Does It Compute?

The Amicus Fiasco

There is a long history of disastrous takeovers in the software industry. The acquiring firm is not really interested in the product being required, it frequently just wants a piece of technology, user base, etc. So the product that is acquired is reduced to insignificance if not terminated entirely.

Last summer, Abacus Systems acquired Amicus Attorney.  Several months later, Abacus announced that the previous licensing model (purchase + yearly maintenance) was being abandoned in favor of a Software as a Service monthly subscription model. Existing firms could maintain their current license, but would not get tech support and if they wanted to add any users, they would have to switch to the new model which would be – are you listening? – three to five times as expensive as the old model.  So a firm that previously paid $4,000 a year in maintenance would now pay $12-15,000 per year.  

Predictably, outrage was the response: “No way in hell am I going to pay that!”

At Legal Tech last week, I asked one of the Abacus booth representatives (previously a VP at Amicus) if he was aware of how much ill-will they had generated.  “Yes” he said.

So why do it?  What were they thinking?  Since the reaction was predictable, one has to assume that they did some calculations and determined they would make more money by getting rid of a certain percentage of Amicus users and ripping off the rest. The math is simple.  If you assign a value of “1000” to what current firms were paying, with the new pricing, lets say 50% of the users go elsewhere in disgust. So now the value of the old pricing is only “500”. But since the new pricing is at least 3 times the old pricing, Abacus is making 3 x 500, or 1,500. That is, 50% more revenue.  And the revenue keeps on coming in year after year after year. So it would seem to make sense to do what Abacus did.  

The thing they may not have taken into account however, is that new sales are likely to drop precipitously due to all the bad publicity. Do they seriously think any of the old users will continue to recommend Amicus?  Thus Amicus will go into a long slow slide (as have other victims of takeovers such as Time Matters and PCLaw), and probably in another 4-5 years be subsumed into Abacus entirely. Maybe that was the plan from the outset.

In the meantime, what can Amicus users do?  They are in between a rock and a very hard place.

There are three elements to consider when a firm is thinking about switching.  

First, the cost of competing similar programs is roughly equivalent to the new Abacus pricing. So a firm is unlikely to save any significant amount of money by switching.

Second, the cost of data conversion will be substantial.

Third, the upheaval to the firm in switching to a new program will be significant: new routines, training and general disruption.
So it may in fact be cheaper to stay.  Abacus is probably counting on this.

The smartest thing to do is probably to stay provisionally and start looking around in a systematic  manner. Within the next 2-3 years better web-based options will almost certainly become available. That way, if you bite the bullet now, you can be in a better position to make a change in a well-thought out manner a few years from now.

Amicus Cloud

Gavel & Gown has just released Amicus Cloud, designed as an upgrade from Amicus Small Firm Edition.  I’ve been looking at the beta off and on for the past couple of months.

Amicus Cloud is very slick but it has some major stumbling blocks.  The good stuff first. Gavel & Gown had a brilliant idea, which no one else has ever implemented. Amicus Cloud is closely intertwined with Microsoft Exchange: in fact, you must be running Exchange in order for the email function to work. Therefore the email function – which is the operational center of many lawyers’ functioning – is directly tied into the Amicus Cloud code. This is not a “synch,” you do not have to “send” emails to the program, there is no separate button in Outlook to link to Amicus. The two are directly intertwined. Since email synch/integration tends to be one of the central issues in complaints about other programs’ functionality, this resolves that central problem.

If you are currently using Exchange, this is a no brainer. If you are using another program, Gmail or whatever, although there are ways of getting your data into Amicus Cloud, in essence you will wind up having to abandon your other program.  So this can be a bit of a two-edged sword.

The other usual modules - contacts, files, time entry, billing, etc. are very slick, big buttons and all. The program is designed (or “optimized”) for use on a mobile device, so when you log in there are big buttons informing you about appointments, email, phone messages, etc.  This leads to the second brilliant conception behind Amicus Cloud:  all your data is available on whatever device you are using:  iPad, iPhone, Android phone, Mac, tablet, normal desktop browser, you name it. There is no download or synch, your data is “just there.”  As Ron Collins would say, “phenomenal.”

But,... there are some big “buts.”  The first of course is bandwidth. One of the major drawbacks to previous cloud-based applications has been speed and response time. For any cloud app to work acceptably you have to have major bandwidth available.  And you better check the data plan on your smartphone carefully.  If you will be using a smartphone heavily, you better have a 4G connection. In addition, response time depends on the response of the bandwidth Gavel & Gown has contracted for with the Microsoft data center it is using (which should not simply be taken for granted). When I was testing (even with only a small amount of data), some days the program was very zippy, other days the program dragged and I have a lot of bandwidth in my office. In any event, you should not expect response time to consistently be equivalent to what you have with an in-house network.

Then there are some of the usual drawbacks of web-based products. There is no search function in the contact list, for example. You have to go to the first letter of the contact (after choosing to sort by first name, last name or company name) and then scroll down.  As a solo, I only have about 1200 contacts, but this can still be frustrating.

Several functions are lacking in the initial release.  There are no linked events, no precedents, no document assembly/merges and no custom fields. Many firms don’t use these functions, but for those that do they are likely to be critical.

Gavel & Gown has announced that their upgrade strategy will be very aggressive, with updates, fixes and new features every three weeks at least initially. They have assured me that fixes are “in the works.”  And in fact, there was a major issue with the formatting of contacts up to just before the formal release, but this issue has been fixed. So unless you are prepared to “limp along” for a couple of months, you might want to wait a bit.

Setup is a major issue. There is basically no import routine. Data can be imported from Outlook, but that does not help with your client list. The only import option available is from the Amicus Small Firm Edition, and you will have to pay Gavel & Gown to import your data for you. They say their charges will be “reasonable,” but it is not clear what that will wind up meaning for a firm with a lot of data.

For a more detailed review, see Legal Loudspeaker

At $34.95/user/month, Amicus Cloud is priced substantially lower than its nearest competitors (who range from $50 to $85/user/month), but you have to add the cost of Microsoft Exchange. Since many firms have this already, this is not really an issue. If the firm does not, Gavel & Gown will rent it to you for $10/user/month, which is on the high side of the going rate. It may pay to shop around (but make sure you are comparing the same things, i.e., including backup, anti-virus, anti-spam, etc.).

In short, Gavel & Gown has come up with a couple of brilliant innovations, but Amicus Cloud is still a work in progress and if you badly need one of the still-missing options, you might want to hold off for a couple of months to see how it shakes out.

Upgrading Amicus 2009 to 2012: What Do You Get?

As readers of my blog know, I have for years been recommending that firms NOT opt for the annual maintenance plans from Amicus or Lexis (which now gives you no choice however). There are several reasons for this.

First, the “annual releases” tend to be increasingly incremental and buggy, so that there are fewer reasons to upgrade and some not to. Thus Amicus Premium 2012 was released in January/February 2012. Service Pack 1 was released in April. Three days later, there were bugs discovered in SP1 and it had to be re-released. Gavel & Gown is not alone: LexisNexis is still the leader (if that is the appropriate term) in offering the worst updates/patches.

Second, the AMPs are simply more expensive than buying normal tech support (which Amicus to its credit still offers, although Lexis does not) and then upgrading every third year, which is a more rational path in any event. This is especially true since firms typically support the current release and two previous ones. Thus Amicus will be stopping support for the 2009 version, and support only 2010, 2011 and 2012. For economic reasons, this is basically their only choice.  Firms that insist on refusing to update really old software are just asking for trouble.

The reasonable question then arises: OK, I’ll upgrade from my Amicus 2009 to 2012. What new functionality/improvements will I be getting?  Here is a list of what are in my opinion are the most significant improvements in the respective version (the list is not exhaustive). In particular I tend to give less importance to cosmetic improvements than substantive improvements.

Amicus Premium Edition 2010

•     You can now track the history of adjournments of court dates or other appointments. This can be very important. The old appointment is still show but with “Adjourned to DATE” pre-pended to the title.

•      You can now allow other firm members access to your calendar. This resolves the issue where for years attorneys had secretaries log into their office to see their appointments, or simply making the two calendar lists identical.

•    New File Intake form. This lets you specify what information must be included when opening a new file. This is much more flexible and efficient than the old de minimus form.

•    Firm member availability. You can now see who is in the office, out of the office, expected back, etc.  Of course, for this to work, someone has to manually enter that information.  However, this would be a reasonable job for a receptionist.

•    Business Cards and cover letters. You can now easily generate a letter or envelope for a contact by clicking on the corresponding icon to the left of their business card display. Very convenient.

Amicus Premium Edition 2011

•    New Time Entry Assistant. This lets you identify and select any items - appointments, notes, phone calls, etc. that have not been billed and bill them. You can also view your time entries for the day directly from the calendar. Another way to stop things from dropping through the cracks.

•    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.

•    Outlook link enhancements (on the other hand, virtually every version advertises this, so your mileage may vary)

•    Much improved Worldox integration (lets you search by document type as well as client/matter)

•    An Amicus toolbar is now available from within Acrobat, which facilitates some functions.

•    Use of the SQL reporting services, introduced in 2011, is a mixed bag and initially just didn’t work very well (those pesky yearly updates)

•    Additional options are available for the File view (although it is still not totally customizable).

Amicus Premium Edition 2012

•    Amicus touts the “new documents module.” However, it is still not adequate for significant numbers of documents. Anybody using Premium would be better off adopting Worldox for document management.

•    Amicus now links with Google Contacts and Calendar, which can be very useful for anyone using Google Sync with a mobile device. However, you cannot have both a Google Sync and an Outlook Link. You have to choose one or the other.

•    The contacts referral function has been strengthened to make it more useful.

•    You can send a phone message via email and there is better tracking of return Phone Calls.

While the upgrades for each version are incremental, together they make the jump from 2009 to 2012 worthwhile – even leaving out the fact that 2009 will be sunsetted and support will no longer be available.

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.