TechnoLawyer: Practice Management/Calendars

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Today's issue of TL Serendipity contains these articles:

Neil Squillante, An Important Feature Missing From All Practice Management Software

Michael Caccavo, Review of Time Matters AMP

Harry Steinmetz, PCs Don't Have an Advantage Over Macs Anymore in Law Practice

Courtney Schael, Macs Are Better Than Windows PC in Desktop Search

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Today's issue of TL NewsWire covers an accounting and practice management system that automates client intake, rules-based calendaring, and document creation (see article below). In addition, you'll find links to the previous 11 TL NewsWire features, including our coverage of a corporate messaging service that automatically saves discussions and shared documents to NetDocuments, a Microsoft Word add-in that scores your briefs and offers a spellchecker-like tool which suggests corrections and stylistic improvements, and much more. Don't miss the next issue.

Why is Elon Musk so focused on rocket launches? Because with space travel everything stems from the launch. Now think about your cases. They all start with intake, a process that many practice management systems ignore. But shouldn't intake be a priority?

AbacusLaw … in One Sentence

AbacusNext's AbacusLaw is a popular practice management and legal accounting system with customizable intake tools, court rules calendaring, Outlook integration, and a mobile app.

The Killer Feature

AbacusLaw has an Intake button on its toolbar, which underscores the company's reverence for this aspect of law practice. Click this menu, choose the applicable PALS or Practice Area Legal Solution, and begin entering information about your new matter. AbacusLaw offers PALS for all major practice areas. Each PALS consists of special fields, reports, document templates, and smart intake forms. You can customize a PALS to fit your needs, and create entirely new PALS for niches within your practice.

The intake forms in each PALS are "smart" because they automatically check for duplicate data and link to related information. These forms populate all areas of the software, obviating the need to enter data in multiple locations. Instead of entering all the data yourself, you can have clients, witnesses, and others securely enter information into these forms on your website. You can still take advantage of this automation even if you create a matter the old-fashioned way. Just assign a PALS to the matter and all the associated fields and forms appear for data entry.

Other Notable Features

Rules-based deadline calendaring for litigation matters is another area most practice management systems ignore. By contrast, AbacusLaw includes calendar rules for civil actions in federal courts and most state courts. The calendar rules for California even include specialty courts such as family law. You can set up the applicable rules as part of an intake form or do it later after filing a complaint. The rules calculate all deadlines, and automatically adjust them as continuances and other delays occur.

AbacusLaw also offers automation for transactional practice areas with its built-in document assembly. Choose from dozens of bundled forms and create your own (AbacusNext provides training). After choosing a form, assign it to a matter, fill it out, and generate a Word, WordPerfect, or PDF document for further editing and sharing.

In addition to managing your legal work, AbacusLaw also manages your finances with a full accounting system — general ledger, accounts payable, trust accounting, and of course billing. Every screen in AbacuLaw has a Time Tix button that can start a timer or record a time entry. Reports include all those you would expect, which you can customize. You can also create your own reports.

Because AbacusLaw is matter-centric, you can access all information related to a matter in one place, including calendar events, contacts, documents, and invoices. If you use Outlook, you can also save relevant email to a matter using AbacusLaw's add-in. With the free mobile app, you can access your matters on the go.

"Designed for lawyers, easy to use, and powerful, AbacusLaw helps me manage my practice and do my billing," says Delaware solo practitioner Thomas Shellenberger. "The calendar coordinates well with Outlook and my mobile device."

What Else Should You Know?

Most law firms use AbacusLaw via Abacus Private Cloud, AbacusNext's virtual desktop service. You can host AbacusLaw at your firm if you prefer. Learn more about AbacusLaw.

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So many products, so little time. In each issue of TL NewsWire, you'll learn about five new products for the legal profession. Pressed for time? The newsletter's innovative articles enable lawyers and law office administrators to quickly understand the function of a product, and zero in on its most important features. The TL NewsWire newsletter is free so don't miss the next issue. Please subscribe now.

Today's issue of TL Serendipity contains these articles:

Zack Becker, Review of TeuxDeux (Task Manager)

Robert Boydstun, Review of Trello for Task Management

Debra Bruce, Review of Time Matters v. Zola Suite

Robert Rice, Review of NitroPro

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Today's issue of TL Serendipity contains these articles:

Stephen Silverberg, Review of Zola Suite for Integrated Accounting and Practice Management

Ted Alatsas, Review of Smokeball for Practice Management Plus Cloud Storage

Scott Lawson, Review of Epson WorkForce ES-500W Scanner

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Today's issue of TL NewsWire covers a major practice management update, including a new Android and iOS app that automatically captures time for calls and email (see article below). In addition, you'll find links to the previous 11 TL NewsWire features, including our coverage of a new marketing automation and client intake platform designed for law firms, including tools for email newsletters and electronic signatures, a cloud application for paperless deposition exhibits with tools for focusing the deponent's attention and monitoring their actions, and much more. Don't miss the next issue.

Capturing billable time on the go is significantly more challenging than doing so from the comfort of your office. Only a mobile app connected to your practice management and billing system can bridge this gap — and the more automated the better.

Amicus Attorney … in One Sentence

AbacusNext's Amicus Attorney (Amicus) is a popular practice management and billing system with a new Android and iOS app launching this week that automates time capture.

The Killer Feature

Open the new Amicus mobile app, and you'll see a list of recently-accessed case files. Above this list you can search for a file not listed. Within a file, tap on a client's telephone number to place a call. Amicus hands off the call to the Phone app. Email works the same way. Amicus even creates a subject for the email message and adds a salutation and your signature to save you time.

When you finish the call or send the email message, your phone reverts back to the Amicus mobile app, which shows you the elapsed time in a pop-up and asks if you want to record the details for a time entry. After tapping "Yes" to capture the time, Amicus automatically fills in the client and matter, date, time, and duration of the call or email, and a description. You can make edits if necessary. This time entry syncs back to the Amicus server.

"Practicing law is complicated, but your practice management software doesn't have to be," says Chris Cardinal, Executive VP, Software Development. "Amicus Attorney makes it easy to stay on top of a busy practice, and with the new mobile app your mission critical data is always at your fingertips."

Other Notable Features

Amicus now integrates with Abacus Payment Exchange (APX), enabling you to process ACH and credit card payments. You create an APX account within Amicus. Once approved, you can enter credit cards manually or your clients can access and pay bills directly via the secure Amicus Client Portal. APX charges a flat fee of 3% of each credit card transaction. ACH payments are free and there's no monthly fee for having an APX account.

The Amicus team also focused on making you more productive. The enhanced document management system adds technologies typically found only in dedicated systems. For example, you can "check out" documents to prevent others from working them. Amicus automatically creates a new version of a document when someone make changes, enabling you to revert back to any prior version. An import tool migrates documents from existing locations to Amicus to get you started.

You'll likely create many documents using Precedent Workflows. This tool captures your processes, automatically assigning tasks and making any applicable templates available within the task. Autofill blanks to assemble documents and automatically create a time or fee entry with the ebilling task code required by your client.

If you practice litigation, the recently introduced integration with Abacus Court Rules calculates all deadlines based on a trigger such as the trial date. Coverage includes federal courts and courts in 10 states. You can add these deadlines to the firm calendar and to personal calendars.

What Else Should You Know?

You can run Amicus in your firm or in Abacus Private Cloud, the latter of which frees you from having to maintain a server and prevent security threats. "Amicus gives me the ability to be a great advocate for my clients, and still have a life outside the office," says Peter C. Merani, founder of Law Offices of Peter C. Merani P.C. Learn more about Amicus Attorney.

How to Receive TL NewsWire
So many products, so little time. In each issue of TL NewsWire, you'll learn about five new products for the legal profession. Pressed for time? The newsletter's innovative articles enable lawyers and law office administrators to quickly understand the function of a product, and zero in on its most important features. The TL NewsWire newsletter is free so don't miss the next issue. Please subscribe now.

Today's issue of TL Serendipity contains these articles:

Silvio Nardoni, Review of Dell Inspiron 13 7000

Mark Olberding, Why I'm Fed Up With Task Managers

Bobby Abrams, Review of Time Matters AMP (Why I Subscribe)

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Robin Meadow, Review of National Data Support for Outsourced Scanning

Silvio Nardoni, Review of Power PDF and Soda PDF

Mark Olberding, Review of Xerox WorkCentre 2465 and Epson GT-S50 Scanners

Bill Booth, Review of Amicus Attorney

Robert Rice, Review of Amicus Anywhere

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Neil Squillante, TechnoLawyer eBay Auctions With Free Extras for TechnoLawyer Members

Roy Greenberg, The iPad Pro Paradox: Amazing but Useless

Jon Ladd, Review of Amicus Online

Ben Ballard, Review of Amicus Online

Jordan Gordon, Thoughts on the Time Matters AMP

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Today's issue of TL NewsWire covers all-in-one practice management software with a variety of automation tools to save you time (see article below). In addition, you'll find links to the previous 11 TL NewsWire features, including our coverage of document assembly software that resides within Microsoft Word and offers a simplified way to create templates versus traditional products, practice management software that transforms legal billing from a multi-day process into one that takes minutes, and much more. Don't miss the next issue.

There's a growing divide in the practice management world between products that include everything a law firm needs and those that expect you to add functionality through an ever-increasing array of third-party integrations. One thing's for sure — the latter approach costs more and imposes a complexity tax.

Perfect Practice … in One Sentence

Perfect Practice is all-in-one practice management software with an emphasis on automation and customization that includes case management, billing, accounting, document assembly, internal messaging, shared calendars, and more.

The Killer Feature

All practice management products contain innumerable fields for storing information. In Perfect Practice, you can make most fields a Smart Field, which acts as a trigger for nearly any function you want to automate.

For example, you can configure a Smart Field to retrieve and auto-populate data when you select a client name, generate a form requiring additional information, perform a series of calculations when you enter a property value, etc.

"We implemented a Smart Field to automate tasks that our Intake Team had to run on every new file that we received," says Nicole O'Brien, Director of IT Client Services at Woods Oviatt Gilman. "This allows our users to just click one button and take 15 minutes worth of tasks down to less than one minute."

Smart Fields work via SQL queries. Depending on your firm's needs, you can configure Smart Fields using preset functions that don't require any knowledge of SQL, create your own customized queries if you have SQL expertise, or take advantage of optional consulting services from Perfect Practice.

"The power of Smart Fields is limited only by one's imagination," says Perfect Practice Chairman Monty Helin. "Unlimited Smart Fields can be added in 30 seconds or less."

Smart Fields become even more powerful when combined with DocuTrac, the document assembly component of Perfect Practice that works with Microsoft Word, WordPerfect, and PDF forms. DocuTrac templates consist of questionnaires that generate a document after you enter the required information. Any field in these questionnaires can be a Smart Field to save time and reduce errors.

Other Notable Features

Perfect Practice greets you with a customizable dashboard that shows you whatever you want — your unbilled time, tasks, meetings, etc. Collapse dashboard panels, add, remove, or rearrange them, and drill down to more granular views.

In keeping with its focus on automation and customization, Perfect Practice makes extensive use of Checklists to automate workflows and assign the next task in line to the right person. Each Case has its own dashboard with a tickler so that you can review these activities and who performed them.

Perfect Practice ships with practice-area-specific templates to get you started. An Outlook add-in enables you to file email in the applicable case. You'll find an extensive set of reports in Perfect Practice but if you need a report that doesn't exist you can create it using Quick Reports. HIPAA-compliant security enables you to set password rules, limit access by role or individual user, monitor user activity, and even restore data after an error or tampering.

What Else Should You Know?

Perfect Practice costs $60 per user per month or you can license the software on an annual basis if you prefer. You can install Perfect Practice at your firm or use it on a hosted basis. You use Perfect Practice via the Windows desktop application or your web browser, including a mobile-friendly view on smartphones. Learn more about Perfect Practice.

How to Receive TL NewsWire
So many products, so little time. In each issue of TL NewsWire, you'll learn about five new products for the legal profession. Pressed for time? The newsletter's innovative articles enable lawyers and law office administrators to quickly understand the function of a product, and zero in on its most important features. The TL NewsWire newsletter is free so don't miss the next issue. Please subscribe now.