Best Practices to Enhance SmartAdvocate CMS
You’ve already decided to invest in SmartAdvocate Case Management System (CMS), and investing in a CMS is not something inexpensive. It takes a lot of money and a lot of time. The investment is an important financial decision that is integral to how your firm operates. But, as with many users, after the investment is made, SmartAdvocate CMS fails to run to its fullest potential.
Why? Because so many firms fail to realize that it is THEM making SmartAdvocate’s performance suffer, not the software itself. Investing in the software is only the first step in making sure SmartAdvocate CMS not only reaches its fullest potential, but works properly and efficiently.
In order to help legal firms make the most out of their SmartAdvocate CMS software, zbrella Technology Consulting has rounded up our top list of Best Practices when running SmartAdvocate.
Standardize & Invest in the Right Hardware
One of the most important things to do is standardize on business machines. Make sure you’re running SA on up-to-date workstations that are made for business. Generally, investing $1,500 to $2,000 per workstation ensures that SmartAdvocate CMS will run correctly. If you go cheap, paying only around $500 for poor machinery to save money will make your SA CMS suffer, and you’ll have to pay even more in the long run to fix the issues it will cause down the line.
Pay for the Software
This goes without saying. If you try to run a pirated version of SmartAdvocate CMS, you are putting your entire firm at risk. Software audits are a very common thing, and unless you are looking to pay thousands of dollars in a lawsuit for using illegal software, you’ll want to invest some hard capital in the real thing.
Point of Contact and Accountability
When technology is involved, there is always bound to be problems. That is why you have to prepare for these problems before they arise. Assign someone in your business, whether it’s a technical person or a manager, to be a point of contact for all of your employees should something go wrong with SmartAdvocate CMS. By doing this, there is a designated person that can get on the phone with vendors and deal with issues immediately as they happen. This will result in less downtime and less money lost.
Separate Core Functions
This means make sure that SmartAdvocate CMS is running on its own server. Running your entire business and SmartAdvocate on the same server is bad news. This slows down the application, causes issues, and increases the seconds it takes to load a page in SA every time a user clicks.
Training
Training, training, training! If you’re investing some major capital in a CMS, you better make sure your employees know how to use it! Did you know that many firms only use a handful of functions that SmartAdvocate CMS has to offer? To make the most out of your investment, reach out to SA and have trainers come in every couple of months to spend time with your staff. The more they know about SA, the more they can help the firm grow.
Plan for the Future
You need to start planning for growth now. As you grow, you will take in more and more cases and more and more information. The more data you enter, the more issues you’ll need to deal with: How do we back up? Where are we storing backups? How are we archiving? Etc. If you don’t start planning for this now, your SmartAdvocate CMS will 100% suffer in performance in the future, and so will your firm.
That rounds out zbrella Tech’s best tips on making the most out of your SmartAdvocate CMS. Have questions? Feel free to drop a comment below or call us at 718.355.9155 to talk to our SA Tech specialists. We’d love to chat!
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