Time Matters Slow ?

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Recently I did some consulting for a large firm with pronounced performance issues with their Practice Advantage Time Matters ©(TM). Application crashes, hangs, and general sluggishness were so pronounced that they were thinking of scraping the program and switching to custom software. Time Matters often gets a bad wrap by many technology professionals in the legal arena. Application slowness, hangs, speed issues, and a steep learning curve often cause many to follow the path of least resistance and blame the issues on the software. The sad truth is, more often than not, many of these issues are underscored by an ignorance of the structural components of the software/database relationship that the program is anchored on. I’m not saying that the application is perfect, but let’s be honest, 60,000 lawyers nationwide aren’t using the software for nothing.

An initial assessment revealed the network, servers, and switches were set up properly. TM scheduled database maintenance was being run regularly. A closer assessment at Microsoft SQL server© (MSSQL) revealed several pertinent performance metrics that were out of range. As it turned out, the problem was by no means the application, to the dismay of the IT staff; rather it was a lack of foresight for the infrastructure supporting the application. As I will discuss there are some common reasons why this can happen with TM. After some rounds of tuning on the database server TM was working at top speed.

In this article I’m going to take a in-depth look at the performance issues faced by large law firms using TM and how they can often stem from MSSQL. A deep knowledge of both the architecture of the TM database, along with SQL server, are a crucial component to solving and preventing performance issues of this nature.

How it Works

Business software such as TM works by reading and writing data to a database.  The application itself provides productive ways to input, delete, and manipulate that data.  As of version 10 TM exclusively operates on an instance of MSSQL.  Bottom Line: