Using the new Amicus Attorney Mobile App
Have you downloaded the new Amicus Attorney mobile app? In this free training webinar, get an overview of how it can easily capture your outbound emails, phone calls, send reminders, and more.
About Free Training Thursday: Since the start of 2017, we have been holding these free 20 minute trainings hosted by our industry-leading experts and innovators who will teach you about AbacusLaw, Amicus Attorney, ResultsCRM, OfficeTools, Abacus Private Cloud, and more. If you would like to request a topic, please emailwebinars@abacusnext.com.
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Good afternoon everyone and welcome to this AbacusNext Free Training Thursdays webinar. My name is Chris Tobber, and I’m a Software Trainer here at AbacusNext. The title of today’s webinar, Using the Amicus Attorney Mobile App. Before we get started, I just want to cover one quick housekeeping item. Because of the number of people on this webinar, all attendees are muted. If you have any questions during the session, please submit them to me using the question feature in the Go To Webinar panel on the right side of your screen. We will endeavor of course, to answer any of those questions at the end of the webinar; however, if we run out of time or there are remaining questions that we have not addressed, we will respond to these via email. And with that, let’s get started.
Again, the title of today’s webinar, Using the Amicus Attorney Mobile App. Just a quick couple of points before we get started. The mobile app is currently in the final stages of beta, which means it is slated for general release very soon. Unfortunately, I’m not able to give you an exact date; however, when that date is reached, you will or your firm will undoubtedly receive some emails from us indicating that the app is now ready to download in either the respective Apple or Android or Google stores. And of course, they will be functioning on those two platforms. And with the mobile app, you’ll have access to your Amicus files. You’ll be able to make or review notes as well as time entries as well as being able to start communications with your clients.
Here we are in our demo environment, and this is the initial login screen for Amicus Attorney, so you’ll put in your primary email address for your user profile in Amicus Attorney, as well as your Amicus password. So it will be a single login. You don’t have to have a separate password or email for your Amicus Attorney mobile app. Once we log in, we will see the home screen. You can see here we have kind of the typical modules that you would find in Amicus Attorney. Of course, we have our files module as well as the option to create time entries or review our time entries, so similar to the time sheets module in Amicus Attorney. We have a separate area for phone calls as well as for notes. And then we have settings and then the option to sign out.
What we’ll do is we’ll start with the primary or most important module, which is of course, our files module. Clicking on that will bring up our recent files, so all of the files that we recently accessed via the mobile app will be here, or of course, you can search all your files. Let’s go ahead and search for Janet Bailey, and that’ll open up here.
Those of you that are long-time Amicus users will, of course, recognize most of what is on screen here. We have the client as well as matter ID at the top, as well as the file type. The primary client on the file is Janet Bailey in this case, as well as all the other people on the file, Douglas Brackman and R. Kipling. We have the open or start date of the file, the status and if we scroll down, we have the summary.
So, really nice snapshot of the most important areas of the file. Now, because we’re working on a mobile device we will not have access to everything that you would find in the desktop version of Amicus. If you were looking to access this data remotely, be it for example, the documents on a file, or a view of all of the events. So, either your to-dos or your appointments on the file, you would need to either use the desktop application or use Amicus Anywhere.
Go back to our main screen here. Sorry I should, one second, go back to our file here. We also have some additional functionality on the files themselves. On the top right-hand corner of the device, we can click on the plus symbol and there we’ll be prompted to either create a new time entry for the Bailey re Kipling file, so the time entry will be automatically be associated with this file. We’re able to log a new phone call, as well as create a new note.
Let’s go ahead and create a new time entry, so if I click on … oh, my mistake, we’ll have to do that from a different area, just because this is a demo environment. But let’s go ahead and create a new phone call, or log rather a new phone call for Janet Bailey, and we can simply click on or tap, as it were on the icon. Then we have the option to dial either of the two telephone numbers that we have on file for Janet. This is pulling directly from our Amicus database at the office, which means that if anyone modifies the phone number or adds a new phone number for the client, in this case we’d of course have those options immediately.
We can also write a new email to the client. So here we have a client that we’re going to send off to Janet Bailey, click send, and then Amicus will ask us if we wish to do a time entry for this email. So Amicus is actually keeping tabs of how long it takes us to write that email, in this case of course it was a very short email, so perhaps we don’t want to do a time entry for it. Or of course we can opt to do so. Click yes, Amicus again automatically associates this time entry with the file, because it can do so based on context. Puts in our minimum bill capture time, so most of you will undoubtedly have a minimum bill capture time on your preference. Amicus, you can see has rounded up to a tenth of an hour, it’s put in the date, and then of course it’s up to me to specify an activity code if I so wish. But Amicus will automatically put in a description for us, in this case email correspondence with Janet Bailey. So if we are using the billing component of Amicus, when we generate our bill for the client, this time entry will automatically be included with a description as a line item.
Back to our main screen here. If we wish to do an ad hoc time entry, so we don’t want to go into the file itself. We can certainly do a time entry right here. We can review all of our previous time entries as well as edit them. So if we needed to make any changes we could go ahead. There is that time entry that we just did for the email correspondence, but we can go ahead and actually modify these after the fact. We can also do a new time entry. In this case, of course, Amicus does not know what file we’re looking to bill to, so we’re going to have to specify the file based on either our recent files or by searching through all of our files and finding the appropriate file to bill to.
In our phone calls, we can of course review all of our phone calls that we’ve made with the client. Just as a quick FYI, you’ll notice the little gears icon here, kind of the universal symbol for settings. If we click on that, we can actually specify a couple of filters. That way if our call list is kind of a little bit long and unwieldy we can certainly go ahead and filter down to the phone calls that we’re looking for. Then of course, we can review those phone calls, as well as make any changes if needed.
In notes, of course again, those of you that have been using Amicus for some time will know of course that notes can be either associated with a file or a contact or both. The mobile app works in very similar ways. You can see we have a couple of notes here. Again, these are our recent notes which we can, of course, filter if we had a long list of these. In our case we only have the two notes here. If I click on the note, I can review the note or make any changes to the note simply by clicking on the note and here I can add more detail to this note, as well as review all notes simply by utilizing the search. If I need to create a new note, I can certainly do so. But again, rather than basing it on context, I would have to manually associate this note with a file. Amicus isn’t going to be able to decide which file to associate this note with, which is why of course, we always recommend being in the file itself when it comes to either creating a new note, modifying a note, creating a time entry or modifying a time entry, it’s much easier if we do it from the file itself because Amicus will automatically guess by context what file that note should be associated with.
Under settings, we don’t really have that much when it comes to settings. The idea here is simplicity. We have some options around data encryption as well as the frequency of sync intervals. Based on how high or how low you set it, of course, you are going to be utilizing more data on your mobile devices. But you’re in full control over how often Amicus syncs with your database. This synchronization is in real-time, which means that if somebody at the office were to add information to a file, add a note or anything of that nature, it would immediately be available after your mobile device syncs with your database. This is a real-time synchronization.
There of course, we have the account log-in, as well as the option to keep me logged in. So, unless you shut down your mobile device or manually terminate the app on your phone, you will remain logged in. So you don’t have to type in your password every time you open up the app. Then the last feature, of course is the option to sign out, and that will of course, fully sign you out of the application, or the mobile app.
So again, this was just a quick review of the mobile app. Just kind of as an additional pointer, as I said before when you are using the mobile app, as in Amicus Attorney we always do recommend most of your time really ought to be spent in the files module. Because at that point, Amicus can kind of take over and again, based on context it will know which file you should be associating that note, or time entry, or phone call to.
All right, and that wraps up today’s 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.abicusnext.com/webinars.
Before we open up the floor to questions, I’d just like to remind everyone of a major event on the horizon, it’s called Abacus Maximus. It is a user conference in beautiful Las Vegas. It’s happening July 9th through 11th, and you can find more information on our website, abacusmaximus.com, but the user conference is certainly an exciting event. It’s a two day event and it’s chock full of keynote speakers as well as training sessions and breakout sessions. There’s also going to be exhibitor halls where you can find out more information on all of our products as well. Again, that website abacusmaximus.com.
Q&A
With that I will open up the floor to questions, and I do see we have a couple of questions already. Just a reminder, if you do have questions around anything that we’ve discussed in today’s webinar, you can do so by typing in that question into the questions panel in your Go To Webinar panel.
Our first question is around time entries. Are time entries that we make in the Amicus mobile app posted or un-posted? They are un-posted time entries, which means that yourself or someone at the office would still need to post these on the desktop application. That is on purpose, or by design. We didn’t want to make it too, too easy to accidentally create a whole bunch of time entries using the mobile app. Everyone is undoubtedly familiar how easy it is to make typos when they’re on their phones, given the small keyboard and small screen real estate. So yes, those time entries that you make in the mobile app are un-posted and will still need to be posted.
The next question, is calendar access on the Amicus mobile app? Unfortunately at this point, there is no plan to have the calendars accessible via the mobile app. The reason for this is most of our users are already integrated with Office 365 or Office, and you can actually access your Amicus calendar via that app. So currently, as I said, no plan to have that functionality built into the app. But certainly something that I can pass along to our developers.
Question around what versions of Amicus you need to have access to a mobile app? So you do need to be using the latest version of Amicus Attorney, which is called Amicus 20. Otherwise you will not, unfortunately, be able to use the mobile app. If you are using an earlier version of Amicus Attorney, you can always give us a call and we can point you in the right direction on how to upgrade to the newest version. In fact, you may be eligible for a free upgrade, depending on your maintenance plan as well as what version of Amicus you’re currently on. So I certainly do recommend getting in touch, either through Technical Support or through your Account Representative.
To add to that, there is a separate app available already for our Amicus Cloud product. So if you are using Amicus Cloud which is fully web-based, all on your web browser, there already is actually a mobile app that is out of development and freely available for download. So if you go onto either the Apple Store or the Google Store or Play Store, you’re able to search for Amicus Cloud and thereby download the app.
Next question, I’m using Outlook Mobile on my Android device, will Amicus Mobile open that for drafting my email? So those emails are sent through the app, as you would be connected to your exchange server. So you would actually be drafting it within the app. Outlook Mobile would not open automatically.
All right, I think I’ve answered all of the questions that have come through. I’ll leave a couple of more minutes here, or moments here to put in any last minute questions. Of course, if you have questions later on that you wish you had asked, you can always reach out to us. Again, either through Technical Support by calling in, or simply by getting in touch with your Account Representative.
All right, well it doesn’t look like we have any further questions. I’d like to thank you all again for joining us today for our free Training Thursdays webinar. We certainly do hope to see you at a subsequent free Training Thursdays webinar later on down the road. But with that I’d like to wish everyone a wonderful rest of the day and thank you again for joining us.
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