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.