Very often, it’s difficult to decide when to contact support. Have you investigated the issue enough to save time? Is it something you know how to correct and have just forgotten? And once you do decide that you need assistance, whom do you contact?

This article will help you to better understand the various Vertican resources and when you should call for third-party assistance. Using the appropriate resources can save you time, effort, and unnecessary stress.

Documentation

Your first step should be to review the documentation to ensure you properly understand the feature with which you are working. Often the answer to your question may be found in the documentation.

Release Notes

Vertican’s vPortal has a series of resources including full documentation and release and developer notes. Knowing the recent changes to the application may help you to address your issues.

Knowledge Base

Your first resource should be to visit and query the Knowledge Base (KB). Visiting the most recent KB articles may direct you to issues that have cropped up and are affecting other users as well.

While Vertican does not support third-party applications and systems, like your network, we always ask firms to share their root cause analysis detailing any problem and resolution they have found. Many third-party software systems (and hardware solutions) are documented in the KB. These articles often point to the manufacturer’s notes about how to address issues.

Other Resources

Vertican regularly publishes Mastermind Series (MMS) videos as well as Problem Determination & Resolution (PDR) documents.

Professional Services

Vertican is available for Professional Services. These services are purchased on the portal and must be scheduled. The following are some of the Professional Services that are commonly used.

• Web Training – An instructor will work with you to teach you about specific features. When opening an incident, the Client Success technician may recommend web training.
• Help with creating formulas, form letters, or custom templates – While the bulk of the process is straightforward, you will often want additional help in designing or learning how to implement a solution.
• System Help – Sometimes your own IT vendor will need help in understanding how their system interacts with Vertican Applications. You may want a Vertican Client Success representative to review your own system design or offer suggestions on how to improve performance, compliance, or data reliability. While Vertican is not able to directly provide “hardware support” we are often able to work with vendors to answer questions they may have or to point out best practices.
• Performance Optimization – Generally speaking, performance is based on the primary CPU, memory, and storage performance of your system, but sometimes your vendor may need assistance on how to improve performance. Vertican can review your configuration and perform tests to see how the performance you are experiencing compares with our own internal experience.

Opening an Incident

Once you have researched your problem, you might choose to open an incident. It is important to understand that an incident is limited to a single specific issue and that a single call might constitute multiple incidents. Support calls are broken down into the relevant subordinate issues, with each subordinate issue being a single incident.

When a support request is likely to result in multiple incidents, you may find it best to schedule professional services. Professional Services are based on time as opposed to the number of incidents.

When opening an incident, provide as much detailed information as possible. For example:

• The specific program that is failing (including the Name & Path to the feature).
• Screenshots of the affected area.

• Any recent events that may be relevant. (for example, the server crashed, and you are getting error 4271.)
• Steps to replicate the problem (if possible).
• Gather the VT_ERROR_LOG.txt report
  • If you are at the “Help Window”, use SHIFT-F8 to retry and disable the “Help Window”
  • TYPE: PROC ER [Enter]
  • Copy the file N:\users\Luis.Gomez\VT_ERROR_LOG.txt and include the results in your request.
• Specify if the problem occurs every time or if it’s intermittent? Does it happen to a specific user or everyone?
• If it is a new behavior, explain how it previously worked and how it works now. Check release notes as the new behavior may be intentional.

Client Success will respond either with links to the appropriate KB, PDR, or MMS or will escalate it as a Functional Deficiency and provide a workaround.

Functional Deficiencies

A Functional Deficiency (FD) is an undesirable behavior in the application which may range from a bug to a wish list item or a feature. When a new FD is introduced by a release, it usually receives a higher priority as a new feature changing the behavior in the application in a negative way.

There is an old joke, “What is the difference between a bug and a feature?” “A feature is a bug that is too hard to fix.” In many cases, addressing an FD requires significantly rewriting the application and these requests tend to remain in the backlog.

There is a backlog of FDs and they are added to the worklist, triaged, and then added to future feature lists. There is no guarantee that an FD will be addressed in a particular time frame.

Requesting a Custom Feature or Enhancement

If you are looking for an enhancement to a Vertican product, start by going to SOW Request – Vertican.

Make sure that you include as much detail and documentation as possible. For EDI/DTP requests, provide any desired mapping or translations. For a report, create a sample output, again with the proper mappings.

Keeping your system updated and similar

If you combine very old and very new technology, you will often find that there are unusual problems. Make sure that each of the components is as similar as possible to a recent version. For example, when using Word Perfect X2 with a Windows 10 workstation you’re more than likely to have problems. Refer to the vPortal for an up-to-date list of the recommended applications and environments. It could be that versions not listed on the page may work, but Vertican will not be able to assist on versions outside the recommended versions.

Escalating to the appropriate Vendor

Vertican Client Success will often recommend that you escalate your issue to the appropriate vendor. Vertican is always happy to attend a Vendor Meet to help the vendor understand, and if possible, replicate the problem you are experiencing. Vertican requests that any escalation to another vendor result in a root cause analysis along with the recommended remediation. This information will be added to the Vertican KB. Most of the system/hardware KB articles came from clients submitting the information found by the appropriate vendor.

Examples of issues that should be escalated to the appropriate vendor:

• Ongoing network corruption
• Word processing formatting
• SQL Server configuration problems
• System performance

Contributed by Luis Gomez, Chief Strategy Officer

How cool would it be if law firms had the power to obtain court hearing coverage whenever and wherever they needed with minimal red tape? Good news, that’s a thing in Q-LawE!

Q-LawE offers an amazing tool, in partnership with Docketly, the leading appearance counsel provider in the United States. The Q-LawE/Docketly interface streamlines hearing coverage management for our clients saving them a lot of time and cost.

We spoke with Will Higginbotham, Vertican Business Systems Analyst, who works closely with Q-LawE clients, to learn more about how the Docketly integration makes life a lot easier for law firms.

vConnect: Give us a scenario where a law firm would utilize the Q-LawE/Docketly interface?
Will: You bet, here’s a common situation. Say you’re a law firm practice in Chicago and you have hearings on your calendar at which you must appear, but they are east of St Louis. Well, that’s about a four-hour drive and not a cost-effective way to use your time. Rather than spend the time and money traveling back and forth to court, your firm will use Docketly to subcontract from a vetted network of attorneys who work in that region to appear and handle the case(s).

vConnect: So, lawyers in the Docketly network go to court on behalf of attorneys that, for any reason, cannot appear in court for a client?
Will: That’s correct. It’s not only distance that may be a factor. A lawyers’ inability to attend court may be due to a conflict in schedule, illness, or anything else preventing them from physically going to a hearing.

vConnect: How much notice is required to utilize this service?
Will: Typically, it’s at least 24 hours’ notice. That’s the beauty of this integration, sometimes a firm doesn’t know they will need coverage until very close to the hearing date. So rather than manually vetting attorneys, making phone calls, juggling arrangements, and sharing the necessary documentation to find and get the covering attorney up-to-speed, Docketly handles all of that thanks to Q-LawE’s robust automation.

vConnect: What makes the Docketly interface such a time-saver?
Will: It’s not only about quickly obtaining hearing coverage. All the documentation that needs to change hands is within the users’ control. Then, there’s the amendment process. If you need to send something additional, for example, after you’ve submitted the job to the covering attorney, you can simply go back into the tool and attach what is needed. Finally, another super helpful benefit is where there are multiple cases on the docket, all of that can be handled at the same time.

vConnect: About how much time can firms save using the Docketly interface compared to the amount of man hours needed by a firm’s office?
Will: There are many variables  depending on the size of the dockets being covered. However, the time impact over having to go through cases individually and make sure that you had coverage is significant to say the least.

vConnect: What else can you tell us about the Docketly integration?
Will: In addition to just being able to submit information through the interface, Q-LawE’s docket calendar menu has Cases by Attorney and Reassign and Set Absence by Attorney and Reassigned features. So, if you had court dates listed in Q-LawE individually for each account and you’re sick, that entire docket would need to be covered by another attorney. Therefore, you would use this feature after you select the attorney for the appropriate court date. This is a big

timesaver because with the click a couple of buttons you can completely shift that docket to a vendor who will take care of the case.

vConnect: What about post court processes?
Will: If a judgement in court is received, for example, the covering attorney can provide a copy of that judgment to you by importing it through the interface. Additionally, each court date in the system would have a record for the hearing. We are also working on the ability to receive the hearing results code to provide hearing outcomes. This would trigger DDAS,Q-LawE’s Data Driven Automation System, to advance the file onto the next step in the process. So, the important information in the file continues to move to where it needs to go without the user having to even go into the account.

A brief note about the power and integration with DDAS. This functionality is already built into Q-LawE. DDAS is always in the background looking at any new information and pointing it to the right places.

vConnect: Is the Docketly integration widely known and used among Vertican’s Q-LawE users?
Will: Most of our clients know about it but unfortunately either do not have a comprehensive understanding of its capabilities or haven’t taken the steps to install the interface. I can say that our clients who do use the integration couldn’t be more pleased.

The image below shows one Docketly screen, note the multiple tabs at the top.

Click on image to view larger version.

vConnect: Is installing the tool a bit of a process? How can we encourage firms to take the time to move forward with this integration?
Will: It used to be a time-consuming undertaking, but Vertican is now working on a Q-installer program that makes the implementation of Docketly so much simpler. By the way, the Docketly integration is included with the Q-LawE subscription. There is also optional billable consultation time so that firms can get their users acclimated to the interface

vConnect: What should clients do if they are interested in learning more?
Will: To learn more about Docketly, visit their website. Our Client Success team is more than happy to help clients through the installation process. Send us an email.

Will Higginbotham, Business System Analyst