Most modern businesses are already operating a digital toolchain of specialized business tools covering the different aspects of their business, e.g., an ERP system to manage financials and accounting and a document management system to manage documentation and communications. Unfortunately, the toolchain can easily consist of five to ten such systems or even more for most businesses. This makes processes and data fragmented and less optimal for supporting the business. Legal Plant is, truth to be told, yet another tool in this toolchain. Still, unlike most other digital tools, it ties all these individual systems together and remote control them when needed to enable end-to-end workflows and a single point of truth. This approach can supercharge your business!
Most of today's advanced digital tools are weaponized with powerful APIs (Application Provider Interface) that makes it possible to operate all their features machine-to-machine, which is used to do integrations between systems. This is how Legal Plant can fully or partially remote control other business tools to defragment and unify business processes. This means users of Legal Plant can use functionality and change data in different systems right from within relevant context inside the Legal Plant user interface, e.g., log hours on the case in Legal Plant, but simultaneously automatically filling this out remotely into the ERP system available for the invoicing and accounting workflows.
There are quite a lot of integrations implemented at the moment. Probably the first one the user will come into contact with is the integration with Brønnøysundregistrene, thanks to which Legal Plant users have seamless access to a reliable directory of economic entities registered in Norway. This integration not only facilitates the search for companies, but also eliminates the risk of entering incorrect data, which could have serious consequences.
The power of integrations
A more weighty solution is integration with Google Drive and Google Mail. The former allows you to store documents related to the case in one place, available to all members of the case team. Importantly - obtaining access does not require complicated administrative activities such as assigning a password and the like. It is enough to add the user to the case team (for example, by delegating a task to him in the case workflow), and the rest will be done by Legal Plant. Speaking of integration with Google Drive, this kind of integration with MS365 will be ready in the near future.
As for Google Mail, this integration consists of grouping all emails related to a given case in one place, regardless of which specific case team member is the addressee or sender of the email. It's about more than just the convenience, transparency, and easy access to case information in emails - although these are important factors, of course. Such integration enables, above all, the achievement of an appropriate level of compliance. Gathering all emails related to the case in one place also makes it possible to manage the information contained therein - for example, removing them from all email boxes at the client's request.
Accounting system integration
A relatively extensive and potentially very beneficial integration is the one with the accounting system. It allows law firm employees to log hours spent working on specific cases without leaving the application's context, logging into another system, and other inconveniences.
The user can log the hours in two places. The first one is the 'My work' view, which is the personal control panel of each Legal Plant user. In the 'Timesheet' tab, there is a preview of all matters in which a given user is involved, regardless of whether he is responsible for the entire procedure or only for one of the tasks in the workflow. In this view, it is also possible to log hours not related to any specific case. Logged hours are visible in weekly intervals, and billable and non-billable hours are clearly separated.
The second place where the user can log hours is the context of a specific case. Here, it is only possible to log the hours spent on a given case, thanks to which we avoid clutter and mistakes.
All logged hours appear in integrated accounting systems, which makes the work registration process convenient (the user does not have to leave the context in which he works) and free from the consequences of possible mistakes (thanks to eliminating the user's interaction with the often complicated accounting system).
The integration of Legal Plant with PowerOffice Go is currently available. Still, integration of the application with Tripletex is a matter weeks. We also plan integrations with other industry-standard accounting systems.
