Successes - Fusco, Brandenstein & Rada, P.C.
Top Law Firm Leverages Westbrook Fortis for Integration and Productivity Gains

Summary
Fusco, Brandenstein & Rada, P.C., is a top Long Island law firm handling a high volume case load involving Workers’ Compensation, Social Security and municipal pensions along with personal real estate matters including wills and estates. The firm also administers union plans and manages long-term disability payments for clients.

In this technologically advanced firm, cases were accounted for by using a tracker system that bar coded all the files. However, with the number of clients vastly increasing and a seven-year retention rule by New York’s state regulatory agency, physical files had become a monumental problem. Three separate storage facilities yielded a $2,000 per month maintenance bill and staff members were spending up to two hours per day traveling to these facilities to access files. The firm implemented Westbrook Technologies’ Fortis document management software to tackle the task of managing backlog and gaining greater access to their caseloads, both within the firm and in the courtroom. Efficiency gains include a 2,500 percent in case retrieval time and a 62 percent rise in staff productivity.

“When we first rolled out Fortis five years ago, we concentrated on gaining control of the Workers’ Compensation and Social Security disability areas. These sectors are particularly voluminous with over 20,000 closed files and about 15,000 documents of active cases. All incoming mail including decisions from the courts, hearing notices, client correspondence are captured to a case file. Any additional incoming information related to that case is easily added,” said Catherine Sparks, technical service manager. Since then, Fortis has benefited the firm through integration where it complements a customized case load management program, allows staff file viewing and editing functions, increases file security, functions as a disaster recovery solution and an overall increase in productivity.

Fortis is integrated with the firm’s case management program. With a customized search button within Fortis, staff can easily locate a case within seconds and all related documents including photographs. This is a 2,500 percent gain in efficiency as case retrieval used to take up to a day. New case information is easily uploaded to Fortis from Needles, keeping the stored cases current.

All incoming correspondence is scanned and stored within the firm’s Fortis system. “With the ability to capture the information, accuracy and time savings are increased because we easily avoid spelling errors within future documentation and we no longer manually input this same information,” said Sparks. “This saves the firm about five hours per day of personnel time.” That’s a gain of 62 percent in efficiency.

Sparks says the ability to have scanned images of the client’s file available has strengthened file security since the data cannot be modified or tampered with. Additionally, the annotation option gives the firm’s attorneys the ability to mark up the files while the original remains unchanged. Prior to Fortis, separate notes on the case were either kept in another computer system or written directly on the original file.

According to Nicholas Derby, Information Technologies technician, the firm’s plan for disaster recovery includes Fortis as the main element in restoring their system. “We are confident we can survive a system crash or data loss because we digitally back up our files in this office with a single back-up tape,” he said. Additionally, the effect of hard drive crashes has been eliminated by the use of a RAID drive on their imaging server.

Sparks says all Workers’ Compensation attorneys have access to their Fortis office files right from their laptop, and with their accompanying printers, the ability to immediately provide a printout to a judge while in session.

“Our experience with Fortis is the ease at which it fits into the overall picture and how quickly our staff can complete tasks with it. We have less people leaving their work areas to locate information and, when a file is reopened, there is no question as to where to access it,” said Derby.

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