Does It Compute?

Credenza -- The Entry Level Drug

I recently revisited Seth Rowland’s blog “Credenza – the Entry Level Drug.”  If you are thinking about using Credenza, it is well worth looking at.

The issue is important for another reason. Gavel & Gown (makers of Amicus and Credenza) has recently announced a cloud-based version of Amicus Attorney which will eventually replace the Small Firm Edition of Amicus Attorney.  Obviously, their experience with Credenza forms the basis/foundation for this cloud-based version. Historically, one of the main issues with Credenza (and with cloud-based software generally) has been performance. Depending on your internet connection, response time can be very slow.

Gavel & Gown has committed to Microsoft’s Azure platform. The architect of the Azure platform, Ray Ozzie, left Microsoft in October 2010, about a year after the Azure platform had been released.  That would make me nervous. In addition, Azure has had perhaps more than its outages and problems, most notably the major outage this past February 29. What do you say about a software platform that can’t deal with leap years?

In the meantime, Credenza has been something of an underground hit for Gavel & Gown, which clearly hopes that small firms will want to upgrade to a more full-featured practice management program after using Credenza for a while. Enter Amicus Cloud.

It will be a great idea if they can get it to work.

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.

Amicus 2011 Released

In January, Gavel & Gown provided another one of its annual releases, Amicus 2011 (Small Firm and Premium). Law Technology News appropriately referred to this release as a “refresh.”  The improvements are mainly incremental, but some of them are very useful. They include:

•    A new Time Entry Assistant that makes it much easier to do a quick and dirty time entry. You will probably still want to edit it at the end of the day, however.
•    As screen resolutions have gotten larger, the apparent size of type has shrunk and many people have problems reading some of the information. Multi-line text fields are now displayed in larger type. People with old eyes, like me, will appreciate this.
•    There are a number of minor usability items, including an Amicus add-on for Acrobat, that lets you link PDF files with a matter.
•    Amicus now uses the SQL report writer. This is definitely a mixed bag, since the report writer is not an industrial strength product. In addition, custom fields and records are not exposed and hence not available to the report writer, which negates a large percentage of its potential value.
•    The Worldox link is finally more functional with the ability to search not just by client/matter, but also by document type. Since this also supports boolean searches, you could search for all documents for a matter but “not email.”  This makes the search much more useful.

So, should you upgrade?  For some time now, my position has been that yearly releases are a very bad idea.  I generally recommend upgrading every 3 years. So a firm currently running Amicus 2008 should upgrade (not least because Amicus will likely cease support for it some time this year).

Other firms may want to upgrade if a particular feature is something you have been wanting badly. For example, for people integrating Worldox with Amicus, the new search capability might be worth it.

Credenza -- "Amicus Lite"

Gavel & Gown recently released an add-on to Outlook called “Credenza,” sometimes known as “Amicus Lite” or practice management software for people who don’t want to invest in practice management software. It is designed for up to 3 users (although that may be expanded a little) and costs $9.99 per user per month. So for 3 users, it would be $360 per year.

One of the central conceptual differences between Outlook and practice management software such as Amicus, Time Matters or Practice Master, is that Outlook is individual centric, whereas practice management software is matter-centric. In Outlook I see MY emails, calendar, tasks, etc. In practice management software all information is organized around the file or matter.  I see all the emails, calendar items, tasks, etc. that are related to the matter, without regard to who has entered, sent or received them.  This is obviously much more powerful than Outlook and you don’t have forward copies of emails, yell down the hall, etc. to find “missing” material.

Credenza is designed to overcome this problem by adding three modules to Outlook: Matters, Time sheets and Phone Messages.  The Matters (or Files) module lets you link other pieces of Outlook to the Matter the way you would in a full-blown practice management system. Within the Matter you see tabs for Email, Time, Phone Messages, Appointments, Tasks, Notes, a Chron listing. You can even create a certain number of Custom Fields of various types (memo, number (but not currency), date, check box, drop-down lists).  The options and structure of Credenza follow those of Amicus very closely, so a user wanting to upgrade to Amicus (as Gavel & Gown obviously hopes they will) would not have a major learning curve.

Links to your Outlook contact list, emails, etc. can be related to a given Matter. The functionality of Credenza is fairly limited. In particular, there are no links to billing and accounting packages (although you can export a list of time entries and then import it to a time & billing package) and no provisions for any document assembly (even simple things like fax cover sheets or retainer letters). However, many people use only a fraction of the functionality of Amicus, so this lack may not be perceived as a major issue.

Credenza adds two columns to the Outlook display: the name of the Matter with which a given email has been associated and whether or not a time entry has been made.

You can configure Credenza so that information from the various Outlook accounts are shared (with a current limit of 3 users) even if you are not using Exchange – which most firms with only 3 users would not be.

If you don’t what to invest significant time and money in a full-fledged practice management system, and if you are willing to live with (or even prefer) an essentially “out of the box” implementation, and if you have three or fewer users, Credenza may be worth taking a look at. 

Amicus - Worldox Link

You learn something new every day.  I have been complaining about the Amicus - Worldox link in Premium Edition for some time now (the link was foolishly dropped in the Small Firm editions after 5.1 Takeaways are bad business). The default link brings you to all the files for a given client/matter.  That is fine if there are 50 documents, but what if there are 500 documents?  Not so fine.

It turns out that there is in fact a “search Worldox” function buried as part of the normal search function in Amicus, which lets you search by date, document type, or other criteria in addition to client/matter.  It takes a couple of extra clicks, but the functionality is in fact there. 

Time Matters Conversion to Amicus

It has always been possible to convert from older versions of Amicus to Time Matters (albeit not always totally cleanly), but it has never been possible to convert from Time Matters to Amicus.

Now, faced with mounting client dissatisfaction with Time Matters and the looming May 1 deadline for the expensive LexisNexis Annual Maintenance Plan (AMP), Gavel and Gown has announced a conversion service from Time Matters to Amicus Premium Edition (both SQL based). For $995 Gavel will convert your Time Matters, although with a caveat that “if their database requires unusual services an extra charge may apply.” Presumably this refers to extensive customization, features like User Defined Records and so on.  Nevertheless, for the first time a Time Matters firm has a realistic option to convert to Amicus.

In addition, for the month of may, Gavel is offering 50% off Amicus licenses for firms that convert.  So for a 10-user firm, the cost of conversion plus licenses would be $4,180 not including support/maintenance.

Amicus has gotten significantly more expensive than Time Matters, but offers more support options: an annual maintenance plan similar to the LN plan, yearly tech support, or no support at all. If you have a Certified Consultant, you may have other support options as well.

This option may not be for everyone (the more highly customized your Time Matters is, the less likely a conversion to Amicus would make you happy), but it is an option that has never realistically been available before.

What's New in Amicus 2008 and 2009

Software companies understandably try to portray the question of whether or not to upgrade to a new release as a question of new features.  However, this is at best only part of the picture. After all, if a firm is using Amicus, Time Matters or whatever primarily as a rolodex and calendar, what is the point of getting a bunch of new features that will only be added to the list of features it already doesn’t use?

So the question of an upgrade should really be presented in the context of “how can the firm make better and more effective use of this software?”  It may well be that implementing document assembly routines, precedents or triggers, making use of custom fields or customized forms, will be of much greater value to a firm that a particular new feature. In terms of “selling” a new upgrade to users, expanding the use of the software can frequently be pitched more effectively if presented as part of an upgrade.

That being said, if yearly upgrades are generally not worth it, at what point DOES it become worth upgrading?

First, if you are on any version prior to Amicus 2008, you should definitely upgrade.  Amicus Premium v. 7 simply had too many problems: if you are still using it, you should upgrade. If you are already on 2008, they the question is what are the cumulative upgrades?

New in 2009:

Multiple dashboard pages let you customize the initial view when you open Amicus. It didn’t work adequately in 2009, but has been fixed in 2010.

New File Intake Form.  When the new file creation form was “simplified” a number of years ago, it was a step backwards because it led to not filling out information you really needed. By being able to customize what information is required when opening new files, you get much more consistent and reliable file creation. 2010 increases the available functionality.

The ability to link a document with an appointment – this reminds you to review a given document before an appointment.

Email templates.  This feature lets you do “email merges.”  However, due to the limitations imposed by ISPs and Outlook (frequently you cannot send more than 20 emails at a time without it being labeled spam), this is perhaps less valuable than it might initially seem.

A number of improved settings that may give firms options they wished they had (such as the ability to hide the navigation pane when a file view is opened).

Amicus Mobile works with Blackberrys starting with the 2009 release.

New in 2010:

A number of calendar improvements, including color coding, the ability to track adjournments, and the ability to promote the priority of events automatically after x days.

In addition to associating a document with an appointment, you can now associate an email as well.

Generate standard letters or envelopes directly from the Contact screen.

Improvements to the File Open customization.

All in all, if you are currently on 2008, it is probably worth the upgrade.

Amicus Premium Edition 2010

Many of the new features in Amicus 2010 Premium parallel those in the Small Firm Edition. Logically enough, Gavel and Gown seem to be developing first for Premium as a priority, and then dropping down most (but not all) new features to the Small Firm edition (although they still irrationally refuse to restore the integration of Small Firm with Worldox).

So you can now color code appointments; set incrementing priorities (if something is not done within x days the priority increases from, say, medium to high) and allow others access to your calendar independently of whether they are assigned to a file. This remedies a major oversight in previous versions where if you followed the Gavel & Gown guidelines, access to appointments simply did not work acceptably.  The receptionist (or anyone else) can track who is in and out of the office (assuming the data is entered systematically).

There has also been a noticeable speed increase, which will be more than welcome.

All in all, it is a minor, incremental release. But here is an example of the kind of minor feature that might tip the balance on an upgrade.  I have a client who has been refusing to upgrade from Amicus V because the calendar printouts no longer contained the client/matter number. Well, with 2010, that feature has been restored.  Will my client upgrade?  I don’t know, but this is the sort of minor feature that a particular client might find critical.

On the other hand, many features that should have been upgraded, expanded or completed  were not touched – Worldox integration and Custom Records to name two of my pet peeves. At the ludicrous end of the spectrum, the Word Amicus Merge toolbar is still labeled “Amicus 7 Merge.” And for larger sites, the lack of significant centralized management tools is still a real problem (in some respects there are fewer capabilities than there were with Amicus V).

So if you are running 2009 is it worth upgrading?  Probably not, unless there is a particular “must have” feature. If you are on 2008 or earlier, the case is more compelling.

Amicus Small Firm 2010

Amicus comes in two flavors:  Small Firm and Premium. By and large the feature set is very similar. Gavel & Gown has gone over to yearly releases, so you can expect each release to be minor and incremental. Over several years, however, the “increments” can add up to significant changes. What does Amicus Small Firm 2010 offer? There are a number of new features related to the calendar. First, you can color code types of appointments – for example so that all court dates appear in red or some other color. This is especially useful if you are in a month view, because all the appointments of a given type easily stand out.  Secondly, you can now set Amicus to track adjourned appointments together with the reason for adjournment (if an appointment is adjourned multiple times, you will have an audit trail of the adjournments and reasons for them). Initially, I wasn’t very convinced about the utility of this feature, but I noticed a thread on a Time Matters listserv  recently about how to make TM do this exact thing. The feature is now built in to Amicus. Thirdly, you can set a priority to be progressive: if you set the priority to medium, you can tell the program that after x days, the priority switches to high, after x more days to very high, etc.

A firm member availability feature lets users track who is in and out of the office, when they are expected to return, etc.  In practice, this is likely to be used primarily by the receptionist.

A few additional automation features have been added: it has always been possible to launch a fax or email from a Contact’s business card. Now it is possible to print an envelope or generate a default letter as well. This could previously be done via the document assembly feature, but the new functionality saves several steps.

Amicus 2010 illustrates once again what happens when a mature program tries to “churn” its existing customers by offering yearly updates. The result is a marginal release with only a few new “featurettes” that probably do not justify an upgrade from the immediately previous version – unless one of them is something you have been wanting badly for a long time. Amicus is not alone in this respect – Time Matters and PCLaw had the same problem with their releases last fall. Generally speaking, it makes sense to wait 2 or 3 versions until the incremental improvements add up to something that is worth the upgrade. For example, the changes to the customizable File Intake form between v. 2009 and 2010 are not very significant, but the ability to customize what information must be entered on File Intake, introduced in 2009, is a major advantage. So if you are running 2008, the combined changes might be worth it.

Budgeting: Getting the Most Out of Your Software

In the midst of a severe recession (to avoid the dreaded “D” word), firms are under a lot of pressure to get more out of their software.

One way to do this is to keep better track of your cases and revenue by availing yourself of the budget features in Amicus or PCLaw. Both these programs let you set up a budget for expected billable revenue and then generate reports comparing time worked and/or billed against the budget.

In Amicus, the timesheets page lets you set up a budget for the year and for the month, and then compare what you have actually billed to the budget. While most small firms know pretty well how things are going (good month, lousy month), it will help manage your firm to be able to put numbers on this.

In PCLaw, you set up a budget per month for each timekeeper. You can then run reports on budget vs. worked, vs. billed, etc.