The inaugural LawPro user group meeting took place at Ross Priory on Thursday the 6^th of September and was attended by 34 people from 24 firms. In the introduction, Ronnie Paton welcomed everyone on behalf of PPS and thanked them for taking time out from their busy schedules to attend the meeting.

The number of firms attending represented a reasonable proportion of the total number of firms using the system which stands at 67.

There is no written record of the meeting but a DVD is available. Please let us know if you would like a copy.

The first part of the meeting was a summary of LawPro features presented by Ronnie Paton and covered the following main topics-

• Explanation of the Diary/Calendar functions in LawPro
• Description of the email creation and storage functions
• Explanation of the activity prompting and reminder functions
• Explanation of the tools to assist in tidying multiple instances of names or addresses
• Demonstration of the auto billing capability
• Reminder of the document creation functions
• Explanation of the SLAB Billing functions
• Reminder of the money laundering record keeping feature
• Introduction to the Financial Services module
• Reminder of the portfolio and trust functions
• Introduction to the mail shot creation and monitoring functions

 The second session was a presentation by Mark McWilliams of E. Coogans & Co. on his firm’s use of LawPro case management workflow.

In this Mark demonstrated the very comprehensive extent to which he has made use of LawPro to automate and speed up the conveyancing process for his firm.

The third session was presented by Faye Wallace and Stacy Halliday of Gillespie, Gifford and Brown on the firm’s use of the estate agency functions in LawPro.

 In his introduction, Iain McDonald the partner responsible for IT in the firm explained that the firm uses Citrix technology to allow all data to be stored centrally in Castle Douglas and accessed from the firm’s branches in Dumfries, Dalbeattie and Kirkcudbright.

Faye and Stacy from the Kirkcudbright and Dalbeattie branches respectively then demonstrated their use of the system and answered audience questions.

The final session was presented by Jim Currie and covered the integration of LawPro and Microsoft Word and the ability to automate the production of documents by merging data from LawPro and saving them automatically to their matter folder.

Jim then showed how other functions within Word can be invoked to further speed up, simplify and automate document production.

These included the use of auto text, form fields and using arithmetic within documents.

Everyone then had the opportunity to chat over lunch before those who played golf assembled to do battle for the LawPro Challenge Trophy.

This was won by Tommy Gemmill of Carruthers Gemmill after a Rules Committee meeting had established that his colleague, Keith McLennan had played from out of bounds on the 9^th when holing out from 150 yards for what had appeared to be a birdie three.

 The boss always wins Keith!

Tommy Gemmill with the LawPro Trophy, flanked by Ronnie Paton and Gordon Seaton.

In the immortal words of someone – “a good day was had by all”