In today’s world of rapid technological change, our priority at Evol is to keep up with the needs and wants of our users. Today, most of our innovations come directly from suggestions from you, our users.In the following article, we will introduce you to a number of innovations that we have prepared and will gradually publish among you.
Brief recap:
- Pricelists – the main new feature brings a number of improvements to labour accounting
- Reporting to the CBA – new functions according to the amendment to the Statute on Lawyers’ Deposits
- Improvements to real estate registration
- Reporting – several improvements
- and a few other gadgets
Price lists – unlimited flexibility in reporting for law firms
The practice of law is constantly evolving and changing and it is essential to have tools that enable law firms to adapt to changing conditions and client needs. With our new Pricing in Evol, we aim to offer a solution that meets these requirements while providing attorneys with the highest degree of flexibility and personalization.
Until now, you could set two hourly rates in Evol, which was suitable for standard needs. However, we have noticed that many offices have specific requirements and different rates for different types of work or clients. That’s why we are coming up with a comprehensive solution – new price lists. Whether you have a small or large office, the new price lists allow you to create an unlimited number of rates that reflect your individual needs and preferences. Do you want to have special pricing for corporate clients? Or a specific price list for family law? It’s not a problem. Each price list may have its own validity, either temporal or for specific clients. To ensure a smooth transition, your existing settings will remain unchanged and will carry over to the new default pricing.
Each price list contains many important details so you can set up exactly what you need:
- Name: clearly name the price list according to its purpose.
- Condition: Active/Concept/Archive/Invalid.
- Currency: useful for international clients.
- Time rounding: how exactly you want to charge your time.
- Method of charging: here you can use either a per-role rate or a per-job rate.
For method, you can choose between the role-based rates you’re already used to, or try a new approach with job-based rates. This breakdown gives you the freedom to decide whether you want to charge per hour for any work or different rates for specific activities. You can even combine these methods with each other!
The rate by role is now extended. From the original two fixed roles, the dial is now free. You can add any number of roles and their rate.
The rate by type of work allows specific activities to be priced at a different rate. This may be, for example, advice provided by a related tax or other specialist firm. Note that if you do not set a rate, the default file or roll rate is assumed.
And what’s even better? The new price lists now include the ability to define a list of out-of-pocket expenses and tasks charged by amount, allowing you to specify the price for each specific item. This is ideal for offices that often deal with various expenses such as fare per mile, unit price per contract, etc.
Specialized settings at the file level
And to give you even more flexibility, you can choose in the file settings whether you want to use a specific price list for a given file or whether you prefer an individual rate. This is ideal for situations where you know that a particular file will require a unique hourly rate and it would be unnecessary to create an entire price list.
For more information about the price lists, please visit our free webinar 21.9. at 15:30. A link to register can be found on the webinar blog. Or run it directly from this article when we start posting 🙂
New entry of unreported activities
Unreported activities are now entered in a redesigned window and displayed on the timeline.
You can see everything clearly in this four-minute video:
Disbursement of custody to the CAK according to the Regulation
In accordance with the new regulation of the Czech Bar Association (CBA), which came into force on 1 July 2023, we have adapted and expanded our function at the depositories. This regulation emphasises the need for increased transparency and communication in the context of legal custody, especially towards clients.
Extension of records to include information emails
The integration with EKU CAK offers the possibility to send notifications of escrow payments directly from Evolia. In addition, it is now possible to send an informational email about the escrow payment to up to five different email addresses at once. Evolio whispers the email contacts from the file on that occasion, so there is no need to manually transcribe them.
Deposit termination and reporting history
The termination of the deposit is newly reported. There is a dedicated button in Evolus for this. At the same time, we have added a history of reports – you have an instant overview of whether there were reports to the CAK and what their content was.
Extension of the real estate register for Buildings on land
We will stay with real estate-related functions. When we say “property”, we often think of either a detached house or a piece of land. But what if you have a building plot with more than one building? To better address this specific need for registration in selected cases, we are providing an update in the real estate registration section. At the moment, if you have the property type recorded as Building Plot in the title deed, you can easily register the individual buildings located on the plot. Whether it’s smaller outbuildings, garages, or even larger structures, you can now record everything under one master property record.
Don’t invoice the whole file!
The ability to report work correctly and smoothly is the foundation of good law firm management. However, we have full understanding for those of you who would sometimes like more flexibility in determining how and when work is billed. Just for you, we’ve added a new option to Evolio in the file billing settings.
You can now select the Do Not Perform frequency in the File Settings. What does that mean? Not performing allows you to report work on a particular file as you are used to. However, Evolio does not automatically transfer this work to the bid to be billed. This reduces the risk of bills being issued from such a file by mistake, you don’t even have to omit them from your regular billing, and it eliminates the need to manually mark reports as not billed.
Improvements to the work overview: better organisation and customisation
Transparency and efficiency are key elements that every law firm values when monitoring the work done. With our new version, we have focused on significant improvements to the user interface of the reported work in files tables. These changes will allow you to better organise and track your reports and give you more flexibility when working with your data.
1. Dragging columns: now you can easily change the order of columns by simply dragging with the mouse. Just click on the column name and drag in the table where you need to go. This allows you to customize the table to best suit your specific needs.
2. Saving column settings. Now Evolio remembers your preferred column settings so you won’t have to make the same changes over and over again.
3. New column order:
- Date
- Type of activity
- Activity – action
- Real time
- Charged time
- Amount without VAT
- Amount including VAT
- Status
- Retrieved from
- Details
4. Hidden information: to make the overview as concise and informative as possible, we decided to hide the Reward Type column. If you ever need this information, you can still view it in the column edits found under the three dots on the right above the table.
We believe these changes will give you better control over your data and simplify your reporting. Your feedback is crucial to us, so we look forward to your opinions and comments on this news!
Deleting calls in cases of
Communication is a key part of working in a law firm. Whether it’s calls with clients, colleagues or opposing parties, it’s important to have full control over the records of these interactions. That’s why we’re bringing two key enhancements to the call logging section of Evol.
Permissions to delete calls
We’ve extended the permission settings to allow you to specify who can delete call logs, whether they are outgoing or incoming calls. You can find it under Settings→User Roles→Program Settings→Remove calls from cases. Here you can easily restrict or enable this action for specific user roles within your team. This way you can be sure that only selected people will be able to make such important changes.
Delete button on the call tab
To make it easier to manage your calls, we’ve added a Delete button right on the tab of each call, for both outgoing and incoming calls.
International address registration
In today’s globalised world, it is often necessary to communicate with clients, partners or colleagues from distant countries. To make it easier for you to manage your international contacts, we’ve come up with a new update to the address form. The address form in Evol now includes the option to switch to international format. This toggle adjusts the form field to better reflect the structure of international addresses:
- Address 1: Basic information, e.g. street name and house number.
- Address 2: Additional information, e.g. floor, apartment or other specifications.
- City: the name of the city or town.
- Country: Select from the list of countries.
- ZIP: Postal code.
We understand that not all information is always available or relevant. Therefore, you can now only fill in the Advanced field in the address form if you need to specify or add additional information to the address. These enhancements will make working with addresses in Evolio even more convenient and tailored to your needs, whether you have clients in the Czech Republic or on the other side of the world.
Mandatory information in the acts
In addition to the already existing custom fields in the tasks that you can set according to your needs, we have added the option to mark them as “required” in the settings. This means that when completing actions, these fields must be filled in to save the action. How do you know which fields are required? Simple! Such a field is marked with an asterisk (*) and is bordered in red when not filled in. This ensures that no important data is missed and that all key information is recorded consistently from all colleagues in the task. We always make sure that Evolio is as tailored to your needs as possible.
As you can see, our latest version 2023.1.3. brings a number of small but useful innovations. We are grateful for your continued support and trust in Evolio. Based on your feedback and suggestions, we are continuously trying to improve and refine our features to better reflect your needs. As always, we have a complete list of changes available to you, and if you have any suggestions or comments about the new features, please feel free to contact us via the support button when the update is complete.
