Cognito Software
“Pervasive.SQL is an extremely versatile product which lends itself well to the evolving needs of legal practises. Over the past decade, Pervasive has been instrumental in enabling Cognito to develop a practise management system that includes unique features like hierarchical contact management and relationship marketing, which are made possible by the unique combination of transactional and relational database components”
Zahid Hamid, Business Development Director, Cognito Software
About Cognito Software
Part of the Ultima Networks Group Plc, Cognito Software is one of the UK’s foremost ISVs serving the highly specialised legal sector. Formed 12 years ago, Essex-based Cognito provides practise management solutions for over 200 solicitors’ firms including International law firm Martineau Johnson. Cognito’s users cover all areas of the legal profession, from commercial and property to medical and family law.
Cognito Software began as an accounting systems developer, but quickly identified a huge need for integrated legal business management systems capable of automating a solicitor’s entire workflow process. Approved by the Legal Services Commission and Law Society of Great Britain, Cognito’s solution stands alone in the industry as the only system offering a unified practice and case management system with integrated accounting and workflow - a feature that can be attributed to the versatility of the Pervasive transactional and relational databases at its core.
Today with an annual turnover in excess of £1 million, Cognito employs 27 people, 75% of whom are focused on software development and technical support.
Business Challenge
After conducting focus group research, Cognito understood that one of the biggest challenges faced by the legal industry was developing an IT system that allowed lawyers to manage their practises by individual clients. Such a system would enable users to very quickly cross reference multiple cases, automatically create a secure audit trail, manage accounting and billing procedures and provide details of all associated case correspondence.
Working in close partnership with its user base, Cognito designed the industry’s first unified practise and case management system for SMEs, which links both contact and case data simultaneously. In the legal profession, contact data is defined as any individual or organisation that might be associated with a particular case – ranging from defending clients and social workers involved in divorce cases to doctors giving evidence for medical negligence claims. Since people tend not to move frequently between different solicitor’s practises, it is important for lawyers to be able to store practise data according to a hierarchy based upon contact records. This eliminates the need to create a new client record for each case.
Instead, when accessing the Cognito system, a solicitor can search for client data and instantly have access to all previous cases, keeping administrative efforts to an absolute minimum.
Pervasive.SQL as the Business Solution
Cognito has a long history of working with Pervasive, and its product range has advanced in functionality steadily, in line with the evolution of Pervasive’s own product range. Designed around the Pervasive.SQL database, using Visual C++.Net running on Novell NetWare, NT, Windows 2000 or a standalone PC, Cognito’s systems are fast, easily deployed and because they require no maintenance, have a low-cost-of-ownership. “Our customers do not employ database administrators and need versatile systems that perform reliably. Once deployed, they want to forget about the underlying technology and get on with running their businesses,” says Hamid.
According to Hamid, what makes Pervasive.SQL unique is the combination of both transactional and relational database functions, which it uses about equally.
The transactional engine is much faster and better applied to complex database inquiries. It is used by Cognito to handle the accounting, workflow and diary components of the application. Conversely, the relational engine is most suited to processing report and ad-hoc data inquiries - the end user can generate a selection of over 300 formatted reports quickly and easily.
This combination of transactional and relational components is a key reason why Cognito has remained loyal to Pervasive over the past decade. The company had previously embedded FoxPro into some of its applications, but due to problems with reliability and file corruption, and the fact that FoxPro would not scale easily to more than 10 users, it is now in the process of porting to Pervasive.SQL.
“Pervasive.SQL scales easily to 50 concurrent users and beyond, it can be installed in 5 minutes and never needs to be touched again – I don’t think there are any other databases out there with that sort of functionality,” says Hamid.
Bottom Line
Cognito’s practise management system cleverly emulates the entire business process, allowing solicitors to manage their diaries and time recording procedures from the desktop. It also gives the additional flexibility to select multiple billing options and unify the two, automatically producing a fully audited workflow trail which complies with strict Law Society reporting regulations. Pervasive’s database platform acts as an effective report generator, enabling Cognito’s users to critically analyse both case histories and internal business processes.
An independent comparative analysis conducted by the Business Research Unit across all of Cognito’s users reported extremely positive findings and ranked Cognito’s practise management system as one of the best available. “Across the board, our users reported very high levels of satisfaction, almost zero down time and commented positively on ease of implementation, reliability and straightforward day to day use. These are all key attributes facilitated in part by Pervasive’s superior technology and effective customer support,” concludes Hamid.
For more information
To learn more about Pervasive Software and our solutions, please visit www.pervasive.com. To reach the North American sales office, call 1.800.287.4383, extension 2. For Latin, Central and South America, Australia and New Zealand, call +1.512.231.6000. In Europe, for Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, call +800.12.12.34.34. For any other European, Middle Eastern, African or Asian countries (excluding Japan), call +32.70.23.37.61. For Japan, please call +81.3.3293.5300, or visit www.pervasive.co.jp.
