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Amicus Attorney by CARET

Score9.9 out of 10

11 Reviews and Ratings

What is Amicus Attorney by CARET?

Amicus Attorney is a legal practice management platform which focuses on growth and business development, from AbacusNext in San Diego.

Amicus Attorney - great case management, document automation, and calendaring software

Pros

  • Very efficient calendaring with sync to Outlook calendar (option of Exchange or Outlook level synchronization).
  • Case management including contacts, emails, documents, etc. to keep everything in one consolidated place.
  • Document automation including Word merging or HotDocs (third party). Take case data including custom pages and fields and instantly create documents based on templates with ease.

Cons

  • Subscription based only, formerly allowed "ownership" of software with annual maintenance agreement. Software has moved to a monthly subscription where one "leases" the software from the owner, Abacus.
  • Software stability, can occasionally have server-level issues that require cycling of services in order to restore connectivity.
  • Exchange calendar sync does not warn users that sync is not occurring. After updating Active Directory password, password needs updated in Amicus Attorney. Problem being, it does not remind / alert if the synchronization is not occurring.

Return on Investment

  • Large software investment, if not properly configured and utilized this can be a time and money vacuum.
  • If law firm does not have a consistent personality among employees, buy-in may be difficult as it's a significant workflow change for users.
  • Can greatly benefit law firm if used properly and across board for all employees. Uniform data organization for cases and custom pages add to personalizing software for firm.

Alternatives Considered

LexisNexis Time Matters, Clio and Thomson Reuters ProLaw

Other Software Used

LexisNexis Time Matters, Thomson Reuters ProLaw, Clio

Amicus Attorney is great when it works.

Pros

  • It is very helpful with tracking our time and allows us to start a timer when working on a project to keep an accurate log.
  • Since it is web-based, it can be used to log into email and contacts remotely, which I have found extremely helpful on several occasions.
  • The phone messages are also very helpful. Amicus will populate the caller information with the caller's contact info (if stored on our system) and generates an automatic email to the individual for whom the call was intended.

Cons

  • Amicus is pretty buggy, and is "out of order" on a fairly regular basis. It is not uncommon to try to save something -- a time entry, phone call, or calendar entry -- only to be met with a spinning ball. Sometimes we can't access it for a few hours.
  • Another persistent issue is duplication of contacts. We have thousands of contacts in our system, but many of them are the same name, sometimes as many as four times. Amicus allows you to associate a contact with a file, but the duplication issue makes it difficult to keep a contact with all the files with which s/he should be associated. Because you have to disassociate a contact from all its files before deleting it, correcting the problems can be time-consuming and frustrating.

Return on Investment

  • There is no real way to quantify this; we use Amicus every single day to call/email clients and other business contacts, and we use it to keep track of our billable hours. Without it or something like it, our business would not function the way it does.

Other Software Used

WordPerfect Office

Amicus Attorney Review

Pros

  • 3 options of where to run it, on-premise, cloud or their hosted data center
  • Integrations with other products
  • User friendly out of the box

Cons

  • Partner channel doesn't really exist anymore
  • Support of the product is extremely poor
  • License agreement states you can only run it in their data center (not Azure or AWS, really Amicus?)

Return on Investment

  • In years past, Amicus was a great product with very good support
  • The positive impact we get now is revenue from moving our clients to other platforms (away from Amicus)

Alternatives Considered

Actionstep

Other Software Used

Actionstep, Clio, CodeTwo Email Signatures