Overview

A young and dynamic law firm, Klehr, Harrison, Harvey, Branzburg & Elllers (KHHBE), an alternative to the traditional law firm structure KHHBE prides itself on fast resolutions to problems. 

Business Challenge

The CFO at Klehr, Harrison, Harvey, Branzburg & Elllers (KHHBE) discovered that current and historic client bills were being held in editable Microsoft Word documents and naturally, the risk of easily making accidental changes to the files was a concern.. In addition, Word had to be launched every time the lawyers wanted to access the files, resulting in high IT overhead.

Thousands of client bills were being generated with CMS Open in Word, each as a separate DOC each month.
 
KHHBE needed to find a way to ‘freeze’ the bill in its original form and have it accessible by using the search and view capability within CMS Open.

Solution

The decision was made to convert Word files to PDF. KHHBE needed a software product that was robust and reliable and could sit in the background converting files to PDF as they were generated. The PDF version then needed to be placed in a separate folder that could be accessed and viewed in CMS Open.

Thousands of bills were generated in a single day during the monthly billing cycle. The product had to function in this production environment without any IT staff intervention.

After extensive research, Adlib Software's ExpressConversion Server was selected and implemented. ExpressConversion Server now runs 24/7 on a Windows 2000 workstation and polls the bill folder that resides on a server. A PDF copy of each qualifying file is created and placed into a folder on the server. The file names remain the same except that they are suffixed with ‘PDF’. Within CMS Open, the viewer application simply points to the new folder and launches Acrobat Reader instead of Microsoft Word.

Benefits

• Guaranteed data security for clients’ bills, without compromising quick access for viewing
  
• Improved performance of queries as a result of the speed of Acrobat Reader
  
• Reliable application with virtually no IT intervention
  
• Excellent ROI with the functionality provided for a reasonable entry cost and low maintenance cost