Amicus Attorney

Carol Deadman, of Colfax, started working with computers--for her, it was mainframes — over twenty years ago. She gravitated toward law practice applications of computing; and five years ago, as an independent consultant, she obtained Timeslips certification. On October 21, 1998, over lunch at the Delta King, Deadman demonstrated Amicus Attorney, Version III, for Windows or Macintosh, market leader Gavel & Gown's latest entry in the case management software wars.

Amicus Attorney gives you instant access to people, dates, time records, and cases. Naturally, it maintains a file on each case. It pops up your calendar (with the expected Day-Timer-like appointment pages and to-do list). It gives you a Rolodex-like contacts database. It pops up time slips to enter your billable minutes.

Some Amicus Attorney versions are designed for work groups. (They cost more than a standalone version.) All versions can dial your outgoing calls, but some give you refinements. One such refinement, for incoming calls, is using "Caller ID" data to pop up your contact information on the caller and an associated matter file.

When you launch Amicus Attorney, the screen that comes up is called an "office." (Other programs might call it a "desktop.") All versions of Amicus Attorney have offices designed for attorneys; some give you "Assistant Offices" for your clerical assistants. Each office has a group of icons that launch the program's main functions.

Deadman started with "Files," symbolized by a file cabinet icon. This brings up a file- drawer screen showing a set of dividers labeled, for example, "Active," "Closed," "Billable" and "Non-billable." Clicking on a divider's label tab brings that divider to the front; on it are the names of the files it contains. Each file corresponds to, for example, a case or matter. A matter file could contain, for example, the type of case (personal injury, real estate); a list of the clients; opening and closing dates; and a list of the attorneys assigned.

Unlike a physical file cabinet, in the Amicus Attorney file drawer a particular file can be found behind more than one divider. You could find an active, billable matter by clicking on the "Active" or the "Billable" divider tab. There is a divider labeled "All"; clicking on it gets you a list of every file in the system.

Another icon, looking like a Rolodex and called "Contacts," leads to the contacts index. Choosing a person's name in the contacts index leads you to a contact edit screen, containing the kinds of information you might expect to see on a business (or Rolodex) card for that person.

Clicking the "Calendar" icon leads to your calendar book. You can choose to have it open to the current (or any other) year, month, week or day. You can see your appointments in the weekly and daily views. Amicus Attorney can run Compulaw Docket within a window to generate calendar entries automatically according to court-specific rule sets.

Clicking "Time Sheets" brings up a list of your time slips. From that window, you can pull up other windows to generate, examine or post time slips for yourself. One Amicus Attorney user at the SLUG meeting spoke of the program reading Timeslips data directly.

Besides these capabilities, Version III does document generation. For document work, Amicus Attorney integrates with WordPerfect, Word, and HotDocs.

Deadman moderated a lively discussion among the Amicus Attorney users at the meeting. Some use earlier versions from Gavel & Gown, and some use the Corel Amicus Attorney versions packaged with the Corel WordPerfect legal suites. Users' comments indicate that similar version numbers from the two vendors do not indicate that the features are the same.

One attendee asked whether a crash during an Amicus Attorney session will corrupt the law firm's data. Deadman answered that in her experience, lockups mean losing only the changes, not the previous data.

Some attendees told of problems they had with transferring data between versions, especially between Corel and Gavel & Gown incarnations of the product. Their experiences suggest that users make sure their existing Amicus Attorney data are reliably backed up, and exported to a generic format, before installing an Amicus Attorney software upgrade.

Reference

Amicus Attorney, Version III, $299 and up, Gavel & Gown Software, Inc., 184 Pearl St., Toronto, Ontario M5H1L5, (800) 472-2289, fax (416) 977-2563, www.amicus.ca

Corel WordPerfect Legal Suites, Corel Corporation, 1600 Carling Ave., Ottawa, Ontario K1Z 847, (613) 728-0826, fax (613) 761-9176, www.corel.com