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