Law Office Technology

How to Control which Program Over Writes Addresses

When you setup the Amicus PCLaw link you control which program will overwrite the other one if the information is in both places. (Office -->  Firm  -->  Accounting,  Step 2, Link Preferences) So if Use Amicus is checked as seen in the picture above,  if you change an address in Amicus,  it will change it in PCLaw.  If Use PCLaw is Checked, and you change the address in Amicus,  the address in PCLaw will overwrite it, preventing the change. 

Amicus Premium Edition and Date Light Savings Time

I had an instance today with one of my clients and their Amicus 2010 Premium Edition.  When they would put in appointments in Amicus,  they would not appear until the client exited the program and then re-entered it.  This can be very frustrating.  The solution is to get everyone out of Amicus:

 

• Stop the PE Service and Daily Checks
• Open SQL Studio Manager
• Run this Query:  refreshfirmeventcache
• Execute It
• Start the PE Service and Daily Checks

 

Problem solved. 

How to shut off User Account Control in Windows 7

 

For certain programs like Amicus Attorney Version Vyou have to shut off user account control to install programs.  This has changed from Windows Vista.  Here is how you do it. 

Start –> Control Panel –> User Accounts

 

 

Move it to never notify.  This will effectively shut off User Account Control.  Install the program and then turn it back on. 

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

Now all the groups for your contacts appear 

For this example we will chose Clients.  Click OK

All of our clients name appear in To.  Click Open

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

Change My Contacts to Firm Member(s)

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

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

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

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

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.   

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. 

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. 

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. 

New Screencast: Create Precedent in Amicus Attorney

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

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_

 

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.