Speaker 1: Hey y'all, it's Zach, the legal tech advisor here at Lawyerist. Today I'd like to talk to you about all-in-one law practice management systems. Specifically, I'd like to talk to you about ZolaSuite and how their all-in-one solution can help streamline law practices. Recently, I sat down with Fred Cohen of ZolaSuite and he talked to me about how their approach to increasing the features on the platform can benefit your firm. Have a listen and see what you think. We're here with Fred Cohen from ZolaSuite and we're talking about what new features they have, but really about, Fred, you guys are an all-in-one, an actual all-in-one that goes from CRM all the way through and you can cut checks out of ZolaSuite, right?

Speaker 2: Yeah, totally covers the entire client life cycle. And all-in-one is a term that's kind of bandied about by pretty much everyone in the space. But, you know, ZolaSuite is probably the only one that is able to serve the entire client life cycle from that first initial interaction to clearing the conflict, to doing the intake, to generating bills, to generating invoices, having everything go into the GL, and finally recording payments. So we call it from prospect to profit.

Speaker 1: Okay, I like that. So a lot of times with the all-in-ones, we wind up with this siloed community where it doesn't integrate with anything else, you know. And Zola has a lot of partners as well. You guys have a lot of things that you can integrate into. I think a lot of people, they say they're an all-in-one and they integrate with QuickBooks. But A, you are also that accounting aspect, so you don't need QuickBooks, but you have some integrations that are connected as well.

Speaker 2: For sure. We generally have a bias towards built-in versus what we call tacked-on, and we think that generally we can deliver a much better user experience having something that is completely integrated into the UI and having one bill, one point of support, one company that you can call and yell at, right? But there are some strategic partners that we work with. For example, NetDocuments is one of them. Right now, we're part of the Abacus Next family, which means that we have direct access to the Hot Docs team, Hot Docs being essentially the world's most powerful document automation platform.

Speaker 1: Yeah. A lot of our listeners and readers and users use Hot Docs as well, yeah.

Speaker 2: Yeah. So it's been a great opportunity for us to integrate with Hot Docs, and that one we've been able to do almost as if they were part of our internal team because we work so closely together.

Speaker 1: So what I was going to ask was, you know, a lot of times, just like all-in-one is bandied about kind of loosely sometimes, integration is as well. And so it sounds like you guys went directly to, instead of saying, what's your API do, let me work with that, you guys went to Hot Docs and really got locked in.

Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. And you know, sometimes we wanted to have access to a particular data point or some function in a way that normally wouldn't be exposed. Or if it was, we had to do it in a way that didn't optimize the user experience. So these are things that we were able to address, and you know, just kind of having that seamless experience makes all the difference in the world. A lot of times, companies kind of check the box on integrations, but they don't really deliver a lot of value because they're very superficial. Interoperability is limited, and the benefit, the net benefit is actually just, you know, very minimal.

Speaker 1: I think minimal is probably a good word there. But so with that Hot Docs integration specifically, what you're saying is that people can get into all the data points of ZolaSuite instead of just, let's say, the information just in the matter. It's not just siloed in what you're working on. It's all of ZolaSuite that people can get into, and you guys have, being an all-in-one, have a lot of data in there for the lawyer to get to.

Speaker 2: And you know, this also builds on our theme of single source of truth, and also minimizes double data entry, minimizes mistakes. So in the context of a Hot Docs integration, there's normally an interview where you need to collect data in order to generate the fields to create the documents, and a lot of that data is already in the product. So when you start the interview, which, by the way, you can start within a matter inside ZolaSuite. It just pops up in a window just like other functions within ZolaSuite. All the data that already exists for that kind of interview is preloaded from ZolaSuite. You generate the document, and you can save the document right back into ZolaSuite with one click.

Speaker 1: And that kind of goes it back, like you said, into the all-in-one, single source of truth, single place. That's fantastic. Well, thank you for joining me today, and thanks for all the information. I appreciate it. Thank you. If you'd like to learn more about ZolaSuite, go to ZolaSuite.com, or you can simply visit the Lawyerist website and look at our reviews.