Amicus Attorney Reviews

Pros

Amicus integrates your calendar, contacts, email, phone calls and matters and reminds you to create docket entries for all appointments, emails, calls, documents, etc. The beauty and economic benefit of the software is that it helps you to capture your time and to keep you organized. Over the years, Amicus has added things like Amicus mobile (which allows you to access features from your mobile device or any web browser) and a client portal (which allows you to permit clients to access certain information).
I have always considered the most important element of the software to be the communications module. If you turn on email integration and make notes of all of your calls using the software, you can quickly review what has been happening in a case by turning to the communications module. You won't forget to docket your time for all those communications.

Cons

While many other features have been added, the developers have not made material improvements to the communications module since email integration was added in about 2001. Obvious improvements have been needed since then. For instance, you cannot access scanned or faxed letters from the communications module. These can be added and viewed in the documents module and in a chronology module (added in about 2015), but neither option is not ideal. Flipping through communications should be as easy as flipping the pages of a paper file, but it's not. It is the organizational equivalent of having one file folder with your emails and phone calls, and another file folder with your faxes and letters. You have to flip from one folder to the other to view each. Also, you should be able to filter communications. For instance, you should be able to display only client communications, or only counsel communications, but you can't (even though there is a field for role on file for each contact attached to a file). The chronology module will put everything including all communications and documents (including letters and faxes) in chronological order, but you can't filter the chronology to show only communications (it will also show every document, docket, calendar appointment, etc.).
I have looked at alternative practice management software several times over the years and haven't seen one that I am adequately attracted to want to make what would be a painful change.

Pros

Easy to use, handles large databases, offers a variety of features including date calculator, time management stuff, and document templates that integrate with Word. Allows red letter day, appointments, and more.

Cons

I wish you could highlight fields in the status section. Or make something in bold so that the important stuff jumps out.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to Amicus Attorney

Pros

The ease of use is the best thing about the product.

Cons

The look of the program seems a bit outdated. Also the formatting of the invoices when you print them is a weird.

Pros

Amicus Attorney offers a comprehensive case management solution tailored for legal professionals. Its intuitive interface streamlines tasks, making law practice management significantly more efficient. While the integration features with other software are commendable, there's a slight learning curve for beginners. Nevertheless, Amicus Attorney stands out as a worthy investment for firms seeking to modernize their operations.

Cons

Ways to make some notes stand out would be helpful

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to Amicus Attorney

Pros

The efficiency. The program for billing is easy to operate. The management of client's files is essential to our practice. Being able to add all contacts to a file is a time saver when working with same.

Cons

Nothing I can recall at this moment. I so far have not had a bad experience with this program.

Pros

Cost effect client management and time keeping software.

Cons

I don't like the way that the client trusts reports are printed and the inability to customize the reports. It makes 3-way trust reconciliation difficult.

Pros

It was the product I used from the beginning of my career at a law firm. It has a few quirks but it was a good product. We would have continued to use Amicus Attorney if they did not stop supporting integration with PCLaw.

Cons

It has several quirks but you can work around those once you are more familiar with the program. There are better products out there for less money, however.

Pros

I actually look forward to pulling up the program (it reminds me of the best secretary/paralegal I have ever had). Everything is at hand, and connected to anything I need to do, whatever task is immediately at hand. It is flexible enough to accommodate interruptions in work, and powerful enough to take on every task I need to perform.
When I was practicing full-time, my overhead was 30% while generally in the profession 40% to 60% was considered normal. My billing hours went up dramatically, and my family time increased commensurately.
The tech support has alway been terrific. I had been practicing for several years before the personal computer was introduced, and I am not a computer wiz. When I needed tech support they were always on time and always fast and effective in sorting whatever I needed.
The online tutorials are also terrific - clear and easy to follow; allowed me to use advanced features initially beyond my ability.
This is a great program backed by a solid company with real integrity. I is always a pleasure to do business with them.

Cons

Paying for it, of course. Worth the money, though in increased billing hours and increased time with my family.
Several years ago there was an separate accounting add-on, which I used and did not like at all. I am not sophisticated in accounting principles or software. Tech support was good, but I ended up doing it the old fashioned way (hired someone).

Pros

The old Amicus Small Firm edition was THE BEST database system for small law firms until Abacus bought the Canadian company that created Amicus. The old program was easy to learn and use. All of your data remained your data on your computer. No cloud requirement. It interfaced with e-mail and Time Slips. The pricing was good... everything was really great for the small firm law office. Customer support was the best; nice Canadians answered all of your questions. I really, really miss the Canadian company.

Cons

When Abacus bought the company they eliminated the Small Firm Edition. They tried to force everyone onto their platform. They went to monthly billing for maintenance and they could terminate your data if you failed to remain with their captive service. I refuse to use a "Cloud" based services because of the risk of hacking. In addition, Abacus almost doubled the price of the old Amicus maintenance plan. I will never do business with Abacus.

Pros

I have used this software for over two years at the law firm I work for. Ultimately, the software does everything we need it to do and them some: track case development, client information, time spent, etc. The software served its purpose well and has kept our firm organized and up to speed with all our cases.

Cons

While we have a large database of clients and still depend upon Amicus day-to-day for our older cases, we ultimately made the switch for other case management software a year ago, for one sole reason. Price. While Abacus decided to go the route of so many other similar products and only offer a subscription-based model, this was not something that ultimately suited our needs, and we had to cut ties.

Pros

One stop functionality. Decent customer service in training

Cons

Difficult to use. The firm opted out after a few months

Pros

Amicus always trys to make a product that is easy to use and learn which this product is. I really like the way it brings up the documents to be able to see them once they are attached to the file. It is also easy to put in notes about the document. I review the medical records and put notes on the file.

Your tech people are always helpful and pleasant.

Cons

Unfortunately I have found many glitches with this upgrade that I do not like. One is when you are attaching a new person to the file you get choices from the contact list but there is no way to review the person to see if the address for that person is correct. We have doctors who work out of multiple locations. I asked someone at Amicus and they told me there was no way to do it. Our old Amicus program allowed us to do this.
Another thing was if someone else has the file open I can not cut and paste from the custom pages area. I prepare depo billing while the attorney is preparing the client and if the attorney has the file open I can not cut and paste info from it.
Also because most of us have older eyes we need the resolution made larger on our computers. This distorts the info on the people on the file. You can not see all the phone numbers or the e-mails.
Another thing is there any way to make the program use fax numbers with out the ( ) on the area code number. We use ring central for computer faxing and it takes twice as long to try take the () out and put a hyphen in when copying and pasting into our outlook.

Pros

Amicus has allowed my firm to be at the forefront of our industry by enabling us to be completely paperless and meet the Federal and State efiling requirements. The automated document control features saves time by allowing us to skip the scan, save, move, paste, and name, routine of saving documents to locations where they can be found. Amicus does all those steps automatically, and in addition, has the capability of allowing you to preview documents in the Amicus file without even having to open them!

The customization features allow you to make Amicus look and do the way you want tasks done. You do not have to conform to it, Amicus will conform to you.

The creation of timeslips and billing will shock you in its ability to capture all your time. Reviewing and editing time entries is fast and easy. The publishing them to a bill is seamless and fast. The ability to preview and edit bills is efficient as well. And of course, you can customize your billing templates to make your bills look the way you want.

The Client Portal is another firm saving feature. It allows you to give access to Clients to view documents, events, messages, that you select. I view it as a malpractice insurance feature! All communication is open to the Client. They can view their documents, their appointments, and can message you. It totally eliminates the complaint that, "I can't reach my lawyer." Everything is there for them to see. And again, only what you allow.

Cons

Amicus is a really great product. Little issues such as the Client Portal is a little finicky can be improved. It is a new feature and needs to allow Clients the ability to reset their password and to log on easier.

Pros

Amicus Attorney Premium is a reliable product. Once it's up and running correctly, there are few bugs. It is a highly flexible program chock full of more options than anyone could ever use. I prefer to avoid the cloud, too much risk of privacy issues, so even though an in-house server is old school, I prefer it this way. MS Exchange sync which gets calendars and contacts to the cell phone is excellent since 2015, best it's been since the old days of synching to the Palm Pilot. While I am listing a number of cons below, this software is the center point of our practice.

Cons

Since this software was purchased by Abacus Corp in 2016, the price has gone up 75% --
what a sticker shock! IMHO, the tech support under the new owner is no better or worse.
As for improvements to the product, the new owners seem to be focused only on selling their own add-on products --- the announcements tout how AA Premium now links to Abacus Product XYZ, but AA Premium has received any new features. They promised a cell phone app for remote access as part of the February update to AA 2017 and it still has not been released. They have added links to their add-on extra accounting and law products, but not updated any features of the core Amicus Attorney program. There is still no iPhone or Android app for remote access, one still has to use a browser on the cell phone to reach AmicusAnywhere. The process for writing SQL reports is complex! Also, the move from WordPerfect to Word (a necessary evil in today's world) meant losing the highly flexible document merge abilities of WordPerfect. I've been with AA since 2001; if Abacus doesn't produce new features, however, I will look to move my office to another product that seems more modern even at the risk of going to a web-based product when my two-year contract expires.

Pros

We are able to customize pages and add new fields to collect data. But data is worthless unless you can get it back out in a useable report, which this program cannot do without a degree from M.I.T.
The support is slightly above average, but we were forced to contact them almost daily.

Cons

Too many to list. Program crashes DAILY! Not intuitive, huge learning curve. The quality control in awful and it is a certainty that any version upgrade will break a feature(s) that was repaired in prior versions. We DO NOT rely on the calendar since we found it is not accurate and never synchronizes with Outlook as promised, over, and over, and over. Since being forced into a subscription based model, we have found it is no longer cost effective. We opted to have a developer custom write a program for us with all of the same features provided by Amicus Attorney. Development to distribution and support, we will realize a 90% reduction in annual cost, but have a more robust program and better support.

Pros

Nothing. This product is awful it is why we switched to Clio Manage.

Cons

They lock you into a contract and even when you honor the term of the contract and send in written cancellation they kept charging our card. I had to change credit cards in order to get them to stop and do a charge back for past transactions.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

The calendar, communication center, and file management modules are invaluable and much better than just using Outlook.

Cons

The billing feature is very cumbersome and is not easy to use. The billing templates are terrible and you must have extensive knowledge of Report Builder to modify the templates or to create new ones. I integrated Amicus with Timeslips before I switched to the billing component . Transferring billing information between Amicus and Timeslips was a problem because it would send data both ways every time I ran a sync and I would end up with the same timeslip as often as 10 times.

Pros

I love that everything is in one place, and that it integrates smoothly with our accounting software.

Cons

Right now we are dealing with a lot of glitches. I think its because of the upgrade. We are trying to.smooth some things out. Once its all done, I think it will be a lot better.

Pros

I like the fact that the software integrated with our document management system, Worldox, and that it kept us much more organized.

Cons

I did not enjoy the fact that it had not moved to being web-based. The only "web" option was their sell of cloud-based pc's.

Pros

The database features for entering client data (i.e. name, matters, conflict check) in criminal cases and ability to run the reports we need, as well as the calendar. Also, love being able to print labels from the database.

Cons

Too many features that our firm will never use. We are a small firm and don't need linked forms, exhibits, etc. Maybe Abacus should offer the product with the ability to customize the product with items the firm will actually use. I know of several law firms in the area, including my previous employer that stopped using abacus because of all the new add ons and changes. Everyone really loved the older version.

Pros

We have used Amicus Attorney since we started our practice in 1997.

Cons

There were times when we were doing our billing over the weekend and the software would quit working. We didn't have access to technical support on weekends.

Pros

The best thing about Amicus Attorney is that everything about my practice is in one place: my contacts, my files, my calendar, my time, my emails and my documents - and I can access it all in my office, in my car, or half way around the world, as I did last March while in Australia (and the customer support is awesome!)

Cons

Frankly, there is nothing I am unhappy about with Amicus.

Pros

Calendaring events is easy, which negates the risk of failure to timely file lawsuits, responses to motions and requests for admission, etc. We sleep much better knowing our risk in these areas is so low.

Cons

Had a bit of difficulty getting used to emailing from Amicus rather than Outlook as we had in the past, but it was a low learning curve. Entering time through Amicus also took a bit of getting used to, but once we got used to the process it has gone smoothly.