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. 

Quick Timer

The Quick Timer can also be accessed from the windows menu. You can open up the quick timer without opening PCLaw, but you still have to log in. To be honest the Quick Timer is quite pointless, and we usual deleting it from the menu. It is the same as the Time Sheet, except harder to use, you can only see one entry at a time and cannot easily jump back and forth between entries.

If you Delay Post in the Quick Timer:

It will show up in the Time Sheets as delayed post

It you have your Time Sheet opened when you delay post, you will have delay post your Time Sheet to see that entry.

Fee Sheet

Fee Sheets are just like the Time Sheet, except there is no place for Hours. There for, the Fee Sheet is perfect for contingency cases and anything with a fixed fee.

Time Sheet is one of the best features of PCLaw. You can use the Timer, to record the exact time of each entry or you can manually override them. When you click ok, the Time Entries are posted to the matter and ledger. You can edit and find your time entries by either going to the Matter Manager and clicking on the Time Tab or going to the Register and clicking on the Time Tab.

Delay Post

You might not be ready to post all your time entries yet. Delay Post, saves the Time Sheet so when you open it again, all the time entries are still there.

Time Sheet Settings

System Settings

· Options –>  System Settings –>  Data Entry will give you options to set the firm wide minimum time entry. You can override this by typing your entry in. It will also give you the option to save time in minutes instead of 10ths of the hour.

· Options –> System Settings –>  Data Entry will also allow you to Hold Charges. If you check this off, the next time you log into pclaw, your will have this at the end of your time sheets:

Work Station Settings

Default to will allow us to choose what Lawyer to automatically always default to. If we uncheck Allow only one timer. We can run multiple time entries in PCLaw. That may be a bad idea.

Uncheck Carry Matter Nickname Forward on Time Sheet is a good policy to set. When you create your next time Entry, the Matter Knick Name will be blank instead of being filled out.

Spell Check

If you check Automatic on OK then when you attempt to Post your time entries, PCLaw will spell check them. I would have this checked for all my users.

Lagniappe

Calendar

Even if you are not using PCLaw for Practice Management, you still want to enable the Calendar. On TimeSheets, at the bottom, you click on Calendar.

Look at all the information you get

· Running Talley of Billable Work with a $ Value for the month

· Running Talley of Non Billable Work

· Days with no Time Highlighted in Red

· Easy way to see all the Time Entries

In the post, there are some links to YouTube that show how easy it is to hack into an iPhone.  Since the post did not suggest what phone was totally secure, I decided to search YouTube to find the un-hackable phone.

No Blackberry (except for the Blackberry, the NSA spent four months making hacker proof for the President.) So there you go, get elected president and you can use your Blackberry.

No Windows Mobile

No Palm Pre, plus read this article: http://www.precentral.net/secure-hand-pre-and-security

What about Desktops?

No Windows XP

No Mac

There are no videos on how to hack a legal pad or typewriter, so these might be the only options for a totally secure firm.

To put matters into perspective, any geek off the street can hack into an XP Machine.  So if you have a desktop or laptop running XP, it is more unsecure then an iPhone or Blackberry.  Download The Ultimate BootDisk, burn it to a CD and you can easily boot to an XP machine and change all the passwords.  I used to have to do this all the time to help clients recover their data.  I guess you have to ask yourself, if you lose your iPhone, is the next person that picks it up going to be able to:

“First off you “jailbreak” the phone by placing it into recovery mode and installing a custom RAM disk to the iPhone.  Jonathan mentions that the tools are only available to law enforcement (nice thought, but not so); but also acknowledges that it is fairly simple to develop your own. Several products like Red Sn0w and Purple Ra1n are freely available to “jailbreak” the phone. You then install a Secure Shell (SSH) client to port the raw disk image onto your computer.”

If you have password protected your phone, the person that finds your iPhone also has to be able to:

“Jonathan has another demo where he replaces the passcode file with one that contains a blank password, effectively removing the unlock code.”

Now if you are attorney Michael Clayton and U-North has a crack team of ex CIA types bugging your law partners phones and killing them,  you probably want to dump what ever mobile device you have and conduct all meetings in a shower with the water going full blast.  For the rest of us, here are some steps to make your iPhone more secure:

1.  Password lock your iPhone.  Settings –> General –> Passcode Lock. 

This will make you type in a 4 digit password every time you want to use your iPhone.  After 10 failed attempts the phone will erase itself.  I know there is a way to hack this, but the average joe six pack that finds your iPhone will probably not know this.  One of the basic rules of security is to put in place obstacles that will make hackers look for an easier target.  This is one of those obstacles.

2. Purchase an app like Lost n Found.  These apps allow you to put some sort of contact information on the wallpaper of your iPhone.  If someone finds your lost iPhone, they will see a contact number.  If you have followed Step 1 and locked your phone, this is all they will see.  I guess it all comes down to your view of people.  Do you believe that most people are good and will attempt to return your phone, or are they NSA level hackers that will go through all your client data and sell it to opposing council and send an ethics complaint to the state bar?  It is a sick world.

3. Sign up for MobileMe so you can locate your phone via a website or remote wipe it if you lose it.  MobileMe will also allow you to send a text message to your lost phone and send out an annoying noise for two minutes so you can find it.  Now, if you lose your device, and the next person that finds it happens to carry around the tool that allows you to yank out the iPhone sim card, this will not work. 

If you follow these three steps, your iphone is going to be more secure then Windows XP, but not as secure as a typewriter. 

Roger Entner, senior vice president for telecommunications research at Nielsen, said the iPhone's "air interface," the electronics in the phone that connect it to the cell towers, had shortcomings that "affect both voice and data." He said that in the eyes of the consumer, "the iPhone has the nimbus of infallibility, ergo, it's AT&T's fault." AT&T does not publicly defend itself because it will not criticize Apple under any circumstances, he said. AT&T and Apple both declined to comment on Mr. Entner's assessments.

I have been on the AT&T network in Louisiana since I got a cell phone.   I have run the Treo 600, 650, 680, 750 on the network.  Until June of this year I was using the AT&T Tilt.  Since then I have been using the iPhone 3GS.  The multiple Treo’s and the Tilt never had the dropped calls and connection issues the iPhone had.  I always had a sneaking suspicion that it might be the iPhone hardware or the software radio.  By having one exclusive carrier, Apple has a huge advantage.  If the iPhone was available on Sprint and Verizon as well, and the coverage sucked, the finger could be pointed directly at Apple.  In Canada, the iPhone is available on the Rogers Network.  I wonder if they have the same issues that the US user has?

PCLaw lets you automatically number Matters by Client or by Firm. 

Automatic Matter Numbering By Client

In the Example above we assigned the Client a Number of 0001 and the Matter a number of 0001-001.   The Next Matter shown below will have a Client ID of 0002 and a Matter ID of 0002-001.  PCLaw increased the Client ID by 1 increment and also increased the Matter ID by 1 increment. 

,

Now what happens if we leave automatic numbering by client on but introduce Alpha Characters instead of just Numeric. 

We will leave the Client ID as 0001 but we will put in BayerCraig as the Matter ID.  The next Client ID is 0002, which is an increase of 1 and the Matter ID is still 0002-001.  As show in the image below, PCLaw completely ignored the previous Matter ID.  Therefore, if you want to use Alpha characters as the Matter ID,  PCLaw will ignore them and replace the next matter id with numeric characters.  This can be problematic when linking to a practice management software like Amicus Attorney, because the Matter ID will be grayed out with a numeric number already in place and you will not have the option to replace it.  To fix this, change PCLaw Automatic Numbering to By Matter.  It will still increase the Client ID while leaving the Matter ID Blank. 

Automatic Numbering by Matter

In the Matter above, we used 09-0001 as the Matter ID and 001 as the Client ID.  The next Matter we create, as seen in the example below, will have the Matter ID of 09-0002, an increase as 1 and the Client ID of 002, an increase of 1.

Now, lets look at the same example, but lets introduce Alpha Characters.  In the example below we will use the Matter ID of 09-0001 but the Client ID of BayCra. 

When we go to create the next Matter,  PCLaw will increase the Matter ID by 1 and will leave the Client ID  blank. 

In our experience, it seems that firms have more success when they set PCLaw to Automatic Numbering by Matter.  For the Client they use Alpha Characters and for the Matter they just use a sequential number.  For 2008,  there first matter would be 08-0001 and at the start of 2009 they would start all over again to 09-0001.

In the Matter Manager, Go to the Billing Tab

Your Options are to Create this one time, Every time you create a bill, or a percent of Fees.  Most Firms use a One Time Amount.

What G/L Account to Use?

G/L Account for Cash:  5010 Client Disb Expense

GL Account for Modified Cash / Accrual: 5210 Client Disb Clearing

Now you could also create your own expense account to track this separately

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. 

Since I usually travel with two laptops and an iphone, now all these devices can connect to the MiFi for internet. I can also put the MiFi near a window in a hotel and then go back to the desk to work without having to worry about getting a good connection. Costs about $100 after rebates and the sprint data plan is $60 a month.  Seems to be much more reliable then AT&T. I am in car heading up to Oxford to the LSU Ole Miss Game and have only lost connection twice.  It is about the size of a deck of cards but much thinner.   This would be great for Clio users.

1.  Views -  I should have been using these for a long time

The outline view is totally amazing.  I am coding an ILIT Template for a client in HotDocs and just by using this view, I fixed some of the outlining issues that I was having.  The draft view is great for viewing a large document as it significantly speeds up the reviewing process.

2. Quick Styles Gallery

Very nice to be able to add certain styles I use over and over again to the Quick Styles Gallery for easy access

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.