PerfectLaw Podcasts

Episode #16 - PerfectLaw's Powerful Search Tool a.k.a the Data Browser

Cyndi Celebrezze of Wegman Hessler & Vanderburg in Cleveland, Ohio talks about the flexibility of PerfectLaw’s search tool, the Data Browser.  She talks about the power of the relational database and the ability to see information for a client who has matters in different practice areas. The firm uses this information to make informed decisions in marketing, decisions on handling files, and other necessary areas which have improved the firm’s profits.

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Anthony Beasley

So good morning we have Cindy celebrating with Wegman Hessler and Cindy and I've worked together for quite a bit on a couple of things and she had a very unique problem a while back that she and I talked about which she felt we had in what we currently have in her firm.

00:00:16 Anthony Beasley

A solution for.

00:00:19 Anthony Beasley

We have something in perfect law.

00:00:21 Anthony Beasley

Call related matters.

00:00:23 Anthony Beasley

It's you have the ability to see them on the matter, but you have the ability to also search related matters within the system through a search tool.

00:00:31 Anthony Beasley

So Cindy had a scenario where she has.

00:00:36 Anthony Beasley

In her firm, make up a client with multiple matters across multiple practice areas, so I wanted her to kind of talk about something that she discovered and she saw it.

00:00:46 Anthony Beasley

She made some statements to me as she went through the.

00:00:48 Anthony Beasley

Project and I wanted.

00:00:50 Anthony Beasley

Her to let that live for people who may have questions about things like related matters because a lot of firms.

00:00:58 Anthony Beasley

Don't even understand the relationship from matter to matter or from client to matter within what they're using, and perfect law has an answer for that.

00:01:06 Anthony Beasley

Just built in in the core product that can be expanded to other things if needed, and so Cindy just tell.

00:01:12 Anthony Beasley

Us a little.

00:01:13 Anthony Beasley

Bit about that situation that you know when you you came and you saw.

00:01:17 Anthony Beasley

The Related Matters tab.

00:01:18 Anthony Beasley

You saw that we had a related matters review and you were looking for a specific solution to look across all departments and our Diego Jimenez, who is the person that worked with you from our service group.

00:01:30 Anthony Beasley

Uhm, he gave you.

00:01:32 Anthony Beasley

Something that I think became a good help, so I don't want to take away all the Thunder.

00:01:35 Anthony Beasley

So I'm just going to let you speak from here.

00:01:38 Cyndi Celebrezze

OK, thank you, Anthony.

00:01:40 Cyndi Celebrezze

Yeah, so this was like.

00:01:41 Cyndi Celebrezze

A really interesting kind of scenario, and you know, in our law firm were corporate business lawyers and we also have personal services like estate planning and trusts.

00:01:56 Cyndi Celebrezze

And we also actually have divorce family law.

00:02:00 Cyndi Celebrezze

So a lot of times we'll have one person who or one family who has a number of different things going out.

00:02:08 Cyndi Celebrezze

Maybe they have a couple of businesses and our business department.

00:02:12 Cyndi Celebrezze

They have their personal family trusts and estates and all sorts of things going on in that department then maybe.

00:02:20 Cyndi Celebrezze

Someone in their family is getting divorced or or needs a prenup or something of that nature so they would be in the family law section.

00:02:29 Cyndi Celebrezze

But all of this work.

00:02:31 Cyndi Celebrezze

Comes from one person connection with one person right?

00:02:36 Cyndi Celebrezze

And then of course as that person comes in, their family is involved.

00:02:39 Cyndi Celebrezze

Their businesses are involved and it.

00:02:41 Cyndi Celebrezze

Just grows and grows gross.

00:02:43 Cyndi Celebrezze

So the question became how does?

00:02:47 Cyndi Celebrezze

Somebody an attorney here understand the full blood.

00:02:52 Cyndi Celebrezze

Less of a client.

00:02:53 Cyndi Celebrezze

Relationship with us, not just his accounts, but it's full relationship with us.

00:02:59 Cyndi Celebrezze

If, say, you know his.

00:03:02 Cyndi Celebrezze

The client's originating.

00:03:03 Cyndi Celebrezze

Attorney you know is.

00:03:04 Cyndi Celebrezze

Retired to Luzon, and then there's a new one here.

00:03:07 Cyndi Celebrezze

So how do we get our arms around everything that this client has with us?

00:03:14 Cyndi Celebrezze

So since we you.

00:03:15 Cyndi Celebrezze

Know we have the IP module and I.

00:03:17 Cyndi Celebrezze

Had seen related matters in there and I didn't fully understand it.

00:03:21 Cyndi Celebrezze

But I I.

00:03:21 Cyndi Celebrezze

Knew that it was very helpful.

00:03:23 Cyndi Celebrezze

To the IP department, the way that they managed patents and trademarks and all that stuff I.

00:03:29 Cyndi Celebrezze

Don't get so.

00:03:31 Cyndi Celebrezze

I was looking at that and.

00:03:32 Cyndi Celebrezze

I thought why can't we?

00:03:33 Cyndi Celebrezze

Use that to sort of map all of this out, and I talked to Diego as Anthony said, who's great?

00:03:40 Cyndi Celebrezze

And what we?

00:03:41 Cyndi Celebrezze

Did is we put together a specific relationship so that.

00:03:49 Cyndi Celebrezze

We put together a specific relationship that shows related matters and then we could go in and actually put all those matters in on the one main client and then of course it feeds out to all the other client matters so that we don't have to manually put those in.

00:04:05 Cyndi Celebrezze

So when you look at the main client matter, you can see the entire list of every matter and every client from all across the entire portfolio of his business with us.

00:04:18 Cyndi Celebrezze

When you look at each one of those individual.

00:04:21 Cyndi Celebrezze

Matters they cross reference.

00:04:23 Cyndi Celebrezze

So that's even better.

00:04:25 Cyndi Celebrezze

And then Diego built asserts for us so that we could go in there and to search on like whatever the root matter client number is and it would bring up the entire list in one.

00:04:36 Cyndi Celebrezze

Place which, if you know perfect log, you could take that list, drop it into Excel.

00:04:41 Cyndi Celebrezze

You could work with it.

00:04:42 Cyndi Celebrezze

You can make a.

00:04:42 Cyndi Celebrezze

Report out of it whatever you want to do.

00:04:44 Cyndi Celebrezze

So that has been just like one of those things.

00:04:50 Cyndi Celebrezze

You're like wow.

00:04:51 Cyndi Celebrezze

All I did was think of a question and we were able to answer it and come up with a resolution and an answer.

00:04:57 Cyndi Celebrezze

And it works.

00:04:59 Cyndi Celebrezze

What more can you say about that?

00:05:01 Anthony Beasley

Right, so so that you know, that's one of those neat things where I, I think you and I were talking.

00:05:06 Anthony Beasley

And you mentioned.

00:05:08 Anthony Beasley

In your prior systems that you were using, you taught me mention a little bit about how hard that was to do or how much work it took to do that.

00:05:15 Anthony Beasley

Can you kind of expand on that, or at least bring?

00:05:17 Anthony Beasley

That point up because I I know a lot of people.

00:05:20 Anthony Beasley

You know, working in my role with perfect law, I hear all the problems from different systems and I would venture to say on a lot of sales.

00:05:29 Anthony Beasley

There are some things that go on in the firm we never hear about in the sales cycle.

00:05:34 Cyndi Celebrezze

Right?

00:05:34 Anthony Beasley

And so.

00:05:34 Anthony Beasley

I'm sure people have this problem especially.

00:05:37 Anthony Beasley

If they're dealing with.

00:05:39 Anthony Beasley

A client on the same level as.

00:05:40 Anthony Beasley

You have I've.

00:05:41 Anthony Beasley

Actually spoken with a couple of potential clients.

00:05:44 Anthony Beasley

Who do have a setup where they do you know they have some of the same practice areas and some of the same scenarios that you probably are dealing with?

00:05:52 Anthony Beasley

But because of the work, or maybe because the question hasn't been asked yet, they haven't thought about it that way.

00:05:59 Anthony Beasley

So, but just kind of tell us, you know from your background you know your thoughts on what you went through before versus what you do now.

00:06:06 Cyndi Celebrezze

Yeah, so when we.

00:06:07 Cyndi Celebrezze

Were with jurists you know, jurists I said was very limited.

00:06:11 Cyndi Celebrezze

You couldn't really find a way to map.

00:06:16 Cyndi Celebrezze

Automatically clients to clients, right?

00:06:19 Cyndi Celebrezze

So you know, it was always sort of like.

00:06:22 Cyndi Celebrezze

Does the billing address have the same name in it?

00:06:25 Cyndi Celebrezze

Does the client is the same last name of the person in every matter you know, even if it's a different family member?

00:06:31 Cyndi Celebrezze

And then you would always be missing.

00:06:33 Cyndi Celebrezze

One you could put together billing groups, but then that information was only accessible to the billing people, so the billing person would have to go and run like a pre bill for that billing group to find out all the matters that are in there and if they didn't have time, nothing.

00:06:51 Cyndi Celebrezze

Would show up anyways.

00:06:52 Cyndi Celebrezze

So it was extraordinarily difficult, and I think that's why most people just avoided even doing it right.

00:07:01 Cyndi Celebrezze

You know, they just avoided it because?

00:07:04 Cyndi Celebrezze

You know it's it was a lot of work, so being able to do that now with the perfect law is is great, not only because you can do it, but also because now that people know you can do it and it's easy, they do it all the time and so they have a better understanding of you know I'm going to deal with this specific.

00:07:24 Cyndi Celebrezze

You know person or business, I can just go ahead and look and see what else do they have here.

00:07:31 Cyndi Celebrezze

Well this is what they have here.

00:07:32 Cyndi Celebrezze

Perhaps I can cross sell some services.

00:07:36 Cyndi Celebrezze

Right so it it breaches out it, it moves into almost more like a client outreach business development scenario, because you're not just going to talk to him about his current business problem, you can see what else is out there and maybe talk about other issues that oh hey, this business problem might.

00:07:55 Cyndi Celebrezze

In fact, your.

00:07:55 Cyndi Celebrezze

State plan, maybe you should talk to our state planner.

00:07:59 Anthony Beasley

Wow, so yeah that's that.

00:08:02 Anthony Beasley

Sounds like it.

00:08:02 Anthony Beasley

Generated some some some funds as well.

00:08:04 Cyndi Celebrezze

Yeah, I mean it's it's great.

00:08:06 Cyndi Celebrezze

It's really, it's really.

00:08:07 Cyndi Celebrezze

Good, you know people ask questions now because they know that the.

00:08:10 Cyndi Celebrezze

Answers are available.

00:08:12 Anthony Beasley

OK, well Cindy this has been very enlightening.

00:08:15 Anthony Beasley

It's it's one of those things that come.

00:08:18 Anthony Beasley

For some folks, it's nuanced, but for me, because you know, I deal with a lot of clients and.

00:08:25 Anthony Beasley

Questions do come up, people sometimes don't ask.

00:08:28 Anthony Beasley

Uhm, and sometimes you know it's one of those things that they don't ask because they're like if I ever see something that can do that, I'm gonna remember.

00:08:36 Anthony Beasley

And the fact that you can bring it forward and let us know.

00:08:39 Anthony Beasley

Well, what that meant to Wegman?

00:08:41 Anthony Beasley

Hessler is awesome, because that's that's some of the things that we actually look for.

00:08:44 Anthony Beasley

So I really appreciate your time.

00:08:47 Anthony Beasley

I really appreciate you giving us some insight in something that was a very unique problem.

00:08:52 Anthony Beasley

Maybe for that we've heard of or that we may have what we looked in our own client base because sometimes.

00:08:59 Anthony Beasley

We just don't know all the issues firms face, but this is going to be something that clients will see and potential clients will see that.

00:09:06 Anthony Beasley

I think maybe and open their eyes about, you know for clients it opens their eyes about what they have at their fingertips and for potential clients.

00:09:14 Anthony Beasley

It may open your eyes to, you know, we've always wanted to do certain things, probably from a A you know, a marketing standpoint.

00:09:22 Anthony Beasley

And I think this is also a great marketing tool for firms that are looking to work within their own client base and expand business.

00:09:30 Anthony Beasley

So the fact that you're doing it the way you're.

00:09:32 Anthony Beasley

Doing it speaks.

00:09:33 Anthony Beasley

Volumes compared to some of the things that I hear, so I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to us about it.

00:09:39 Cyndi Celebrezze

Your time.