Today we introduce why it is important to ensure a single source of truth for the information when working in teams and how this is implemented in Microsoft Excel and legal software Amberlo.
While working in teams, information is consumed and created by all team members and the information is constantly changing. Therefore it is important to ensure that all users always work with up to date information.
Excel
Excel was built for individual users. Excel stores data in files. Very often files are exchanged using email, resulting in multiple file versions. Excel does not provide any version control and it is hard to ensure that all team members are working with the latest document version. The situation gets a little bit better if Excel files are stored in a centralized location (e.g. DropBox), but even then the file can be edited by a single person at a time, while the rest of the team must wait.
Conclusion: Microsoft Excel doesn’t give you an audit trail to see who changed what and when. It doesn’t give you the ability to run a report relating to a specific point in time. It doesn’t reduce the amount of email clogging your inbox. And there’s the manual error issue of Microsoft Excel for entity management.
Amberlo
Lawyers no longer need to worry about the glut of spreadsheets, and can instead turn to case management software to connect law firm data: clients, documents, individuals, tasks, and third-party platforms to manage the firm’s records more effectively. Legal software like Amberlo stores information in a central database ensuring that the whole team is working with up-to-date information. Also, data can be changed by all team members simultaneously and all the changes become immediately available to all team members. Need to make a change? So would you rather go into 50 different spreadsheets or one line of legal software to make that change?
Conclusion: Amberlo provides a single source of truth and enables a complete legal team to consume, create, and update information at the same time. Legal software takes the humble spreadsheet and adds a tremendous amount of additional functionality necessary for effective law firm management success.
If you did not try Amberlo yet, you can do it here.
Your Amberlo team
