Amicus Premium Billing

I had a chance to look at a late Beta of Amicus Premium Billing at the Amicus Consultants conference a couple of weeks ago and have been playing around with it since then. Gavel & Gown officially announced its forthcoming release at the ABA Tech Show this week.

The program is designed centrally by former PCLaw people who were dumped by LexisNexis, so together they have closed to 50 years of experience with one of the best Billing and Accounting programs around. This gives one grounds for optimism.

Premium Billing is a single integrated code base combining both Amicus Attorney and Premium Billing. You switch back and forth from one view to another simply by clicking a tab at the left of the screen. Thus Gavel and Gown potentially eliminates the question of “integration” of two products: there is one product, one code base, but two views of the information. The interface is very Amicus-like so it will be immediately familiar to Amicus users.

One of the central bottlenecks in getting a firm’s time and billing process to be more efficient is the widespread resistance by attorneys to viewing account information and draft bills electronically. Attorneys are accustomed to marking up drafts, which is very inefficient.

Premium Billing goes a long way toward providing an underpinning to remedy this situation. First, when you switch to Billing to look at the client/matter list, instead of seeing information such as client/matter number, file type, etc., you see a mini-report about billing information: Unposted fees, WIP fees, WIP Expenses, A/R, Retainer and Trust information.  In addition, this information is totaled at the bottom of the screen. In short, the second you open the client list, you have a complete billing report on the screen. In addition, if you sub-select the list by file type, responsible lawyer, etc. the totals reflect that selection. So in a single click, the head of a practice area can see how his department is doing. If there is a large amount of unposted time, that can be pursued. Since any column can be sorted, with a single click you can see which clients have the largest outstanding Accounts Receivables.

There is no need to go through menu options: with one or two clicks, you have the essential information you need at your fingertips. As one consultant said at the conference, the program almost talks to you.

In addition, Premium Billing has an extensive series of “File Alerts.” A given attorney can be given a reminder when a client’s WIP exceeds a certain amount; when A/R exceeds a given amount, or is older than a certain number of days; when a draft bill is ready for review; when a retainer requires replenishment, etc.

When you first open the Premium Billing office, you are presented with a Navigator-style screen that lets you select from the most frequently used functions. This is convenient, but it would be nice if it were customizable.

Time Entry is essentially the same as it has always been for Amicus, but also introduces the new “Time Entry Assistant” which searches through your appointments, to dos, phone calls, e-mails, etc. and locates the ones that have not yet been billed. It then offers you the opportunity to bill that time. Yet another way that Amicus prevents billable time from “falling through the cracks.” Billing rates and categories have been considerably improved from previous versions of Amicus.

The Billing function has a lot of slick “Amicus-like” functions. For example, if you have a bill for a client with a number of sub-matters, if you expand the client information, you will see the billing information for each matter separately.

Premium Billing does not currently have an accounting piece, but it does make extensive provision for trust accounting. For the time being, it integrates only with Quickbooks.

A number of reports are built in. Previous versions of Amicus used Crystal Reports to do custom reports. Amicus 2011 and Premium Billing have switched to the Microsoft SQL Report Writer, whose main virtue is that its free. It will take some getting used to. The main advantage is that the Report Writer reports are interactive: you can “drill down” on a report, see and change the underlying information, and the changes will immediately be reflected in the report.

Of course, this IS a version 1.0 program, designed from scratch. This has the advantage that the design team has been able to take advantage of the best elements from PCLaw, Timeslips and other programs and create a unified concept. It does remain to be seen whether the underlying programming can live up to Premium Billing’s potential to be an excellent program.