More on the Latest Amicus Attorney Upgrade

By Gerry Morris

Last month I wrote about information I had just received concerning a new product offering by Amicus Attorney. Amicus Attorney is a widely used law practice management application. The interesting thing about the new product, Small Office Edition, is that it is an upgrade from Amicus’ previous Version V+ rather than from its newer Version 7. I wrote about some of the problems Amicus has experienced with Version 7 and how I have decided to wait until the kinks are worked out before upgrading .from Version V+.

In my office Version V+ has been bulletproof. I have five users and we use most of the features extensively. Because I work mostly on a flat fee basis, I have not utilized the time keeping features to a great extent but we rely heavily on the calendaring, contacts, tasks, document generation, note taking and document management features. However, there were a few features lacking from Version V+ that I thought would have made it more convenient and useful. Most if not all of these were addressed in Version 7 but I didn’t want to risk the upgrade. I did purchase the upgrade to Small Business Edition last month and am happy to report that the upgrade went well with only minor problems. SBE basically amounts to Version V+ Advanced Edition with several features added that I’m sure were often requested. Since I have written some negative things about Amicus Attorney in past columns I thought it only fair that I report my mostly positive experiences with this upgrade. Also, I’ll give you the practical view of the upgraded features with my wholly gratuitous suggestions to Amicus for future enhancements.

First of all, as I said, the upgrade went smoothly. One of the attractive things to me about Amicus Attorney is that the program is relatively simple to install and configure. I do these tasks myself so I want it to stay simple and not take much time. The upgrade of my system from Version V+ Advanced Edition to the new Small Business Edition took about three hours including installing the new workstation software on each user’s computer. The only small glitch was that I had to reinstall the program on one workstation because of some problem with the server recognizing the user’s license. This problem took about 15 minutes to diagnose and solve.

Once the system was up and running one new feature was immediately apparent. There is a new navigation pane to the left of the program windows that makes it easier to go from one module to another. This is a bit easier than the floating task bar of previous versions. Once I started typing notes on a phone call, I discovered the new spell check feature. It pops up with suggestions for misspelled words. Unfortunately, the users in my office including me use a lot of abbreviations in notes and messages. The spell check interpreted the abbreviations as misspelled words and quickly became an annoyance. We unanimously decided to disabled it. I suggest that Amicus change this feature to work like Microsoft Word to flag misspelled words and offer the option of running spell check rather than making it real time interactive.

One of the most useful new features is the improved task management module. One problem with Version V+ and previous versions was that assigning tasks to someone else and tracking progress on the task was extremely cumbersome. If I assigned the task to myself and my associate or paralegal it would show up on the todo list of my calendar along with the ones I assigned to only myself. This made the todo list too long to use efficiently. If I assigned the task only to another person in my office I had to go to the group calendar and view their tasks one day at a time or go to each individual file and view the todos to monitor progress on the assigned tasks. The new task module in the Small Business Edition allows me to filter all assigned tasks in my office by the person to whom they are assigned and view only those I want to view. From the task module I can click on a task and send an email to the team member to whom it is assigned inquiring of the status. This is a big improvement. However, I still suggest that Amicus consider a separate task window view for those tasks assigned by a particular user to others so that only tasks so assigned can be viewed. Outlook has a similar feature that allows tasks to be viewed by assignment.

Amicus Small Firm Edition adds new Outlook email integration functions to those found in Version V+ Advanced Edition. SFE allows electronic signatures to be automatically placed on outgoing emails generated from within Amicus. Heretofore, I had to manually add the signature before sending the email. More robust integration with the email function of Outlook would be a welcomed improvement. I don’t use the communication module of Amicus to manage my email because it doesn’t provide me with enough options. I receive a lot of email that I scan the content of in the preview pane of Outlook and then move to another folder for storage. I can’t do this from within Amicus Version V+ or SME. It is time consuming to use the communications module to view the mail I want to save with a file and use Outlook to move emails to storage folders. I find myself not saving very many of my incoming emails to files. They remain in my Outlook folders and I retrieve them with Google Desktop Search.

Amicus Small Firm Edition adds Outlook synchronization for appointments, tasks and contacts. This feature was previously available only on the Client Server Edition of Amicus Attorney. The main benefit of this feature, in my opinion, is to give users a means to use Blackberrys and Windows devices with Amicus by syncing them with Outlook rather than directly with the Amicus program. The sync feature is a bit tricky to set up because the various fields have to be mapped between the two applications. I synced my Amicus SBE with Outlook and found that new appointments synced fine but preexisting appointments sometimes didn’t. Since I use a Palm device this feature is not currently important to me, so I didn’t spend any time trying to correct the problem, nor did I call Amicus support to get their help. I haven’t seen an outcry about this on the Amicus user forum so I’m going to assume it’s a fixable problem. Otherwise, if I ever decide to permanently turn on the calendar sync feature, I’ll either figure out how to fix it or devise a workaround until all my future appointments have been created after the date I activated the process. I probably will continue to sync my contacts with Outlook so I can use email distribution lists generated by Outlook. Also, when someone emails be their contact information in a vcard attachment, I can save it to Outlook and it will appear in Amicus. I would like to see Amicus provide direct conduits for syncing Windows devices. There is really no compelling reason to worry with Outlook calendar and task integration other than to sync with a non-Palm handheld device.

Another feature added to SFE that has previously been available in the Client Server Edition of V+ is automatic timed backups. I’ve tried to remember to do periodic backups of my data but I don’t always. SFE can be set to do periodic backups as often as necessary.

Duplicate contacts can be combined by individual users of SFE rather than just by the administrator. I find that dispute our best efforts we have duplicated several contacts with each entry assigned to several files. By using the combining feature the two contacts can be merged so that the files with which each copy of the contact was associated retains an entry for that contact. Here I might add that the ability to create a distribution list independent of a file would be nice. There are several workarounds to accomplish this but none I’ve found are as easy to use as the Outlook distribution list feature.

Small Business Edition retains the Secondary Office feature that allows installation of the program on a laptop and transfer of data back and forth by packing a “briefcase” with the data from one for transfer to the other. This is an extremely useful feature that has not yet been incorporated into Version 7.

The drawback of SBE is that it is limited to 10 users. I haven’t yet determined if the database size is limited to around 2 gig as was V+ Advanced Edition but I suspect that it is.. The Client Server Edition of V+ with unlimited user capability has not been upgraded. Larger installation will have to go with Amicus Attorney 7 or stick with Version V+ Client Server Edition if already installed. Amicus’ web site no longer offers any of the V+ versions for sale on line.

It cost me almost $600 to upgrade my five users to SBE. The main reason I upgraded was for the enhanced task management, automatic backups and Outlook integration in case I want to change to a Windows based smartphone. I probably would have spent the money just for the task module and automatic backups.

Amicus V+ and SBE are still very reliable and usable products. They are not as feature rich as Time Matters or even Amicus Version 7, but for a small office like mine, that’s part of the appeal. Amicus does what I want it to do, especially with the latest enhancements. A program can be too complex much like a cell phone with 200 features, 195 of which are never used. I just want Amicus to do well the things I want it to do and nothing else. It is still the most intuitive practice management system on the market as far as I am concerned meaning that learning curve for new users flattens quickly. Hopefully, Version 7 will evolve into as reliable an application as its predecessor. Until it does, I’m sticking with the Small Business Edition.