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.
I have spent the last 2 days teaching myself SQL enough to put together a report using the SQL report writer. All I have left now are the custom fields and I cannot find them the tables. I just read this article and almost threw myself on the floor kicking and screaming. Thankfully I saw you had comments and that you CAN access the custom records. WHERE????
Posted by: Angela Wise | December 16, 2011 at 01:29 AM
I really like this release, even though there is a room for some improvements... I mean - it's great and all... any idea if there are any upgrades soon ?
Posted by: sap upgrade planning | August 02, 2011 at 10:22 AM
Nice information. I will definite bookmark your post!
Posted by: personal budget calculator | June 03, 2011 at 07:00 AM
It is only very recently that Amicus has exposed the custom fields and records so that they can be accessed by Report Builder. But you are right, the good news is that now they can.
Posted by: John Heckman | April 22, 2011 at 08:24 AM
I'm not sure who told you that custom fields and records can't be accessed through the SQL Report Builder. I have created lists of documents and various other documents with the custom records information. It's just a matter of mapping out how your custom data is store and the relationships between the various tables. From there, you can link these pieces of information together and generate all kinds of reports. I have been using the SQL Report builder with excel and created macros to automatically sort data for use in court documents.
Posted by: Lucy | April 21, 2011 at 05:56 PM
Is Outlook sync any better in SFE 2011?
Posted by: M Farley | February 24, 2011 at 08:16 PM