When news broke in August that Abacus Data Systems bought Amicus Attorney, we anticipated change would be coming. Business acquisitions and mergers are common place, this isn’t anything new.
But for many of OUR clients, this news has caused panic and concern, frustration, and has even forced firms to make major decisions in short and even uncomfortable time frames. Here is a summary of the changes as of now. Amicus Small Firm Edition. As of August 5, 2016, you can no longer purchase Amicus Small Firm Edition or Credenza. As of August 5, 2016, existing Small Firm Edition users can no longer add a new license to their existing system. Current firms using Amicus Small Firm Edition will be supported through the end of their maintenance agreements.
Top-rated Amicus Attorney legal practice management software allows you to manage workflow through automation. Simplify your legal practice, learn more today! Take Your Practice to New Heights of Productivity Amicus Attorney is the legal practice management software with cloud mobility in a desktop product.
Whether you are on a 1 year plan or a 3 year plan, you will have access to technical support through the duration of your original agreement with the former Gavel & Gown. Firms using Amicus Small Firm Edition without any maintenance or technical support agreements in place with the former Gavel & Gown Software cannot get support from the vendor. Firms can get support from Affinity. Affinity is thrilled to help, of course – but this option is risky and should be a short term solution for firms. The product has reached its end of life. No more sales, no more development, it has effectively died.
It is time to make a decision about where to go from Small Firm Edition. Amicus Premium Edition / Amicus Premium Edition plus Billing Prior to the acquisition of Amicus by Abacus, support for Amicus Premium Edition 2013 ended (June 30, 2016). It should come as no surprise, then, that Abacus will not support Amicus 2013. They are running an aggressive campaign to get people to upgrade to the most current version, Amicus Premium 2016. By aggressive, we mean free if you upgrade in the next 90 days. Affinity can’t exactly compete with free, but we are offering to upgrade our clients for a much reduced fee. To see if your firm is a fit for the upgrade.
Amicus Premium Billing is no longer being sold to new firms. Existing Amicus Premium firms can add it to Amicus, existing Billing firms can add licenses and get support. Otherwise, no new sales. We knew change was coming, and here is another big one. Amicus Premium Edition will no longer be sold under a “perpetual licensing model.” In the past, you paid $849 (or something close to that) and you OWNED the license.
You could purchase maintenance, or not, but at the end of the day – you owned a license to the software that lived on your server. With the acquisition came a switch to subscription pricing. $77 per user per month, to be exact. So, even if you already BOUGHT the software in a prior year, you can consider that a sunk cost, as you will be switched over to the $77 per month per user model.
When will it switch? A few things can trigger itfirst, when your maintenance or tech support agreement comes up for renewal, you will be converted to subscription pricing.
IF you need to add a new license (even if that is PRIOR to your renewal), you will trigger subscription pricing for all of your licenses. And, if you take them up on their FREE offer to upgrade you from a prior version to Amicus 2016, you will convert to subscription.
Now, we have been told that any balance of your maintenance or technical support agreement will be prorated and credited towards your subscription – but we don’t have the official word on how that will calculated. In any event, if you are talking directly with Abacus (we still want to be your Trusted Advisor and advocate – so please let us help with these conversations), be sure to know when you paid your maintenance, when it expires, and pay attention that you are getting the credit you deserve. The Reaction It’s not hard to image how the change, the speed of the change, and the financial consequences have affected our clients and others using Amicus. The subscription pricing will increase some firm’s costs by 2-300 percent.
We don’t love how things have gone down, but we want to try to bring some calm to the situation. $77/ month / user is more than you have ever paid, but you are getting a seriously powerful program for that amount. Converting to another PMP program out of anger, frustration, or spite is an expensive endeavor, and will likely cost more than the Amicus subscription. Subscription pricing is new to a lot of people, but it isn’t a new concept. It is likely the wave of the future for software, and frankly – does provide firms with the ability to better anticipate and budget software maintenance costs while using the most up to date software. Other Confusing Distractions In addition to emails and letters about end of life, old versions, support, and scary letters about compliance and security, many firms are also asking “What is Abacus Private Cloud?” Abacus Private Cloud is a completely hosted infrastructure – it is not a replacement for Amicus Attorney, it is a replacement for your servers. All of your programs would be migrated to the Abacus Private Cloud, and it is a completely different offering than Amicus Attorney.
Commodore4eva download movies. It isn’t a bad product – or a bad decision to go hosted – we recommend it all the time! Deciding to move your firm to a hosted infrastructure is NOT a decision to be made quickly or lightly, and certainly not because you have a coupon for $1500 off. One last thing. Amicus Cloud is now called Amicus Online. Because, well, that was the only product left that didn’t have some news attached to it! Let's Get Started Today with a plan that's right for your practice.
Let Us Teach You Take advantage of our blog resources, sign up for our law office technology white papers, take a course from Affinity University, Attend all of our Live Events. Hire Us To Do It For You Hire Affinity Consulting Group to make your law office run more efficiently than ever We can deliver the hardware, the software, and the training that is perfect to make your law office more efficient. Work With Us We can give you expert guidance, helping you make smart choices for your law firm. We can help you analyze your current situation and make suggestions that will point you in the right direction.
If you are currently using Amicus Small Firm edition perhaps it is time to think about a change. I am not suggesting you get rid of Amicus! What I am suggesting is a platform change. Gavel & Gown has three practice management offerings – Amicus Small Firm, Amicus Premium and Amicus Cloud. While support for Amicus Small Firm is not going away, it’s not getting much in the way of new features and functions. All of that is going to Amicus Cloud and Amicus Premium.
So first you should decide if the time to move to the cloud is now. The transition from Amicus Small Firm to Amicus Cloud is relatively easy. In addition to the features you know and love you will get billing, exchange integration, much improved precedents and powerful document assembly capability. Plus with Amicus Cloud you never have to worry about backups or upgrades, they are all taken care of in a secure environment.
But not everyone wants to go cloud. For those who prefer to stay on the desktop you should look at Amicus Premium. Amicus Premium offers improved communication internally and externally.
First there’s the client portal. This offers secure document sharing with your clients. If you are currently using Dropbox or a similar service to share you might want to read the license agreement.
Client portal is easy to use and portrays the professional image your firm wants their clients to see. If you do want to keep using Dropbox, Amicus Premium offers integration. Amicus Premium also offers improved integration with Exchange so that your calendar and contacts are always in sync with your devices. There is also an option for automatic synchronization of calendar and contacts with Google.
Granular security insures that everyone can do their job but data is protected where appropriate. You can keep users from seeing data they shouldn’t see or changing data. With AmicusAnywhere (part of Amicus Premium with a maintenance plan) you have access to most of your data from anywhere that you have Internet access. This gives you cloud capabilities while maintaining the desktop environment. You can also easily enter your time from anywhere you have Internet access with AmicusTimeTracker. No more excuse for forgetting the time. But just in case, there’s Time capture to review what you’ve done that has not yet been billed.
Amicus Premium offers unlimited custom fields. Because it is SQL based you can use SQL Reporting Services to create all kinds of reports.
There’s also Amicus Premium Billing for tightly integrated billing and integration with QuickBooks. You’ll be pleased by how comfortable you will be in Amicus Premium. It is the same structure and approach to practice management as the Small Firm Edition, with a similar workflow and interface. There’s also a cleaner, more modern interface available. If you’re thinking it’s time for an upgrade we can help you decide what’s right for you and thenhelp you get there. Note: AmicusAnywhere, TimeTracker and Client Portal require an active maintenance plan.
The message this year is mobility and workflow. We’ll focus on Amicus Premium Edition here but Amicus Small Firm has also received improvements. Do you ever leave your office and then realize you don’t have a document you need. With Amicus Premium Edition 2014 your documents are accessible with Amicus Anywhere. Access your documents anywhere with a web browser. Your documents remain secure at your office but you can get to them.
Alternatively, you can use the new integration with Dropbox to get your documents when you need them. Need to see what you have to do? The new interactive home page helps draw you to important items more quickly. With Amicus Anywhere you can see your calendar and contacts from any browser. However, many user want data synchronized to their mobile device. With Amicus Attorney Premium Edition 2014 you have more choices. In additional to the traditional Outlook link or Google synchronization we now have Direct integration with Exchange.
One note on this new feature – my early testing has shown that, at this time, dashes and other non-numeric characters may be stripped from phone numbers when direct integration with exchange is first turned on. The phone numbers are still there but they don’t look quite as nice. Fixing them is a good exercise for while you are waiting on hold. Is your contacts list long and unmanageable? Are there contacts that you need to keep on the list but really don’t want to see.
The new feature to hide inactive contacts will allow you to clean up your list without worrying about losing conflict checking or history. If you bill for time, or just want to track your productivity, new enhancements in Amicus Attorney can help. You can now see a visual snapshot of your performance with graphical time sheets. If a picture is worth a thousand words this should be very helpful in staying on track. There’s also a new time entry summary to help identify lost billing opportunities and make sure everything is posted. If you are using Amicus Premium Billing you can get paid faster as you can now mass email bills. The bills reach your clients more quickly allowing them to pay you sooner.
To learn about these improvements and others, please contact us at 203-254-7736 or visit us on the web. If you are thinking about implementing a practice management solution or upgrading and product we support, we are here to help. Check out all the software we can help with.
Today Gavel & Gown announced the release of Amicus Attorney 2014. We will provide an article with details on new features in the near feature but here’s an excerpt from the press release: “Amicus Attorney 2014 has just been released. It comes with a host of substantial new capabilities to help lawyers practice law, with a special emphasis on mobility and workflow. Notable is the new capability of accessing all your documents -anywhere – with a web browser. Your documents are secure at your office on your server, but you can get to any of them with an iPad and Amicus! So you will never get stuck without an important document again.
Or if you use Dropbox®, Amicus now has a transparent integration, offering another way to flexibly have access to your documents wherever you are. More mobility has been added with integration at the server level with Microsoft Exchange, meaning that lawyers are always seeing up-to-date, real time information from their Outlook Calendar, Contacts and Tasks, regardless of location or device.
Amicus Cloud Online
The Google® sync has been enhanced to provide the same capabilities for those who use Google apps. The Billing component of Amicus has also been expanded in 2014, and now lets lawyers email multiple bills to clients in a single billing run, so bills get in the hands of clients sooner and lawyers can get paid faster for the work they do. These are just a few of the many powerful features that were added to Amicus Attorney Premium 2014. You can learn more. If you are on a maintenance plan, the new version of Amicus Attorney is included as part of your maintenance subscription. If you have questions about the new version, or about Amicus Attorney, billing or practice management, please contact us at 203-254-7736. Do you use Amicus Attorney?
Have you ever gotten a message that a record is locked? Perhaps you are trying to come back online. Or maybe you are trying to edit a File record.
Whatever the cause, the message can be frustrating. The good news is, it is usually not hard to fix. Whichever version you are using the first step is to get everyone out of Amicus Attorney. Once everyone is out log, have the person who experience the error go back in and see if the record is still locked.
Assuming it is, here’s some simple instructions that will usually solve the problem. If you are running Amicus Attorney Premium edition an administrator should login and go to Office – Firm Settings. Click on Utilities – in the Maintenance Section. – Make a BACKUP. Make sure the backup path is set and click on Backup Now. When the backup is finished – Look at the bottom section and next to Locked Records, click on Unlock All Once it is finished, check if the problem is resolved.
If not, please try to reboot the server. If that doesn’t work you will need to work with technical support or call us for help. If you are running Amicus Attorney Small Firm Edition, open the Amicus Administrator. – Click on Database – Backup to make a backup of your database. When the backup is finished – Click on Users – Recovery Functions – Unlock All Data. – Once it is finished, check if the problem is resolved.
If not, please try to reboot the server or the workstation running the Amicus Administrator. If that doesn’t work you will need to work with technical support or call us for help. By Caren Schwartz (from Solo Professional) Computers are a tool that can help you save time and money. They can also help you waste time and money.
What Are Your Needs? In order for your computer and software to save you both time and money, you need to do three things:. You must first determine what you want and need to accomplish so that you purchase the right computer and software. You need to setup and learn to use your tools. You must use the applications consistently so that you have meaningful information.
Read the full “” article.