The verdict: For Omega Legal Systems, Caché's performance delivers information faster than relational systems

Key Benefits

• High Performance
• Ease-of-use
• Scalability

In 1975, Don Gall founded Omega Legal Systems in order to help a lawyer-friend whose computer system kept losing accounts receivable. "He hired me as a consultant to help him buy software," explains Gall. "After looking at three systems, I told him if I couldn't write better software than what I'd seen, I'd quit." The client challenged Gall to prove himself, and in six months Gall had written the first Omega Legal financial package. More than 28 years later, Omega continues to provide fully integrated time and billing, accounting and firm management systems to over 250 law firms nationwide. Its original client, The Cavanagh Law Firm, is still an Omega customer. Omega is able to retain customers because its Caché-based application gives bottom line-oriented law practices what they crave from firm management systems: a cost-effective system that delivers high performance business solutions with real-time data.

Caché provides additional benefits to law firms because the firms don’t require a separate SQL administrator or separate server to maintain historical data. This way, Omega’s clients can easily generate “inception-to-date” views and reports on long-term clients, helping to facilitate client profitability analysis.

Omega Legal is an integrated firm-wide suite of applications that provides time and billing, complete accounting, case management, customer relationship management (CRM), and business intelligence for law firms from 10 to 250 attorneys. Omega Legal is a perfect match for today's law firms that operate with less staff but need to deliver more information than ever to clients and partners.

Fear of a difficult conversion and the time required to deploy a new system are the two reasons most often cited by law firms for sticking with outdated legacy software. Smooth migrations to Omega Legal with Caché and Caché’s proven performance give law firms and their IT staff peace of mind.

With more capability, more attorneys and staff make use of the system. Therefore, high performance becomes critical in keeping everyone productive. Post-relational Caché, with its multidimensional data model, is the key to delivering information quickly even while a firm’s entire staff is concurrently using the system and month-end bills are being generated. With Caché, Omega Legal’s users do not see any system performance degradation, regardless of the number of users or type of system activity.

"Clients who have moved to the Omega Legal System experience a 30 to 40 percent increase in efficiency," Gall says. "This is because of the ease of use and the high level of performance that our application provides."

Caché provides Omega with a competitive advantage. “Most of our competitors require an SQL server or a separate historical database. In fact, most of our clients who have been on the system for 8 to 10 years have yet to archive any of their data—they keep it all online and have no performance degradation. No other vendor can claim that”, remarks Gall. "We feel we have found the correct business partner with InterSystems to allow us to grow.