Terms & Conditions for Client Support
Client Obligations
- General client obligations: With all services, whether support, professional, training, or otherwise, Client understands that delays in the performance of its underlying responsibilities, whether that is making available necessary resources or approvals or otherwise, may have a disproportionate delay on services if the Vertican resources are reallocated.
- Incident availability: Severity Level 1, and sometimes severity level 2, support cases typically require the client to be available to provide Vertican with information. Vertican personnel will inform the Client on what effort and availability is required. If the authorized or designated client contact is not available to engage in this effort, Vertican may reduce the severity level. If the client refuses to implement the steps suggested to troubleshoot or correct the issue, Vertican may close the ticket.
- Obligation to follow Technical Support guidelines: Clients understand that if they fail to follow any of the support guidelines below, their support request may be closed or remain unresolved.
- Support requests may only be submitted by an authorized Support Coordinator as listed in vPortal.
- Clients are responsible for monitoring their support allowance and must pay to exceed that allowance.
- Support Coordinators must submit support requests through the VSA, vPortal or any application that Vertican designates. Vertican reserves the right to refuse cases submitted via phone or email and to require submission by a designated method.
- Clients should submit a single issue per support request. Multiple issues will be placed in multiple tickets. The client will be informed in order to decide which tickets should be worked and so that the client can purchase any additional incidents as necessary.
- Clients must provide sufficient documentation with support requests.
- Clients must respond to Vertican within 5 business days.
- Clients must keep their software and account status current. Invoices are generated on the first day of the applicable month or year and are due 30 days from the date of invoice. This includes billing for an SOW, as well as an obligation to keep credit card and ACH information current in vPortal for monthly billing.
Vertican’s Responsibilities
Vertican has not warranted that any application will operate in an uninterrupted or error-free manner or that all programming errors can or will be corrected. The Technical Support commitment from Vertican is to use commercially reasonable efforts to remedy any Technical Support Case. Support does not cover, and Vertican cannot control, any issues arising from hardware, software other than the application/software, any misuse by Client or its personnel or partners, or any use of the Software with hardware or software for which it was not designed and configured.
Application Uptime
Where downtime is required during Normal Business Hours, Vertican will use commercially reasonable efforts to notify its clients any time services are unavailable for more than 15 minutes.
Response Time
Vertican is not able to guarantee the operability of client-hosted applications (Collection-Master, Q-Law, Q-LawE, vMedia). Therefore, our commitment with client-hosted software is response time rather than application uptime.
Vertican’s Discretion
- The categorization of a support request as Technical Support or Professional Services is at the sole discretion of Vertican.
- The categorization of a severity level for each Technical Support case is at the sole discretion of Vertican.
- Vertican may change its support hours, support pricing, response times, and the requirements for clients to receive support, including using a designated contact method and providing specified documentation.
Professional Services
- Professional Services are subject to mutually agreeable scheduling and have a minimum time of two hours per project.
- Provided as agreed by the parties in writing, including by email, with payment through the vPortal.
- Except as expressly set forth in a written agreement to the contrary, such services shall be on a time and materials basis at Vertican’s then-published rates for subscription clients.
- Vertican shall use commercially reasonable efforts to provide the specified staffing and meet the deadlines set forth in such schedule, provided that the Client performs all of its obligations under such schedule.
There are three types of Professional services: hourly web-based training, hourly consulting, and other professional services.
Web-based Training (hourly)
- Based on resource availability and scheduled accordingly.
- Scheduled hours for learning basic product functionality and tools or setup and training for DTPs and Optional Modules, except for the SQL-Sync module in Collection-Master.
- The client shall pay all costs of web-based hosting services.
Consulting (hourly)
- Based on resource availability and scheduled accordingly.
- Handled by subject matter experts who provide industry knowledge to guide, advise, and assist with needs relating to hardware questions, new server setup, workstation installations, network setup or server migrations, SQL-Sync training and consulting, data recovery, application maintenance assistance, business development, workflow automation consultations, customized reports/queries/templates, project planning, and research/resources used to resolve data and/or application errors that may result from user errors or misuse of the application.
- Provided as agreed by the parties in writing, including by email, with payment through the vPortal. Except as expressly set forth in a written agreement to the contrary, such services shall be on a time and materials basis at Vertican’s then-published rates for subscription clients. Vertican shall use commercially reasonable efforts to provide the specified staffing and meet the deadlines set forth in such schedule, provided that the Client performs all of its obligations under such schedule.
Other Professional Services
- Based on a Statement of Work.
- Custom work (e.g. custom programming; new interface development)
- Onsite training:
- Based on availability.
- The client shall pay all travel costs in accordance with Vertican’s then-current travel policy. Travel time is charged any time more than one hour travel either way is required or any time that Vertican personnel are required to be on site before 8:00 a.m. or after 6:00 p.m., even if travel time is less than one hour.
Use of Training Materials
The client may record, capture, copy, and use training materials provided by Vertican provided that such use is solely for its internal training purposes; however, such materials, in whatever form, shall be owned by Vertican and shall be the confidential information of Vertican. Client may add its own business rules to the training materials but may not change or modify in any other way Vertican’s training materials except as authorized in writing by Vertican, and Vertican shall not be responsible for any additions or unauthorized alterations to such materials.