Protechnica

By Robyn Weisman All Articles, Law Technology News, June 4, 2012

Since 1989, regional law firm Traffic Law Center has catered to people fighting traffic tickets. Its eight offices located in the St. Louis and Kansas City, Mo., metropolitan areas handle everything from moving violations to driving under the influence or driving while intoxicated, depending on the jurisdiction.

TLC’s St. Louis offices typically see 20 to 25 walk-in clients a day, and repeatable workflows have been important since the firm’s inception. Among other tasks, the firm developed a series of questions and procedures to conduct a client intake in 15 minutes or less. “Traffic tickets are fairly routine and use the same information over and over again,” notes Robin Sullivan, founder and managing partner.

TLC has used what Sullivan calls “a database approach” in handling its workload. From 1991 until this year, the firm used a combination of dBase, a relational database management system manufactured by dBase LLC, and its built-in ReportWriter software to manage its data and documents and produce reports. According to Sullivan, dBase was great for collecting client information and reporting on such information as the average cost of a ticket and the number of tickets handled in a given jurisdiction. Members of the firm would then use dBase’s ReportWriter to extract information from the database and import the content into letters, pleadings, and other documents. <READ MORE>