Amicus Attorney Dashboard Customization

The Dashboard inside Amicus Attorney has a question to ask – will you be its Valentine? The dashboard makes the perfect partner: it organizes your data, improves productivity, updates your calendar, and supports your clients. In other words, it’s the best friend a lawyer can ask for. But any good love story needs a great introduction, so we asked Paul Fihrer, our senior solutions architect, to make the introduction for us. Here’s to a long and happy relationship!

About Free Training Friday: Since the beginning of 2017, we have been holding these free, 30-minute training hosted by our industry-leading experts and innovators who will teach you about AbacusLaw, Amicus Attorney, the Abacus Private Cloud, and everything in between. If you would like to request a topic, please emailwebinars@abacusnext.com.

Video Transcription

Good morning and good afternoon, wherever you are. My name is Allyson and I’m the content manager here at Abacus. Today, we will be showing you some great tips and tricks for the Amicus dashboard, as well as some useful shortcuts so you can become an Amicus pro!

Please let me introduce Paul – he is the senior solutions architect in our Toronto office. He has been presenting about Amicus products for a number of years, and loves to travel and scuba dive. So take it away, Paul!

Thanks, Allyson. Good morning and good afternoon, everybody! I am now sharing my screen and showing you my Amicus dashboard.

When I talk to users, I am always astonished that not everyone knows about the power of the dashboard, or as I call it the dailies. The dailies shows you everything – from the attorney information to billing – as well as all the data you need to run your office smoothly. Basically, it’s a proactive feature where you can find all of the data and information pushed to you in Amicus.

Within the dashboard you can also put some of your favorite things, like important websites or notes.. It can be as basic as the weather – I’m in Toronto now, but let’s say I want to know about the weather where Allyson is, in San Diego, California. Obviously it’s a lot warmer. But I can add my favorite weather website to my dashboard. Other websites – sports, celebrity gossip, legal blogs, you name it you can add it.

Obviously, you can add more firm-pertinent information as well. For example, I have a firm that has specific needs that I have customized my Amicus Attorney to respond to in the form of parameters. This will let me know when work for that client is in progress, or has been completed.

For example, if I open up this case file, I have actually set a parameter where if I go over a certain amount of time – where a full day, half day, any amount of time you need. I can actually set a flag and the program has proactively told me on my dashboard here that I have used those hours. It’s a great tool.

It also has the capabilities to tell me what my to-dos and appointments are as well. One of the nice things about this is if you have integrated Exchange or Office 365, it will also push an agenda to your email. So you will actually get a PDF of all your appointments and your to-dos, which is linked to this dailies here.

The dashboard will also tell you relative to your time entries and your phone calls what time is outstanding so you can proactively track that as well.

Further Customizations

One of the nice things about the dashboard is that I can set up my own customized dashboards. So what I can do is I can set up a dashboard of the sort of quick links.

If you recall, a couple of weeks ago I talked about shortcuts.

In that webinar, I told you that the toolbar shortcut is Ctrl+Shift+S, which will bring up shortcuts. But I can also bring up the search button. So instead of actually picking up my fingers and doing a Ctrl-Shift-S, I can actually set up multiple dashboards or a single dashboard where I’m actually looking at my favorite things.

Let’s pay attention to the outstanding communications. In the dashboard, I can look at all of my communications and open them up. So instead of going to the communications module, I can actually be in the dashboard and see my favorite files. I can see my communications. I can see my clients. I can even see a calendar so I can jump to my calendar, if I wanted to actually jump to the calendar today, I can see exactly what’s going on for today.

So, the dashboard is a quick and easy way for me to see a whole bunch of stuff. Many people ask me “Is there a quick and easy way of doing appointments or to-dos?” When I talk to office managers or assistants to attorneys, one of their tasks is often setting up appointments or to-dos for their attorneys.

I have all that information here, on the dashboard, very quickly and easily. So maybe an important client meeting is from 4:00 to 5:00pm. As you can see, the schedule is already in the calendar and the meeting notification just popped up. It’s that simple.

Bills, Bills, Bills

Let’s move to billing.

So on the billing side, I have the same to-dos. I also have billing reminders. Just like on the attorney side, if you have a billing module, I have that same proactive features where I often talk to, again, the officer manager, the billing manager and either the lead attorney or the primary attorney and they want to know what’s happening in the firm.

Now let’s talk about integrated billing. With this program, you can proactively push information on a daily basis or on an hourly basis or minute-by-minute information to the clients

So instead of generating a report, I can go to a specific client and say, and I always call this ‘the bottom 10%’, I can proactively say, I would like to set thresholds on a specific client. Like, the balance is greater than a specific threshold, or if my work is greater than a certain threshold.

Let’s say those thresholds are met, then when I come to my dailies, it’s going to push information to my dashboard. So instead of having to run a report and go look for that information, it’s proactively pushing that information to me.

I can also see other information, like active files that have not been billed at a minimum period in the threshold that I’ve set. So I can open up that file and see exactly what’s going on there

The dashboard helps you become much more proactive about what you’re doing. Much more conscious about what you’re doing from a practice management perspective, from a billing perspective vs. having to say “Ok, let me go over here. Let me look at what I’m doing.” I can actually again, go in here and actually set those alerts on those files.

Again, you’re not going to set this for every single file. But like I said, the bottom 10%, the bottom 15%, and you’re going to set this based on your thresholds so that the system is going to tell you what’s going on.

Company-wide Dashboard

On top of that, there’s also a dashboard that you can set up for the firm. One caveat I’ll put on all of this: this is permission-based. So not everybody has access to this. You can limit the access to who has access to this. So that I can see from a management perspective, “Were are we from a work in progress? Where are we from an accounts receivable perspective?”

Then I can even narrow the focus. So if I want to know what a ‘Heather’ is actually doing, I can narrow that work or work in progress from a specific individual’s perspective, from an accounts receivable perspective, I can do the same thing. I can look at Heather and say “How is she doing?” From doing work and bringing in revenue. And ‘Tom’ in collection; I can do the same thing

So just a recap: from an attorney’s perspective, I have the ability to proactively remind myself of the day to day activities that are coming in.

On top of that, I can be notified of the to-dos and calendar items sent to me directly as a PDF. So even if I’m at the office, in the morning I can wake up and see exactly what’s going on. If I have Exchange or Office 365 or even Outlook integrated into the system

I can set up some of my favorite websites to link to, so that they’re right there. I can set up my own dashboards so that I can quickly and easily have a consolidated view of the things that I either want to look at or that I want to do. And then on the billing side, I can do the same thing. I can proactively get information pushed to me so that I can be on top of all of my billing information

I think that with that I’m going to wrap it up. I see that we have many, many questions. I’m actually going to send these all to Paul afterwards. Thank you everybody for joining us today. And we hope that you join us for another Free Training Friday.

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