Does It Compute?

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.

Amicus Contradictions

Amicus now strongly recommends that you NOT associate all firm members to files and contacts because of the additional computing load. According to Amicus, failure to abide by this guideline will make “your workflow cumbersome, provides no benefits, and results in performance degradation.” To offset this you can now see “all Firm” files and contacts. Sounds good.

Another significant improvement in PE 2009 was the increased ease in viewing other calendars. So in a firm with 3 or 4 attorneys, the receptionist can simply have a group calendar open on her desk at all times and know what all the attorneys are doing, what clients they have appointments with, etc.

OOPS!  Wait a minute. It turns out that if you do not assign a user to a file, that user cannot see the content of an appointment for a matter to which they are not assigned. It comes up as if it were a private appointment and the details are not visible.

So if you follow the strong recommendation about not associating firm members to files, you disable one of the really convenient, time-saving, ease of use functions of the program.  Isn’t there something wrong with this picture?

According to Amicus, the fact that receptionists and paralegals cannot see the content of the appointment means that “you can see that someone is booked but not why. This privacy restriction reflects what the vast majority of our customers have asked for.” 

Now it may be that what the “vast majority” of Amicus customers ask for is the total opposite of what the virtual unanimity of my clients want, but somehow I don’t think so. Furthermore, since the program already has a setting to see “all Firm Files” in addition to the files to which a user is assigned, one might suppose it would not be too difficult to port this over to appointments, so that if you can see “firm files” then you can see “firm appointments.”

With a yearly release schedule, this is the sort of problem that is likely to get a response “will be fixed in the next version.” But this is just an excuse to get people on to the upgrade treadmill what is known in the financial industry as churning clients) rather than treating significant design issues as bugs (or if you will “Working as Poorly Designed”) and fixing them.

Amicus Custom Records

I recently had occasion to implement the Custom Records in an Amicus 2009 PE installation. This functionality lets you create a spreadsheet-like listing of, for example, client expenses or medical expenses for PI firms. For years, this type of functionality was available only in Needles. 

You can create a number of fields (although for space reasons only about 4-5 can be displayed in a list format). Numeric fields can be summed up at the bottom of the screen, so that you can see the total expenses, client costs, etc.

While this is a great feature, there are several significant limitations that prevent it from entirely replacing whatever spreadsheets a firm currently keeps this sort of information on.

First, the reporting function cannot be configured, so you cannot get an acceptable printout of the data (and the totals do not appear on the report).

Secondly, aside from totaling numbers, there are no other calculations available: you cannot to a “count” of the number of records, you cannot add or subtract two columns (e.g., payments minus costs), and you cannot enter negative numbers (which would be another way of getting payments minus costs).

The fields are not natively exposed; that is, you cannot run a report using the Amicus merge function. It may be possible to use Crystal Reports to generate a more acceptable report. If that turns out to be the case, it would alleviate many of the weaknesses of the current implementation.

Delegation Systems: Amicus v. Time Matters

People constantly want to compare Amicus and Time Matters. While this is sometimes a matter of Apples and Oranges, there are fundamental conceptual differences in how the programs work. Every once and a while I run across a feature that perfectly encapsulates this difference. The “Delegation Systems” function is one such example.

In Time Matters, Tom Rowe first developed this system for TM v. 6 (if memory serves). It was subsequently incorporated into the shipping program. Basically the delegation system involves a customized ToDo form. When you create a “Delegated” ToDo, the form changes to include a different set of fields, namely: 
Delegated By
Date Assigned
Date Started
Date Finished
Current Status
Details.
The “Current Status” is selected from a configurable dropdown, which generally includes things like: Not Started; Scheduled but not started; In progress; Waiting on someone else; Deferred; and Completed.

In order to use this system, you have to make sure it is installed/configured (it did not ship with earlier versions). The user creates a ToDo and selects “DELE” as the classification code. You can also manually configure a QuickTab so that the person doing the delegating can see all the tasks they have assigned to somebody else and the status of them. This is an extremely effective system once it is set up.

In Amicus PE 2009, the “delegated” function is built into the system.  When you create a ToDo, there is a “Priority” option – Top, Average, Low, etc. and my personal favorite, “Someday.” Let's say you simply assign the ToDo to someone else.  When you open the “Tasks” function, there is an option to view ToDos “assigned to others by me.” You can set the “percent done” to be viewable on the display. That's it. So almost everything is built into the system, but there is virtually no configuration (except for the “Priority” options which are configurable on a firm-wide basis).

So the Time Matters system is more powerful and has a lot more options. However, it requires a fair amount of time to set up. The Amicus system has fewer options, but works out of the box with no additional consulting time.

This type of difference pops up throughout the two programs. So the net result is that while Time Matters offers more options, it is also going to cost you considerably more to configure adequately. In Amicus, you get what you get, but it is a lot simpler and less expensive.

New Cheat Sheets for Amicus Attorney 2009

I have just finished updating my Cheat Sheets for Amicus Attorney 2009, both for the Small Firm edition and the Premium edition.

They are available on the “Cheat Sheet” page of the Heckman Consulting Web Site.

Is Amicus a Viable Alternative to Time Matters?

In the course of the past several months, I have had several Time Matters consultants call me to inquire whether I still thought that Amicus was a viable alternative to Time Matters.

The answer, with the usual caveats, is YES.  Some history. When Gavel & Gown first tried to write a “dot net” program, it was a disaster and was pulled from the market almost entirely (Amicus X – LexisNexis take note). Following that, the first SQL version, Amicus 7, had many many problems and many leading Amicus consultants basically refused to sell it. However, with Amicus 2008 and now 2009, the SQL version (Amicus Premium Edition) seems to be stable, well-behaved, and most of the “glitches” have been fixed (although of course there will always be a few). Amicus Small Firm Edition has always been a good option for smaller firms and can still be had (at some extra expense) for slightly larger firms that do not have the hardware to run the SQL version. Almost all senior Time Matters consultants, on the other hand, strongly recommend the “Enterprise” SQL version, sometimes even on a single PC.

Now for the caveats.  Amicus and Time Matters have completely different philosophies of software development. In a nutshell, Amicus has always focused on ease of use even at the expense of customizability (if that’s a word) whereas Time Matters has focused on extensive customization even at the expense of ease of use. It is significant in this regard that many of the “add-ons” that make Time Matters functional (especially with regard to email and forms customization) come from third party software developers. Such a “third party” pool of applications/developers does not exist for Amicus.

However, now that Amicus is on an SQL platform, the possibility for direct manipulation of the database tables (which is the basis for third party TM developers) exists. It also lets Amicus be even more customizable than TM in some respects, with unlimited custom fields and custom pages (sort of like the User Definable Forms in TM 9 on steroids). With this of course, comes increased consulting time (thus tending to eliminate the previous distinction between TM and Amicus,  where as a rule of thumb TM required twice as much consulting and training time as did Amicus).

The contrast between the two programs came out very clearly the other day at a potential small client. I showed him both Amicus and Time Matters. It turned out that he had been running his practice on an extensive set of complex Excel spreadsheets, so when he saw the TM “spreadsheet look,” he said “that’s what I need.” Other firms react “yuk!” to the spreadsheet look and go with Amicus. To each his own.

One last caveat: if you are looking to convert, look very carefully. If you have extensive Time Matters customization, it will not be an easy task.

Amicus 2009 Programs

Gavel and Gown has released 2009 versions of its three programs: Small Firm Edition and Premium Edition of Amicus Attorney and Amicus Accounting. The good news is that after a couple of disastrous releases, with Amicus 2008 and now 2009, the Premium Edition seems once again to be a stable and viable option. Small Firm, built on Amicus V, has always been solid. However, I certainly hope that Gavel & Gown is not buying in to the “yearly release” approach (2008, 2009), as it will almost certainly prove to be a mistake and come back to bite them in the neck.

The 2009 releases are largely incremental, although they do have some nice features. Whether that is enough to justify the upgrade is up to you.

With the major exception of Blackberry support for Amicus Mobile, the new features are parallel in Small Firm and Premium. The new version features a customizable “dashboard” which lets you, for example, put instant forms for calendar items, phone calls, notes, etc. on one screen. My favorite new feature is a customizable client intake screen which lets you ensure that new matters are opened correctly. Also an improved conflict check function, a preview pane in the email/phone call/message screen, and some other more minor features. 

New features in Accounting 2009 are mainly new and improved reports, but if you are upgrading, Accounting has to be upgraded in tandem with Attorney.

The one clear “worth the price of admission” feature is support for Blackberrys on Amicus Mobile, which is currently the only PDA-based feature that let you do a real-time synch with your home servers. Other programs, such as MobileTM for Time Matters are one-way only: they download from the server in real time, but don’t write back. So with Amicus Mobile, when you make a phone call on your PDA, you can also bill time for it on the spot. Very slick.

Accessing Practice/Document Management with a PDA

Now that “everybody” is synching their emails with a PDA device, the next generation of applications is starting to appear that link a PDA with the main database of your practice or document management systems. This will increase rapidly in the next year or two, especially as more and more on-line practice management systems start to appear.

To date, there are basically two models, one represented by Amicus Mobile and the other by TM Mobile and Worldox Web/mobile.

The Amicus approach installs a mini version of the main application on your PDA. In the case of practice management programs, this has one tremendous advantage: If you make a phone call or send an email from your PDA, the application pops up and lets you bill time for it. The time record is transmitted back to the office where you can edit it when needed and send it to your billing application from there. This is one of the main reasons people have for buying this application. Any changes made either on the PDA or at the office are synchronized with the other side.

This approach does, however, have a major inconvenience. In an age of proliferating PDA platforms - Blackberry, Treo, Windows Mobile, iPhone, Gphone, etc., it is platform specific (logically, since the “mini-app” has to be written for each separate platform). Amicus Mobile requires Windows Mobile devices: nothing else will work. Getting people to give up their Blackberrys or telling them they can’t have an iPhone is a hard sell.

The second approach uses a web browser to access your data store and download pages as needed. Thus the Worldox Web/mobile application lets you download, view, and most importantly, e-mail documents on your server anywhere.

The new TM Mobile application, written by Steve Stockstill (formerly the lead programmer for Time Matters) and marketed by OTB consulting, is extremely slick for what it does. No more problems with synchronization (of which there were many). You access your data in real time. If you leave the office in the morning, and somebody adds an appointment to your calendar at 11 o’clock, you see it by very shortly after that.

This approach has the massive advantage that it works with any java-enabled phone that can browse the web: Blackberry, Treo, Windows, iPhone and so on, There is no software to download (and hence fewer things to go wrong). It has the disadvantage that you cannot upload any information: e-mails, billing records for phone calls, etc.

This is, however, likely to come in a later generation as feature creep sets in. Like a new PC, the application will be wonderful for a while, but then people will start to say, “why can’t it ... ,” and the main thing they are likely to want to do is to upload time records and new appointments.

While the first approach is more powerful (and likely to remain so), the second approach is more likely to win out in the longer run, because of the independence and flexibility it provides.

Amicus Mobile on Windows PDA

Gavel & Gown has announced Amicus Mobile, a miniature version of Amicus Attorney that runs on a Windows Mobile-based PDA.  I saw a demo of this product at the Amicus Consultants conference a month or so ago and it looks very impressive.

Amicus Mobile extends the concepts behind Blackberry push email to all areas, so that Amicus functions - calendar, contacts, emails, phone calls, time entries - synch up with the Amicus at the office in near-real time. So if a secretary adds an appointment to your calendar, it shows up on Amicus Mobile within a minute or two.

Similarly, Amicus Mobile keeps a record of all incoming and outgoing phone calls and offers to let you make a time entry for them on the spot (busy attorneys might want to make a “placeholder” time entry and flush out the details later).

The bottom line is that virtually all the functions that are available on your Amicus desktop at the office are available on Amicus Mobile. In addition, it will track changes when your cell phone is out of range and synchronize them later.

At $149 per user (and you only buy as many licenses as you have PDAs) is this too good to be true?  Well, it does have significant hardware requirements. You have to upgrade to Amicus Premium PE, which for older and smaller installations may necessitate a new server (Amicus is having a 25% off sale on the upgrade price for the month of June).  You need broadband access sufficient for the number of users (not usually a problem these days) plus a static IP address or a registered Web domain name. Lastly, it only runs on the clunky Windows Mobile 5 or better operating system (so you will have to ditch your Palm or Blackberry). But if those requirements aren’t burdensome for you, and if you are the type of person who is obsessive about staying connected with the office, this could be a very exciting product if it indeed performs as advertised.

Cheat Sheet for Amicus 2008 Small Firm Edition

I have just finished the Amicus 2008 Small Firm Edition Cheat Sheet.  As with other Cheat Sheets, this is not intended as a replacement for a manual.

It is intended to answer basic questions following training: “Oh, yes, he said something about that, now how do I do it?”

The Cheat Sheet can be downloaded from the Heckman Consulting web site list of cheat sheets or directly by clicking here.