About
TeamsWork
Randy Rowland
Owner, TeamsWork
Mission
At TeamsWork, our mission is to assist attorneys and law firms with choosing and implementing software solutions that provide an exceptional client experience while assuring law office efficiency, profitability and compliance with the Rules of Professional Conduct.
And in particular….
Because of my past experience as a CPA, I often audit and repair out-of-compliance trust accounts and other accounting issues to avoid or mitigate sanctions imposed by judicial oversight entities. Further, clients often call upon my expensive business management experience to help them manage firm workflows and resource allocations.
Experience
I spent nine years on the Professional Responsibility Board of the Vermont Judiciary. During that time, I saw that roughly 70% of the cases before the Board were the result of attorneys’ inattention to, or mishandling of, their IOLTA accounts. The preponderance of these cases were due to carelessness and inattention, not malfeasance.
After leaving the PRB, I started helping attorneys and for the first time understood the underlying cause of IOLTA mismanagement: most law firms were using multiple software products to handle their documents, calendar, email, workflow, trust accounting, business accounting, time and billing. The integration of all these products was minimal or nonexistent. The same data had to be entered in 2 or 3 different locations, which wasted attorney and staff time, and created multiple opportunities for errors. I also saw firms struggling with their hardware, as legacy on-premises software required expensive servers, backup protocols and expert oversight by IT professionals.
Attorneys needed legal practice management software (LPMS) that was an all-in-one (AIO) solution. A product that, with a single entry, recorded the time or expense spent on a client/matter, ready to invoice, and updated the firm’s accounting records for reconciliation with a bank account.
Then there was the issue of access to all that information while operating remotely, from a client’s office, a courtroom, or a kitchen table. Legacy on-premises software and operating systems required complex hardware and software to enable remote logins, and if something was not working, you had to be in the office to fix it. I searched and found only one (at that time) product that was cloud-native (accessed via a browser) and AIO.
The LPMS I found is called CosmoLex. Not only did it provide a single login to access a firm’s calendar, contacts, time/billing, and business accounting. It had dynamic integrations with all the major email clients, calendar apps, document management systems (DMS), legal CRMs, and payment processing apps. Recently, more AIO LPMS products have become available and I am a certified consultant in four of them.
