Opiniones de Amicus Attorney

this program is excellent for keeping track of cases, clients, court dates, to-do notices, escrow accounts & billing.

When closing elements of the program, one has to be careful not to inadvertently close the entire program on the user's computer. There is no warning that you are about to close the entire program on your computer. While the escrow (trust) account feature is good, it has limitations. It cannot interface with the bank, so auditing the account is a manual procedure. Also, the escrow function is limited to a case by case report. The program does not give the user an overview of the entire status of all escrows )in a separate report.

TIME & MATTER MANAGEMENT: Timers and time entries are pretty simple. Knowing all people involved in a matter all in one place; engineers, judges, etc. is a great feature. Adding emails to a file is a good idea but time-consuming. Having all the data for a client in one place is good.

BILLING: I like that the Billing and Attorney sides are separate. Billing and accepting payments works quite well. Amicus can do split billing which is important to us. The interface with Quickbooks is quirky but after 1.7 years of working with it we've figured out most of the issues and found workarounds. Reports can be downloaded to Excel which is vital to my managing the firm.

CONS:
The end-user learning curve is huge and not intuitive which has led to a lot of attorneys entering time and not using Amicus for anything else. Text onscreen is exceptionally small, and for most users, problematic. The interface is not intuitive and takes a lot of trial and error to find the best ways to find what you want or report on the issue. We were lead to believe that the document management interface would work for us, but upon trial found out it would not work with our setup. So we're still dealing with Microsoft Explorer for managing documents, which is problematic. Overall our approval level with Amicus is likely only around 50%. There are so many features that we liked in the concept that has been difficult to get attorneys to do because the interface is not user-friendly.

TIME & MATTER MANAGEMENT: Data for our conflict database did not translate well from our previous system so conflicts checks take too long. Adding emails or files to the matter is very clunky. Ticklers are quirky and hard to work in Outlook. Tickler Reports are too limited events with no date range, or date range but no file selection. Running tickers for only one matter is impossible. Need more filters.
BILLING: Reports downloaded to Excel are impossible to use due to all the merged fields and lack of use of tables. We have to download Reports to CSV and spend time figuring out what the column headers actually are. I use the selection tools to view onscreen matters or time entries by

Works well for what I need it to do. I can keep track of time and clients, it sends out reminders and helps me stay on top of what I am doing. Even though the program works, I am not happy with the service.

Company sold me on the 2016 small firm update, then cancelled the software a few months later and went to a cloud format only. I don't need that format and the company has stopped supporting the 2016 version. I have a problem I can't fix and they won't back up their product. They knew they were going to the cloud only, yet still sold me on an update I would not have support for. Now I am stuck with a program that I need assistance on, and no one will help. I feel abandoned by them. I bought the program because they worked with Apple, then they stopped doing that and forced me to buy a Parallels program just to keep using Amicus. If I had to do it all over again, I would not purchase Amicus. The support is terrible.

Has the capacity to store and sort a ton of information. I like the calendaring, file integration, and ability to keep track of contacts. The ability to save emails to a particular file instead of trying to retrieve them from Outlook is very helpful.

It crashes too often. It was a bear to set up for a one-attorney shop. It's inconsistent in its own protocols. For example, it says we're supposed to assign one Client ID per client and use that ID for each file, but half the time, it says we can't use the client ID because it's already in use. It doesn't recognize client's email addresses on receipt, and when I go to link an email to a contact already on the list, it gives me a message saying that there are duplicate entries for the email. The same message says to use some sort of command to clean up duplicates, but for the life of me, I can't find where the function exists. The lack of any paper manual is very frustrating.

Opening files in Amicus Attorney and keeping notes in a center location was a great feature to keep the files organized.

Amicus Attorney often found trouble transferring information to QuickBooks whether it was due to updates with Amicus or with QuickBooks. I also found the support often took days to return calls to help with an issue or sometime would not call back.

The software is highly organized. I know where all my main functions/features are and they're fairly easy to use and understand.

We don't use most of the higher functions of Amicus because they are so difficult to learn to work with and it costs a small fortune for training, not to mention the time it takes. We don't use documents or communications for this reason. Billing can be a pain if I want to break something down a different way. Reports are not easy to generate and don't seem to have the functionality I would like.

Have small 1-2 attorney firm, used Premium. Lots of features, many of which I haven't used due to learning curve and pace of daily practice. As I have integrated QuickBooks and Outlook I have found it more useful, but doing this was tricky and frustrating. It was recommended by WSBA Law Practice Management staff over using Outlook alone for case management. The phone notes feature has proved very helpful and wasn't really available in Outlook when I first invested in the software. Technical support, once paid for the subscription, has been very good and responsive. I like that they take remote control and help quickly to solve problems.

I have reconsidered whether to keep Amicus many times; but once invested in such software, there is a high price to switch products. It has improved over the years. I don't use the Tasks feature the way it is designed, because it involves too much data input. I have modified a system that seems to work well enough and involves less data input but still tracks upcoming deadlines and target dates.

If you need technical support, there is none. As far as I can tell there are 2 people working at tech support and you can expect to wait months for an answer that doesn't solve the problem. we have had the same recurring problems with dropped emails for years and there is no solution in sight., we will be switching.

There is not way to distinguish calendar events like continued or settled items that I want to keep on the calendar but maybe change color or be greyed out. There is no way to alert team members that a file has exhausted their retainer so work is frequently done by a conscientious worker without realizing that we won't get paid for it.

The layout is attractive, and it has a lot of features and reports that are useful. It integrates fairly well with Quickbooks.

This was a good product before Abacus purchased it. Now they don't support it and it has terrible glitches they don't know how to fix that make it nearly unusable. Our billing software requires INDIVIDUAL printing for each bill now - hundreds of clients each month - taking up dozens of hours of staffing time to get bills out. Each month. They have offered no solutions. There are other issues, but that is the worst one. Also determining current balances is challenging, and the program messaging function is poor.

I like that I can have all of my Clients and cases easily accessible.

The mobile app leaves a LOT to be desired. After a couple of years of use, I still can't see a calendar on my app or transfer my calendar to Outlook. I have also asked that the new company develop the ability to print a "NEW MATTER REPORT" like the old Amicus had. I received an email quite some time ago indicating that they had accepted my suggestion but this program still does not have that ability to my knowledge.

I like where you can see the expenses you have in a case. Also, you can charge a credit card payment to a client in Amicus.

It does not allow you to have some features that other leading legal software has right now on the market.

Integration with all of my practice needs including Outlook and Quickbooks and especially linking contacts and calendar data to my iPhone. Amicus allows me to track all of my activities, bill more of my time, follow the progress of cases and easily communicate via email and snail mail.

The online help function is somewhat cumbersome but is useful.

I like the overall management capabilities and ability to keep track of time and bill. Although I have not used it yet, I like the client portal idea and ability to accept payments.

The email system is inconsistent. Sometimes, cutting and pasting into a message will disrupt the formatting of the email and often times, different fonts are used in the final message even though the message you are writing - those inconsistencies do not show up. Oftentimes, the server is slow and cannot send the message or loses the message and you have to start all over - this is the worst. I often have to reload Amicus because it gets "stuck" on a page and cannot move forward. I wish the phone app was more functional.

It keeps a large database where each client's information, files, and communications are accessible.

Not very user friendly. Lots of blank space and small text -- why not make the text larger?? Many simple user-friendly features could be added, but they seem to always be playing catch-up with other problems they are not able to fix. Updates containing fixes are often promised, but not forthcoming. They would rather sell the next "Upgrade" product than fix the current release. The Quality Control department has no incentive to fix things. Customer Service is really awful. A government bureaucracy might be the only customer service department that is worse than Amicus.

The software is very easy to learn and use. It helps arrange all of our cases in an organized manner. Calendar features provide our office with a day to day schedule. The software allows the office staff to leave case notes and memos without the use of extra paper.

The required updates. It has been difficult trying to updated abacus changes through our server. Once the changes have been made, it appears that software enables our staff to keep track of client files efficiently.