At the annual Gavel & Gown consultant conference in Toronto last week, G&G President Ron Collins announced several important enhancements to their popular Amicus Premium and Amicus Cloud practice management applications. These products clearly will become the “twin pillars” of the company’s product strategy going forward.
The most impressive enhancement to Amicus Premium 2015, released in early January of this year, is a Client Portal feature. This new capability allows firms to grant controlled web access to case information for selected clients. The feature was developed in response to trends in the legal services marketplace indicating that clients want improved access to documents and communications concerning their cases. The portal provides a password-secured facility for clients to access selected files, documents, and notes. Clients may also upload new documents and add notes. Amicus Premium 2015 users have a high degree of control over which items are available for client access through the portal, and the ability to enable the portal feature can be restricted to selected firm members.
Other important new features of Amicus Premium 2015 are the following:
- A redesigned graphical interface that provides a cleaner look while preserving existing functionality
- Addition of access to notes and search features to the Amicus Anywhere mobile access facility
- Exchange E-mail synchronization through a server link to Exchange
- Chronological view of file events
- Firm member roles can be associated with files and precedents
- Notes can be associated with documents
The company appears to be moving toward pricing Amicus Premium products on an annual fee “subscription” basis, as the Client Portal and other desirable new features in Amicus Premium are available only to clients who pay for the annual “maintenance” option. This option also provides software upgrades during the term of the annual subscription, and access to technical support.
Amicus Small Firm, which still has 70,000 users, will continue to be supported for current customers, but is now viewed as a “legacy” product now, and will not receive further development attention from the developers.
Gavel & Gown continues to expand the capabilities of the Amicus Cloud product, with the following new features announced:
- Advanced graphical workflow design tool for precedents
- Integrated document viewer
- Improved search options
- Dropbox and Box document integration
- Automatic addition of contacts from email
- Batch billing
- Support for Ledes electronic billing
- Credit card payment processing
With attractive offerings on both local network and cloud-based platforms, Gavel & Gown appears to be well positioned to address the needs of law firms seeking to improve their case management automation. If the company can motivate legacy application users to migrate to the current generation of products, and if they can effectively support the many sophisticated functions of the newer offerings, Gavel and Gown will strengthen its position in the very competitive legal software marketplace.
Jack Schaller has been active in the field of law office technology since 1989, and has worked with a variety of commercial accounting, legal billing, practice management, and document management software products during his twenty plus years in the software consulting field. During his tenure as a software consultant he has garnered many sales and service awards for his work with legal software products. Jack is a frequent presenter at legal conferences and seminars, and is a regular contributor to TechnoLawyer and other technology publications.
