Law Office Technology

Amicus Attorney, TimeMatters, PCLaw, HotDocs, Worldox, and other software for Law Firms.

How to send Emails to Groups in Amicus Attorney

 

Amicus Attorney makes it very easy to send an email to a specific group of people instead of selecting each one individually.  You just need to go to create a new email.  Change your option from All to Group Names

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Now all the groups for your contacts appear 

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For this example we will chose Clients.  Click OK

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All of our clients name appear in To.  Click Open

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Besides sending group emails to our contacts,  we can also use firm member groups. 

Change My Contacts to Firm Member(s)

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You can now select which firm members the email goes to.  In this example, we will chose the Associates Group

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This is the same  principle as when we send the email to our clients

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This email will go to everyone in our firm in the associates group. 

Posted by Craig Bayer on February 01, 2010 at 02:45 PM in Amicus Attorney | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Use SQL to Change All Mobile Labels to Cell Labels in Amicus Premium Edition

A problem with Amicus Attorney is that it has too many labels for phone numbers

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Having the labels Cell and Mobile ensures that half the firm will use one and the other half will use the other.  This becomes a big problem when setting up the Amicus Outlook Sync.  Outlook has a label for Mobile , but not one for Cell.

The iPhone has a label for Mobile as well, but not one for Cell

The end result is that I get clients complaining to me that they cannot find their customers numbers on their iPhones.  My solution is tell the clients to only use the Mobile Field in Amicus, which I have mapped to the Mobile Field in Outlook, which is mapped to the mobile field in the iPhone.  This is a great solution moving forward, but what about all the legacy contacts with phone numbers in the cell field?

Simple, we run a script in SQL that automatically changes all the Cell Fields to Mobile Fields.   

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As we can see from above,  Cell is labeled 7 and Mobile is labeled 11.  Therefore when we run  the following script:

Use amicus
UPDATE dbo.Phone
SET PhoneLabelID = 11
WHERE PhoneLabelID = 7

All numbers labeled Cell will be changed to Mobile.

This is a lot easier then going into each label and changing all the contacts. 

Posted by Craig Bayer on November 29, 2009 at 01:21 PM in Amicus Attorney, Outlook, PDA, Smartphones | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Issue Posting Time Entries between Amicus Attorney and Amicus Accounting

Client could not post time, every time they tried they got an error telling them that Amicus was not connected to Amicus Accounting.  To fix this issue, I had to contact Gavel and Gown and get them to give me a program that re-register the dlls on the workstation this was happening.  This quickly fixed the problem. 

Posted by Craig Bayer on November 10, 2009 at 03:59 PM in Amicus Accounting, Amicus Attorney | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Advice for using Hosted Exchange

I have been getting a lot of questions about Hosted Exchange recently.  Law Office Technology has been using it for over a year and selling and setting it for client sites for the past 6 months.  If you are going to use hosted exchange, I recommend buying it from a company that does not force you to enter in your email password every time you open up Outlook.  I had a client that purchased hosted exchange that did that, and every time they opened Amicus, it would crash outlook.  Fortunately the hosted exchange that we resell does not ask you for the username or password when you log into outlook.  If you are linking ay product with outlook, whether it be PCLaw, Amicus, TimeMatters, Worldox, ect, you must make sure that you do not have to enter in your password every time. 

Posted by Craig Bayer on September 30, 2009 at 08:41 PM in Amicus Attorney, Cloud Living, Outlook, PCLAW, Software as a Service | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

New Screencast: Create Precedent in Amicus Attorney

http://www.lawot.com/screencast/Create%20Precedant/Amicus%20Precedant%20Resize.htm

Posted by Craig Bayer on August 15, 2009 at 05:02 PM in Amicus Attorney | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Automatically Starting and Stopping the Amicus PE Service

Every once in a while it is a good ideal to start and stop the Amicus PE Service.  Sometimes Amicus Premium will stop working and no one can get in.  At that point, the only fix is to restart the Amicus PE Service.  I find that a lot of firms just restart the entire server which in default restarts the Amicus PE Service as well as all the other services. 

To make this easier, I have created a Visual Basic Script which will stop and then start the Amicus PE Service.  I have labeled it Click to Fix Amicus.vbs and leave it on the client’s server desktop.  BE AWARE!!!  If you run this while Amicus is working, it will kick everyone out of Amicus.  This should only be run when no one can get into Amicus Premium Edition.  This will not work with Small Firm. 

The Code I used is below.  Just paste it into notepad and rename it Click to Fix Amicus.vbs OR you can download it here:  https://www.box.net/shared/5ljijk6k4x

Option Explicit
Dim objWMIService, objItem, objService
Dim colListOfServices, strComputer, strService, intSleep
strComputer = "."
intSleep = 15000

'On Error Resume Next
' NB strService is case sensitive.
strService = " 'Amicus PE Service' "
Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:" _
& "{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!\\" _
& strComputer & "\root\cimv2")
Set colListOfServices = objWMIService.ExecQuery _
("Select * from Win32_Service Where Name ="_
& strService & " ")
For Each objService in colListOfServices
objService.StopService()
WSCript.Sleep intSleep
objService.StartService()
Next
WScript.Quit

 

I used this site to help me create it: http://www.computerperformance.co.uk/vbscript/wmi_services.htm#Example_2_-_Script_to_Stop,_then_Start_a_Windows_Service_

 

Posted by Craig Bayer on August 12, 2009 at 03:59 PM in Amicus Attorney | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Amicus and PCLaw 10 Link issues

PCLaw 10 is out and the good folks at Gavel and Gown have updated 2 possible issues with the link.  This should be a  moot point for Lawot clients, because we always wait 3 months to after a new version comes out, right?

Issue #21166: Upon initialization of the link, some Billing Rate Values for Amicus Timekeepers mapped to PCLaw Lawyers will not synchronize from Amicus to PCLaw. Note: This issue does not occur for Rate Categories that ship by default with PCLaw.

Issue #21167: Upon initialization of the link, Rate Values for any Amicus Activity Codes and Task-Based Billing Task Codes mapped to PCLaw Task Codes will not synchronize from Amicus to PCLaw. This issue also occurs when adding a new Amicus Billing Rate to PCLaw (as a Rate Category) via the link wizard.

Posted by Craig Bayer on August 04, 2009 at 01:58 PM in Amicus Attorney, PCLAW | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

New Practice Management Implementation Sheet

Created this Practice Management Implementation Sheet, that should be could for anyone implementing some practice management software, weather it is TimeMatters, Clio, Practicemaster, Amicus or anything else.

 

https://www.box.net/shared/static/9h06y5vhjc.pdf

Posted by Craig Bayer on August 02, 2009 at 07:19 PM in Amicus Attorney, Legal Software, TimeMatters | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Add Outlook Signature to Amicus Premium

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Go to Communications and go to Actions –> Outlook Email –> Set Outlook Signature

 

This will your outlook signature from Amicus

Posted by Craig Bayer on June 08, 2009 at 05:10 PM in Amicus Attorney, Outlook | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

2nd Annual Louisiana Solo and Small Firm Conference

Many thanks to Adriana Linares who took these pictures of Tom O’Conner and I goofing off in the Amicus Booth.  New Orleans attorney Doug Goff pretended to be interested in Amicus (He has had Amicus for years).  I was lucky to have the wall to projected on, which during the breaks all the exhibitors and I watched march madness.

P1050980 

P1050981

P1050982

Posted by Craig Bayer on March 29, 2009 at 03:26 PM in Amicus Accounting, Amicus Attorney, Legal Software | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

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