Amicus Attorney

Kommentare: Overall, AA Online is a terrific product, great value, great customer support (which is rarely needed). As long as you know that it is a starter or limited to solo/small firm practices, it's hard to find a better product for the money.

Vorteile: Right out of the gate, the client portal is the feature that sets apart AA from every, other legal case management software. There are only one or two other programs out there that offer this feature. If you have a practice that requires client updates or have clients who use email for case communications, the Portal can dramatically reduce that in box volume as well as provide needed security. It's also a great marketing tool. Very few firms offer this to their clients. Flexibility is number two. There are few, other programs out there that allow the user so much control over the data fields and how they want to use the program. If you are happy with the spreadsheet style software that costs a fortune to modify or customize, AA is not for you. You can do as much or little work on it as you like. Connected and all inclusive solution. AA syncs up well with MS office products like Outlook and Word and plays nicely overall. You can use the AA calendar and email if you like, but if you're used to Outlook, no problem. AA gives you everything you need to run your practice with the case management, billing, reporting, email, and document generation. For a modest amount you can add the accounting to it. Easy to use. I have tried other programs but haven't found anything that is as easy and intuitive. There are certainly more powerful programs out there and the Amicus Online edition we use definitely has its limitations when it comes to a web browser based system.

Nachteile: It's not meant for more than 3 or 4 attorneys. If you need something more robust go with the hosted environment where AA runs on their servers in a dedicated environment. AA Online is a great solo/small practice, starter software. WARNING: Bear in mind that much of what you set up in AA Online will NOT transfer over to Amicus Premium in the hosted environment. If you are thinking of ever switching over to the full version of AA rather than the web version, do not spend a lot of time/effort with templates and workflows as very little of that will carry over.

Vorteile: TIME & MATTER MANAGEMENT: Timers and time entries are pretty simple. Knowing all people involved in a matter all in one place; engineers, judges, etc. is a great feature. Adding emails to a file is a good idea but time-consuming. Having all the data for a client in one place is good. BILLING: I like that the Billing and Attorney sides are separate. Billing and accepting payments works quite well. Amicus can do split billing which is important to us. The interface with Quickbooks is quirky but after 1.7 years of working with it we've figured out most of the issues and found workarounds. Reports can be downloaded to Excel which is vital to my managing the firm.

Nachteile: CONS:
The end-user learning curve is huge and not intuitive which has led to a lot of attorneys entering time and not using Amicus for anything else. Text onscreen is exceptionally small, and for most users, problematic. The interface is not intuitive and takes a lot of trial and error to find the best ways to find what you want or report on the issue. We were lead to believe that the document management interface would work for us, but upon trial found out it would not work with our setup. So we're still dealing with Microsoft Explorer for managing documents, which is problematic. Overall our approval level with Amicus is likely only around 50%. There are so many features that we liked in the concept that has been difficult to get attorneys to do because the interface is not user-friendly. TIME & MATTER MANAGEMENT: Data for our conflict database did not translate well from our previous system so conflicts checks take too long. Adding emails or files to the matter is very clunky. Ticklers are quirky and hard to work in Outlook. Tickler Reports are too limited events with no date range, or date range but no file selection. Running tickers for only one matter is impossible. Need more filters.
BILLING: Reports downloaded to Excel are impossible to use due to all the merged fields and lack of use of tables. We have to download Reports to CSV and spend time figuring out what the column headers actually are. I use the selection tools to view onscreen matters or time entries by

Vorteile: Amicus integrates your calendar, contacts, email, phone calls and matters and reminds you to create docket entries for all appointments, emails, calls, documents, etc. The beauty and economic benefit of the software is that it helps you to capture your time and to keep you organized. Over the years, Amicus has added things like Amicus mobile (which allows you to access features from your mobile device or any web browser) and a client portal (which allows you to permit clients to access certain information).
I have always considered the most important element of the software to be the communications module. If you turn on email integration and make notes of all of your calls using the software, you can quickly review what has been happening in a case by turning to the communications module. You won't forget to docket your time for all those communications.

Nachteile: While many other features have been added, the developers have not made material improvements to the communications module since email integration was added in about 2001. Obvious improvements have been needed since then. For instance, you cannot access scanned or faxed letters from the communications module. These can be added and viewed in the documents module and in a chronology module (added in about 2015), but neither option is not ideal. Flipping through communications should be as easy as flipping the pages of a paper file, but it's not. It is the organizational equivalent of having one file folder with your emails and phone calls, and another file folder with your faxes and letters. You have to flip from one folder to the other to view each. Also, you should be able to filter communications. For instance, you should be able to display only client communications, or only counsel communications, but you can't (even though there is a field for role on file for each contact attached to a file). The chronology module will put everything including all communications and documents (including letters and faxes) in chronological order, but you can't filter the chronology to show only communications (it will also show every document, docket, calendar appointment, etc.).
I have looked at alternative practice management software several times over the years and haven't seen one that I am adequately attracted to want to make what would be a painful change.

Vorteile: Amicus Attorney Premium is a reliable product. Once it's up and running correctly, there are few bugs. It is a highly flexible program chock full of more options than anyone could ever use. I prefer to avoid the cloud, too much risk of privacy issues, so even though an in-house server is old school, I prefer it this way. MS Exchange sync which gets calendars and contacts to the cell phone is excellent since 2015, best it's been since the old days of synching to the Palm Pilot. While I am listing a number of cons below, this software is the center point of our practice.

Nachteile: Since this software was purchased by Abacus Corp in 2016, the price has gone up 75% --
what a sticker shock! IMHO, the tech support under the new owner is no better or worse.
As for improvements to the product, the new owners seem to be focused only on selling their own add-on products --- the announcements tout how AA Premium now links to Abacus Product XYZ, but AA Premium has received any new features. They promised a cell phone app for remote access as part of the February update to AA 2017 and it still has not been released. They have added links to their add-on extra accounting and law products, but not updated any features of the core Amicus Attorney program. There is still no iPhone or Android app for remote access, one still has to use a browser on the cell phone to reach AmicusAnywhere. The process for writing SQL reports is complex! Also, the move from WordPerfect to Word (a necessary evil in today's world) meant losing the highly flexible document merge abilities of WordPerfect. I've been with AA since 2001; if Abacus doesn't produce new features, however, I will look to move my office to another product that seems more modern even at the risk of going to a web-based product when my two-year contract expires.

Kommentare: I have a small 5 attorney firm. with a large support staff. At any given time, we handle about 1,000 active files. Our practice is very paper intensive. We've tried to go paperless, but it doesn't quite work with out type of practice, so we still do things the old fashioned way ... with file folders and legal pads. I've been an Amicus Attorney user for over 10 years. Prior to that, I tried and use several other "name brand" case management systems. Until about a year ago, we used the Amicus Small Firm program and it worked great. We switched to the Premier edition when we upgraded our server and all of our workstations. The premier edition was more adaptable to our practice. First of all, it was faster, second, we liked the better document management and third, for a rather small increase in cost, we got more bells and whistles. There are at least a half dozen firms in my area that are now using Amicus because of my recommendation. The links with other programs like Outlook are seamless. One calendar entry in Amicus updates Outlook and my laptop and my phone. I have not seen another case management program that has a document assembly system for letters, pleadings, emails, faxes anywhere as sophisticated as Amicus Attorney's. Also, check out their "Do" button and their "precedent" processes.

Vorteile: Their support is fantastic. Very little wait time. The support people are courteous, knowledgeable. and patient.

Nachteile: In many ways, the program is overwhelming for some of our staff. It takes a lot of time to train new staff members on the program. Also, there are many things that the program does that I haven't been able to use because it takes a lot of time to set up those things. This is probably more of a problem with smaller firms that don't have staff who just handle equipment use. In addition, we're WordPerfect users. I feel that the program works slightly better with MS Word.