Custom Pages in Amicus Attorney
Have you ever wanted a designated spot in Amicus Attorney to put important information, such as a federal tax number, marital status or a list of the board of directors? Watch a quick overview of custom pages in Amicus, in this free 20 minute webinar.
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Hello everyone and welcome to this AbacusNext Free Training Thursdays webinar. The title of today’s webinar, Custom Pages in Amicus Attorney. I am Chris Tobber, I’m a product trainer here at AbacusNext. Before we get started, I’d like to cover one quick housekeeping item. Now, because of the number of people on this webinar, all attendees are muted. If you have any questions for me during this session, please submit them to me using the question feature in the GoToWebinar panel on the right side of your screen. If we run out of time or there are any remaining questions that have not been addressed, we will respond to these via email. With that, let’s get started.
Again, the title of today’s webinar, Custom Pages in Amicus Attorney. Just a few points right off the bat. Number one, the primary purpose of custom pages is to offer you the opportunity to capture additional information in designated fields on either files or contacts, so you can actually see a quick snapshot on the right-hand side there where we have a file that has a number of fields that do not come with Amicus Attorney. Rather, they have been created by myself, where I can go ahead and put in such information. For example, registered corporate name, federal tax number, etc.
Custom pages, as well as the fields that they contain, can be leveraged in a number of different ways. This includes document assembly, so you can import all of this information that you’ve captured in these custom pages and inject them into your Word or Word Perfect documents. You can also leverage custom fields in your file intake process, as well as in the client portal. A quick reminder that you must be in Amicus Administrator to create custom pages. However, thereafter anyone can add information to these custom pages and fields.
Here we are today, we’re working in Bobby Donald’s training office. As I said, you do need to be in Amicus Administrator, which fortunately for us, Bobby is. Before we get too involved, let’s go have a look at some existing custom pages that we have and we’ll start in the people module and we’ll open up Janet Bailey. Now, within Janet Bailey’s contact, we have of course the option to put in all of Janet’s contact information. We also have a main note section where we can put in important information that we want everyone to see.
However, those of you that have been using Amicus for some time will know that the main note is kind of an unsorted text box, which means, as I add information to the main note, it can be a little unwieldy. As well, it isn’t a dedicated spot. If I were to, for example, put in Janet’s date of birth, that’s January 21, 1981, that is absolutely fine. However, depending on the volume of notes that you put into the main note, it might be difficult to find this information at a glance. That’s really why we do suggest using custom pages.
You’ll notice over here on the left in the contact we do have the option to click on custom pages. If your firm is not currently using custom pages, custom pages will be grayed out, because no custom pages exist. We will be going through the creation of custom pages during this webinar. Here you can see we have a custom page called a client personal information and within that custom page we have a number of custom fields. The first one, date of birth, is a date field. The next field is client social security number, or social insurance number, which is pre-formatted to basically have these nine characters. You can only put in numbers, you cannot put in letters.
Underneath that, we have a checkbox for client is VIP, that we can toggle on and off. There is a dropdown menu, so you can make custom fields dropdown menus and populate these dropdown menus with options that your team can select. Then underneath that, we have a client memo box that can capture information, either text, or numbers, really, or both. You can go ahead and add as much information as you wish you to these client memo fields.
Here we have, as I said, an example of a custom page on a contact, but as I noted earlier, custom pages can also be leveraged on your files. Let’s go ahead and close out of Janet’s contact and visit our file’s module. We’ll open up Janet’s file, the Bailey re: Kipling file and within the file you also have the option to view custom pages. Again, if your firm is not using custom pages currently, custom pages will actually be grayed out. You won’t be able to click on it until you’ve created your first custom page.
Here you have an example of a custom page on a file. This one, corporate information, really deals with things like registered corporate name, federal tax number. We have a big memo box here to put in the officer’s names, board of directors quorum, name of auditors, and then we have two number fields underneath here as well. Now, you’ll probably notice over here on the left we have corporate information, which is the custom page we’re looking at currently, but we also have the option to toggle to the corporate details, which is its own custom page. Your files, as well as your contacts, can actually have multiple custom pages on them.
Now that we’ve seen custom pages in action, let’s go ahead and create a new custom page. As I mentioned before, you do need to be in Amicus Administrator to create custom pages, but thereafter everyone in your team is going to be able to access those custom pages and put in information. We’re going to start in custom pages and records here in your navigation panel on the left. Again, you do need to be in Amicus Administrator. Here we have the options … Sorry, rather custom page, and record management window. You can see we have open here where we can go ahead and create custom pages for either files or people.
The process is fairly the same regardless of whether you’re creating custom pages for files or people, but we’re going to go with files first and if you expand the files here you’ll notice we have all of our different file types. The one difference between custom pages for files and custom pages for people is that custom pages on files are file type specific, which means your agency files will have their own set of custom pages. Whereas, or your criminal file types will also have their own set of custom pages. Custom pages for people, however, are for all of your people. If you create a custom page for a contact, all of your contacts will have the same custom pages.
In this example, we’re going to use real estate law and here we have my real estate. You’ll notice that each or almost all of my file types have the ability to expand on those. eBill information and eBill information chub are for task-based billing in Amicus Billing. If you are not using Amicus Billing, you will not actually have these options. In fact, we will not be seeing these custom pages in our webinar today and that’s because we’re staying on the attorney side of Amicus Attorney, not the billing side. As I said, you may not actually have these already in. If you are using billing, you should not be surprised if you have custom pages existing already. As I said, those are purely for task-based billing on the billing side of the application.
We’re going to go ahead and under real estate I’m going to select new custom page. I’m going to give my custom page a name. This helps of course differentiate, because you can have multiple custom pages on a file. We’re going to call this sale details. It’s available on our files, right? Or we can put it on our people. It’s available on the real estates and the real estate is in here because I had real estate selected when I opted to create a new custom page. I can leave it as is, or if I wanted this page to be available in multiple different file types, I could go ahead and add these to the list. For real estate, we’re looking at pretty specific information that probably wouldn’t need to be on any other file types, but just for argument sake let’s go ahead and add it to agency as well.
Page area on file really just dictates the amount of real estate that you’re dealing with when it comes to your custom page. Full page, gives you a lot more space. Half page, less space, but it also will enable you to keep the people on the file on screen at all times. I generally prefer half page, but if you’re looking to have a lot of custom fields on your custom page, you may opt to select full page. We’ll click okay. Here we have our custom page designer view. Within the designer view, we have on the left-hand side here, a number of available field types. As we saw before, a custom page is compromised of custom fields. These custom fields can be text boxes, they can be number boxes, they can be dropdown lists, checkboxes, date boxes, etc. Over here on the left, we have a number of different types of fields that we can add to our custom page.
Let’s go ahead and just add a couple of these. We’ll start with a text box and we’ll go ahead and add a check box. I’m just dragging and dropping them onto the view here. A memo box and we’ll go with a dropdown list as well. Now you’ll notice beside each of these custom fields there is a label, which really just is for information-sake, right? Letting your users know what information should be captured in those custom fields. Amicus text number one, or Amicus checkbox number one, or memo number one, right? Are not terribly instructive in terms of what information should be put in these fields. Let’s go ahead and first change the labels.
To change the labels, you simply right-click on either the custom field itself, or its corresponding label and right-click. Select show field attributes and up comes the field attributes window. Now, you don’t really have to worry about any of these different variables here. The only variable that has … Or variables, rather, that are of interest to us are field name and label text. Under label text, you’ll notice that its Amicus text one, which matches what’s on screen currently. As I said, not terribly indicative of what we want to put in there. Let’s go ahead and put in realtor name. Click close and we now have a realtor name.
Now, an additional area that we want to pay attention to is if I right-click on realtor name, which is just the label, and go back to show field attributes, the other fields that we’re interested in here is field name. This is what Amicus will call this field within the application. Typically, what we recommend is having them match realtor name … Oh, sorry. Rather, label text. In this case, realtor name. The reason for that is we want to be absolutely certain when we’re in other areas of the application, for example, document assembly, we don’t want to have to hunt around and try and figure out what Amicus text number two is and remember that’s what Amicus calls that field in the application, we want to easily be able to discern what that field is.
In this case, I’m going to go ahead and put in realtor name to match the label text. Now, Amicus does not like spaces in between field names. You’ll notice as I click away from realtor name, Amicus will give me a warning and say, “Spaces and special characters are not permitted in custom fields.” That’s all right, Amicus has gone ahead and put in an underline in between realtor and name for me. At this point, I can close. Let’s move onto the checkbox. Same idea. We right-click on show field attributes. Again, we’re only primarily concerned with field name, as well as label text.
Go ahead and put that label text in. All right. Although we do recommend, of course, matching, you don’t have to have exact matches between your label text and your fields name. Amicus does not really care all that much. In this case, for field name, we’re just going to call it client VIP. Again, I put a space in between, so Amicus is going to go ahead and put an underline in there for me. “Is this client a VIP client?” You’ll notice is a little bit cut off. That’s just because the bounding box needs to be adjusted, so you can go ahead and adjust your binding box, or bounding box here quite easily simply by dragging it out.
Memo can also be adjusted to give space. We’re going to go ahead and right-click. Purchase address and there we go. Of course, in addition to moving the binding boxes, making the fields bigger or smaller, we can also just move things around, right? Either by using the directional keys on your keyboard or simply dragging and dropping. All right. The last field we’re going to look at is our dropdown menu, which is slightly different from the custom fields that we’ve looked at, be it a memo box, a text box, or a checkbox. The reason being of course is that a dropdown menu has to be populated with options as well. Same as before, we’ll go ahead and right-click. First things first, we’ll take care of the field name as well as the label text.
As I said, we’ve taken care of field name as label text. The one additional area that we’ll want to take care of here is further down the list we have dropdown list items. If I click on the box with the ellipses here, I can go ahead and add options to my dropdown list. We’ll go ahead and put apartments, condo, and attached home, and one more semi-detached. Apologies for the typing here. We can also reorder this list, so if we want semi-detached home to move at the top of the list, followed by detached home, we can do that. Close and done. Let’s go ahead and look at this custom page in action simply by clicking save and close, okay. Let’s go back to our files and within our files, I already have one real estate file, and within my real estate under custom pages we now have our fields.
Now, a couple of things, especially if it’s your first time through building out a custom page, you’ll undoubtedly want to edit your results, which we’ll do in just a moment. Because, for example, realtor name is probably a little bit too short. Here this box, I’m going to want to bump it out a little bit further so it’s a longer box, because if we have somebody with a really long name, right? We might want to have that easily visible. In addition, you’ll notice that there’s kind of a cutoff here for our dropdown menu. That’s actually a … The reason being, is that our label text is overlapping our custom field, so we’re actually going to make some quick edits in a moment, right? To get rid of that little glitch here.
Let’s go back to our custom pages and records, where we were before starting out. Expand the list of files, find real estate. There’s sale details, edit, and we’re back in our design view where we can make any changes that we need. As we said, we’re going to make this field a little bit longer and what we’re going to need to do is move the dropdown menu a little bit to the right. You’ll notice that if I select both the field as well as the label, they overlap. Whereas, our other fields are close but they’re not overlapping with their label. All we need to do is simply move … Simply by using the directional key or just dragging it, move that dropdown list a little to the right, save and close. We’ll return to our file, the blank purchase from Bittle. Return to custom pages.
Now you’ll notice that both realtor name is longer and what kind of property is a dropdown and it is no longer cut off. It’s just something to keep in mind if there are anything cut off, it’s simply because the label box and the field itself are overlapping in the design view. Save and close. Of course, the next person that opens up the blank purchase from Bittle will also be able to navigate to custom pages and find that information very quickly. Rather than having to hunt around, say, in the summary, or the status report, or any of those other areas within Amicus, we have a nice dedicated spot where we can capture information that is important to your firm.
Just a reminder, custom pages are file specific. If I close out of the blank purchase from Bittle, which as you will recall is a real estate file, and go into a litigation file, and go to custom pages. Sale details are not here. We have those two custom pages that we had before, right? And these custom pages are dedicated to our litigation type file types. That wraps up this webinar. Thank you everyone for joining us. We hope that you found this session informative and useful. If you have any questions about this webinar, or need information on future webinars, please visit www.AbacusNext.com/webinars. In addition to these webinars, we do offer a variety of interactive online courses taught by our professional in-house training team. More information is also available on our website.
Before we jump to questions, I just want to highlight a couple of things on the horizon. One is AbacusMaximus and AbacusMaximus is our user conference, which is scheduled for July 9th through 11th of this year. It’s taking place in beautiful Los Angeles … My apologies, Las Vegas. Here you’ll find a number of different keynote addresses, as well as training courses and breakout tracks. These courses can be applied towards CP and CLE credits. There’s also going to be exhibition hall and undoubtedly lots more as well. As I mentioned, you can always book training via our website simply by going to AbacusNext.com. From there, selecting more, schedule training and upgrades, and all of this can be scheduled online for a date and time that is convenient for you simply by choosing the product, selecting training, and then choosing the different training options available.
With that, I’m going to open up the floor to questions. I see a couple have already come through. The first question, “What is the difference between custom pages and custom records?” That’s an excellent question. Return to Amicus Attorney here. Sharp-eyed viewers will undoubtedly have noticed that in addition to custom pages on a file, we also have custom records. Custom records are similar to custom pages, but they’re meant to add an additional functionality. Namely, the ability to capture that same information in a number of records. If I were to go into custom records, and again, if your firm does not have custom records, custom records will be grayed out until you create a custom record. In this case, our files do have a custom record. It’s called court details.
If I select new, I have essentially a self-contained custom page where I can put in information, and these are all custom fields that I’ve set up, and go ahead and click okay. This information is entered in sequentially, which means here we have a list of all of our previous entries, each time capturing the same information, so very similar to a custom page. If you have more questions around that, I certainly do recommend booking some training where we both cover custom pages, as well as custom records in a one hour training session. Excellent question, thank you. Our next question is, “Can we make fields required?” Yes and no. If you simply build out your custom page and have it available on all of your files, there is no way to require your users to put in that information at any time.
However, you are able to leverage custom pages and fields in your file intake process and you can make those fields required, so somebody … Whoever, rather, is opening the file right off the bat will be forced to put in information into those fields. All right. Hopefully, that answered your question. Thank you very much for that. I’ll give everyone just a few more moments to type in any questions. Again, you can submit them to me using using the question feature in your GoToWebinar panel. All right. Well, I don’t see any further questions. I’d like to thank everyone again for joining us today and hopefully you have a wonderful rest of the day.
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