00:00: This video demonstrates how to manage practice areas within CARET Legal,
00:03: highlighting their importance and application.
00:07: It covers setup, editing, deletion, and reporting to optimize firm operations.
00:20: On this training, we will cover practice areas and their relevance and importance in
00:25: CARET Legal.
00:28: To begin, we will start by going to your firm settings up
00:31: on the top right hand side of your screen.
00:38: Confirm settings, you will select the matters and contacts drop down.
00:44: And from there, practice areas.
00:45: As you can see in my example here, that I already have practice areas set up.
00:50: If you are working with CARET Legal's onboarding team, it is very important to
00:55: communicate which practice areas you want to set up, as well as the logistics around
00:59: which practice areas you no longer want to use.
01:12: That being said, I will continue to cover how to set these up and what is their
01:15: importance in CARET egal.
01:22: For practice areas, any that are existing, like these here on the page,
01:26: I can simply click the edit pencil on any of them and update their practice area
01:31: name.
01:37: I would then click save and that will allow me to make the update to the ones that
01:41: are existing.
01:52: Again, I would highly encourage you to discuss making changes or removing practice
01:57: areas
01:57: if you are migrating your data or working with the onboarding team here at CARET
02:02: Legal.
02:07: For the next example, I'm going to trash
02:09: can this practice area that I don't need.
02:15: And here I'm being prompted that I cannot trashcan this practice area because it is
02:19: already associated with a matter.
02:22: Examples like these are the reasons why we should discuss removing or editing these
02:26: practice areas during our onboarding process.
02:30: If I decided to get rid of one that was not being used,
02:35: I would get this confirmation,
02:38: as opposed to the message that you cannot delete.
02:42: This one allows me to delete, but first makes sure I want to do that.
02:48: That is because the practice area was not associated with any matters or cases.
02:54: Add a practice area.
02:57: I can simply click on the plus sign and start to type in the name of the practice
03:00: area,
03:01: then click the check mark.
03:09: Let me try that again.
03:18: Select the blue line here, which adds it to the box, then select the checkbox checkmark.
03:22: Just like that, we
03:23: have our state and services practice area.
03:27: So where do these practice areas become applicable, and how can we report on these
03:31: different practice areas?
03:32: For that,
03:33: I will be taking you to another screen here.
03:46: And here on my new matter screen, I can easily display and show you how practice
03:51: areas are selected as well as where they impact.
03:56: So for this case, I'm going to enter my matter name,
04:01: who the primary client is,
04:05: and for training or just display purposes here, I'm going to select the only primary
04:09: client
04:10: I have,
04:12: and then select my practice area.
04:20: I will then select my responsible attorney.
04:25: For purposes of showing you what this impacts,
04:28: I'm just going to create the matter.
04:30: We have separate training videos to detail how to set up matters and the relevance
04:34: of the matter setup page.
04:36: For this particular training purpose, I want to show you where that practice area
04:40: will end up.
04:42: The page we're looking at now is a matter page.
04:46: This is what all of your matters will look like once you open that matter.
04:51: Here on the top left hand side of the screen, there is case relevant
04:55: information such as who's the primary client,
04:58: matter number, matter name.
05:01: Sometimes those are the same,
05:02: sometimes they're not. Then the date
05:04: it was opened, etc.
05:08: One other very valuable piece of information is which practice area
05:11: this case is related to.
05:14: And that is important because you may need to run reporting off of different
05:17: practice areas, such as how many estate and service cases
05:21: do I have that were opened this month.
05:25: That is a report that you can generate out of CARET legal.
05:30: So you can generate reports for operations by practice area.
05:35: You can also bill your cases by practice area.
05:39: And last but not least, you can run your financials, such as a profit and loss by
05:43: practice area.
05:45: All of those are native functionalities within CARET Legal, meaning
05:49: you don't really have to set up more than just the practice area to be able to use
05:52: that reporting.
06:01: There are other features that heavily rely on practice areas, and just to point out a
06:06: few without getting too far into the weeds on those items.
06:09: That would be your intake forms if you decide to utilize that feature in CARET Legal,
06:13: as well as your document templates.
06:23: Both intake forms and document templates are stored by which practice area
06:27: they belong to.
06:30: Your custom fields can be customized by practice area.
06:34: For instance, for estates and services, I may need to know how many beneficiaries
06:39: are involved.
06:41: That may be a custom field here.
06:45: For family law, I may need to know what type of family law case
06:48: this is. That may be a custom field here.
06:54: Those are just examples of different custom fields that you can use by practice
06:58: area.
07:00: But now we can start to see why practice area setup is critical to the foundation of
07:04: using your CARET Legal.
07:06: Some firms decide to stay very broad with their practice areas, while other firms
07:11: decide to be very specific and granular and even have sub sets to their
07:15: practice areas.
07:27: How you would set up and maintain your practice areas. Consult with your onboarding
07:31: team for future help.
07:35: Learn to set up, edit, and delete practice areas in CARET Legal while understanding
07:40: their impact on matters, reporting, and custom fields for efficient firm management.