Call 800-472-2289, or click here for more information about Amicus Accounting, or request a Free Trial today.

Amicus Attorney 7 - Update 6 - Now Available

Amicus Attorney 7 Release 1 Update 6 provides the latest updates and changes to Amicus Attorney 7, including new features and enhancements.

New features and enhancements include the ability to integrate Amicus Accounting, improved document generation speed, new options for PCLaw and QuickBooks links, more Communications views as well as several fixes.

With this update, Amicus Attorney 7 users can now integrate with Amicus Accounting, our new time, billing and accounting application. Integrating these two products creates a total practice management solution, eliminating the need for double entry and increasing the efficiency of your billing and accounting processes.

Click here for more information about Amicus Attorney 7.

To upgrade to Amicus Attorney 7 contact your Regional Sales Manager at 800-472-2289.

RPost® Registered E-mail®.

Amicus Attorney has partnered with RPost® to offer RPost's Registered E-mail® services to Amicus Attorney customers.

Registered E-mail® provides the sender of an e-mail with legally valid evidence of authorship, content and delivery to any Internet address. Registered E-mail® helps customers reduce risk in e-mail communications and is endorsed by leading law, insurance and public technology organizations.

"Special 2 for 1" Offer for Amicus Customers on their first order of RPost®. Buy a Service Pack of Registered E-mail units and get a second service pack for free! You must purchase directly from Gavel & Gown Software to take advantage of this offer.

For more information, a Free Trial or to Order Online: click here

User Forum

We are happy to announce that we've upgraded our User (Customer) Forum to a new platform. While making the changes, we have also streamlined the categories and provided a much more user friendly and up-to-date interface.

This forum is a peer-support service intended to promote communication and information sharing among customers and consultants. The User (Customer) Forum is available to Amicus Attorney Customers and Certified Consultants only.

If you are not already a member of the forum - join here: www.amicusattorney.com/support/support_user_forum.html

Networking Inside the Office
By Nancy Byerly Jones

Few question the link between smart networking and gaining new clients. I suspect most attorneys would include networking as a non-negotiable "must do" for successful firms.

How many of us, however, have formal strategies for ensuring that networking occurs among our attorneys and staff? If not, then obviously internal networking efforts are not considered a priority objective?

Successful firms recognize the value of providing their attorneys and staff opportunities to network amongst themselves. The best results are found when networking is allowed to occur away from the fast-pace of a typical office day. These events may include: extended lunch hours together with occasional guest speakers; video conferencing between multiple office sites; group community volunteer effort (such as habitat for humanity projects, soup kitchen volunteering or serving as special Olympic volunteers); attending sports or other community events as a group; and retreats.

In my law firm consulting work I repeatedly hear complaints from employees regarding: communication problems with co-workers; disagreements about how things are managed in one of the firm's satellite offices (or the satellite office personnel grumbling about how the home office folks do things); the exhaustion of having to work day after day in a ninety m.p.h. crisis-mode environment; feeling they are unable to take vacation days much less attend CLE courses; and feeling so stressed that their productivity levels suffer, malpractice risks increase and office morale plummets.

These types of complaints and others can be significantly reduced with the right internal networking plan in place. Such activities should range from small networking activities to much larger ones. These plans may include:

• Holding CLE classes at your office for home and branch employees
• Sending employees from different practice areas to training seminars together on topics such as time management, organizational skill-building and stress management, professionalism, and ethics
• Assigning two employees who normally do not work together to join forces in handling a specific project
• Selecting a group of five employees from different practice areas to review certain sections of the firm's policy manual and to come up with a proposal for any changes needed
• Scheduling two to four weekends per year to volunteer as a group for a community project. The entire firm could participate if small enough or larger firms can arrange for attorneys and staff from different practice areas to work as teams. Many offices also invite family members to join them.
• Asking several employees to join forces to present an in-house seminar to other employees. These programs can cover a multitude of topics including recent ethics opinions, new firm policies, etc.
• Schedule fun events for firm members and their families to enjoy together such as ballgames and picnics.
• Create opportunities for employees to have old-fashioned brain-storming sessions preferably during normal working hours.
• Ensure the firm is holding attorney/staff meetings regularly
• Designate a particular morning each week when a continental breakfast will be provided for employees to encourage social intermingling before the busy workday starts.
• Set up a family support network where employees team up to help other employees going through tough times (e.g. help may be offered in the form of childcare, grocery shopping, helping with yard chores, etc.)
• Create a "Services Exchange" program within your firm where employees can list special skills or talents they may have outside of their legal expertise (e.g. mechanical skills, small construction projects, floral arranging, wallpaper hanging or painting, musical entertainment, etc.)
• Consider sponsoring a youth's recreational sports league in your community. Create t-shirts and schedules with the firm's name displayed on them and divide employees up into small groups so that someone from the firm attends most of the games (wearing your firm t-shirts of course!).

One final idea includes networking opportunities for your employees plus the chance to network with attorneys and/or staff from other firms. These focus groups are intentionally small in number (usually no more than 25) so that a manageable and productive interaction and exchange of ideas can occur. They are custom designed to bring attorneys and staff together who work for firms involved in similar practice areas. Their practices are far away from one another geographically, however, that they don't compete within the same legal markets.

Once or twice each year these focus groups meet to exchange information on whatever topics they may choose. This could be anything from sharing their experiences with how they use technology effectively within their offices to personnel issues to marketing successes and failures. Perhaps they bring in outside speakers to earn CLE credits. The benefits of such groups can be multiple. A few of the advantages include:

• networking with attorneys who are potential referral sources for the firm when they need to find local counsel in your area for their clients;
• opportunities for a few of your attorneys and/or staff to share a unique and constructive learning experience together outside of the firm;
• opportunities for them to join forces when sharing information about and ideas from your firm with the other members;
• participants can continue to benefit from networking with one another after such a conference by jointly preparing presentations for leadership and their co-workers regarding what they learned from the focus group conference and how it may be useful to the firm.

There are many ways to encourage networking among your attorneys and staff. What works for one firm may not at yours. Networking options custom designed based on your firm's specific group dynamics and goals are best and well worth the time invested in the planning process. By allowing ample networking opportunities for attorneys and staff you end up with far more productive and loyal employees whose job satisfaction levels remain high. Bottom line -- successful firms understand that networking is far more than an "outside" job.

About the Author: This article was originally published in 2006 in Lawyers USA. Nancy Byerly Jones works with attorneys and legal staff as a management consultant, retreat facilitator, coach and mediator. She is also a practicing attorney, certified mediator and arbitrator. Nancy is a regular contributor to Lawyers USA. For more information, please visit her website at www.nbjconsulting.com, call 828/264-1448 or e-mail: nbj@nbjconsulting.com.

AMICUS ATTORNEY 7
Dynamic Link with Microsoft Office®

Amicus Attorney 7 is dynamically linked to all the applications in Microsoft Office®. You can access all your Amicus information without ever leaving the document you are working on. For example, Word will recognize the names of your Files and People as you type them, allowing you to call up their information without ever leaving your document. You can click on someone's name in a document to insert their address, make an appointment with them or bring up their full contact information.

Save your document to a file in Amicus from within Word® or any other Office application. Do a time entry for working on a document without ever leaving the document. Select any topic in your document and search across Amicus for more information about it. Many of these features are available in WordPerfect® too.

There is also an Amicus toolbar in Office applications that allows you to save documents to Amicus, or search Amicus, directly from within the document. All of this saves time because you don't have to switch back and forth between applications.

AMICUS ACCOUNTING
Integrating Amicus Accounting with Amicus Attorney

Amicus Accounting can be used as a standalone tool or combined with Amicus Attorney to integrate your front and back offices with one all-inclusive practice management solution.

Amicus Accounting was designed specifically for the legal profession and allows you to track transactions by Client and Matter.

It provides complete legal accounting functionality including:

• Trust accounting - generate trust checks, receipts and transfers for regular and interest-bearing accounts
• Time (including hourly or flat-fee time entry, billable and non-billable entries) and Expenses.
• Accounts Receivable and Accounts Payable plus a comprehensive General Ledger with a fully reportable audit trail
• Ability to bill a single client or multiple clients, create pre-bills and A/R reminder statements, as well as reverse bills
• Support for cash, modified cash and accrual accounting
• Financial reporting and Work in Progress (WIP) reporting
• Ability to transfer unbilled time and expenses across clients
• Check writing
• Plus more

Benefits of using Amicus Accounting with Amicus Attorney:

• Robust time, billing, accounting and practice management package
• Single data entry point for File, Time and Expense entries - Post your time in Amicus Attorney and it automatically goes to Amicus Accounting!
• Firm members can easily access their client and billing information from their desktops
• One vendor - one solution, for all your support needs

(*Amicus Accounting is currently not available in Canada)

Question:
How do I license Amicus Attorney 7?

Answer:
Unlike previous versions of the program, Amicus Attorney 7 does not require you to license solely from the Amicus server computer. In fact, any user with Administrative rights can log into any workstation where Amicus Attorney is installed, and license from there.

How to License:

1. Log into Amicus Attorney 7 as an Administrator (any user can be designated as an Administrator).
   
2. Open the Office Module
3. Select User Management from the Control Panel at left.
   
   
   
4. Click Request License(s) button at bottom right of window that appears. This will generate a license request document that must be sent to Licenseing@amicusattorney.com. If possible this should be done from a computer that has Microsoft Outlook installed to facilitate sending of the message.
   
   (License may take up to 2 business days to be processed)
   
   Once processed, a new license file will be returned to you via e-mail. Follow the accompanying instructions to enter the license code.
   
   
   

Licensing individual Firm Members

• Now you can license individual users of Amicus Attorney 7.
  Once your license code has been applied, you will be able to select which Firm Members you would like licensed. The User Management window now features an additional Licensed column where you can check off which Firm Members are licensed.
  The user management window also displays how many licenses have been purchased by the firm.