say an employee leaves your firm tomorrow. While you can trust that her access to internal systems will be ended quickly, confidential data hosted in external applications can remain accessible for many months after her departure. Consider the following hosted applications and the data they hold:

• Case data in litigation support systems like CT Summation
• Financial data in matter management systems like Datacert or Serengeti
• Client data in CRM or marketing systems like Salesforce.com
• Documents and discussions in various collaboration portals
• And tens of other client-owned extranet systems

But if you ask any of these vendors they will tell you their systems are very secure. And, for the most part, they are right. So how could an ex-employee have access to those systems months after their departure? Simple: no one at your firm bothered to terminate the ex-employee access to those systems. In fact, I would bet no one at your firm was keeping track of accounts opened on external systems.

Law firms could do more to reduce this risk, perhaps through more centralized control of who has access to what external applications. But vendors could also do more, perhaps through wider usage of single sign-on or claims-based techniques that enforce access termination as soon as an employee is removed from the firm’s internal systems.

More evidence that sometimes email is not good enough

Email continues to be a source of security risks. You can look at a recent report here or search the internet for similar cases. But the bottom line is very simple. If you are a SaaS vendor in the legal industry ask yourself these two questions:

1. Do you consider your SaaS application to be mission-critical?
2. Does your application send notifications to its users via email?

If you have answered "yes" to both questions then you may be opening yourself -and your customers- to an attack similar to the ones described the report above. 

On a brighter note, Bellefield is working to address this very issue.

Enabling Effective Collaboration

One of the guiding principles of Bellefield's collaboration framework is that it must provide the building blocks necessary to enable users to collaborate effectively. It may sound obvious, but the reality is that when you look at most of the current offerings in the market they lack some of these basic building blocks.

For example, a very basic feature that any collaboration application should have is single-sign on. For the non-technical user, single sign-on means that you get logged in automatically into the applications or websites you use without you having to remember or manage two dozen different sets of usernames and passwords.

Single sign-on is a great idea, however not very many applications in the legal market take advantage of it (see NetDocuments as an exception). And without single-sign on users are stuck with having to manage all these passwords, usually by their own means.

How do they do it? Most use a simple Excel spreadsheet to keep track of their website/username/password combinations. Some use Post It notes under their monitors. Some others just re-use the same password over and over again in different websites. Neither of these systems can be called “best practice” or taken as very secure, but what else can a user do? And what are the risk implications for the law firm as a whole?

We’ll address risk in a future post, but for now let’s write down a simple usability rule: the harder you make me work to access your website the more I will avoid using your website.

And if your website happens to be about collaboration then you should be encouraging me to collaborate more, not less. In Bellefield’s view, single sign-on is a required building block of an effective collaboration framework.

Another call to move beyond unsecured email

Here is an interesting article predicting a shift in the legal industry towards encrypted communications within the next 2-3 years. Knowing a bit about the legal market we would rather bet on 3-6 years, but regardless of the timeframe the overall shift is undeniable and already under way. And the pace will only accelerate as technology advances and regulations press on.

Even today there are very few reasons -other than convenience- for attorneys to continue to use unsecured email to communicate and collaborate with their clients. Email is too unreliable and too risky, and almost any inbox ends up growing to unmanageable size.

There are many vendors that provide secure web-based workspaces for collaboration, but even those vendors resort to the use of unsecured email in one way or another, even if only to keep members up to date with recent changes inside a workspace. Is it possible to build a reliable collaboration platform on top of an unreliable communication mechanism like email? Probably not.

According to the article, a better solution may soon be needed.

Bellefield featured in the September issue of The American Legal Technology Insider

We love The Orange Rag, Charles Christian’s news blog, for the depth of his posts and for his continuing effort to keep us up to date with the most current news in the legal technology field. For the same reasons, we appreciate the reference to Bellefield and our new Legal Collaboration Framework in his most recent September publication.

You can download the Legal Technology Insider September issue from:

http://www.theorangerag.com/_attachments/4318077/ALTi%2314.pdf

The American Legal Technology Insider (ALTi) recently celebrated its one year anniversary and its subscriber base is growing rapidly. Only one year into publication, the circulation has topped over 18,000.

Bellefield Announces Collaboration Framework for the Legal Industry

On September 9, 2009 we announced the formal launch of Bellefield and our Legal Collaboration Framework.

As one of our offerings, we are building a simple yet robust collaboration framework that leverages the latest technologies to address some of the traditional shortcomings of current collaboration solutions.

For more detail you can download the press release from:

http://www.prweb.com/releases/2009/09/prweb2844524.htm

The response so far has been very encouraging. Thank you all!

Bellefield Now a Member of Microsoft BizSpark

We are happy to announce that Bellefield is now a member of the Microsoft BizSpark program for startup companies. The goal of this Microsoft program is to support early stage companies by providing them with free software licenses, technical support, education, and access to their network of partners.

In practical terms, this means that every staff member at Bellefield (up to 25) has now access to a fully licensed copy of the software and tools we will be using to develop our next-generation SaaS collaboration platform for the legal market. Here are the tools we are planning to use: 

• Microsoft Visual Studio 2008
• Microsoft SQL Server 2008
• Microsoft Office 2007
• Microsoft Expression Blend
• Microsoft Expression Web
• Microsoft Expression Design

The BizSpark licenses are good for 3 years and after that we will need to pay Microsoft a symbolic $100. That’s it. Sounds like a deal? Your company may be able to apply as well, read more about BizSpark here.

Obviously Microsoft does not do this out of the kindness of their heart: their goal is to eliminate any pricing objections that startup companies may have to building their solutions on the Microsoft platform. And with all those free open source alternatives for building SaaS applications, why would you want licensing costs to be the deciding factor?

We think this is a very smart move by Microsoft. It is likely that those successful startup companies will continue to use Microsoft’s technology well beyond their startup phase. And that means real revenue for Microsoft. And for those startups that fail, well, at least you have a team of people that have learned and are familiar with a number of Microsoft’s technologies and not some competing alternative. It is a win-win for Microsoft no matter how you slice it.

In Bellefield’s case, we will work hard and do our best to make sure we are one of those successful startups Microsoft is looking to foster. Big thanks to Microsoft!