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Open Source Apps for a Law Office? 38

Posted by Cliff from the what-would-you-recommend dept.
Pandora's Vox asks: "There seems to be lots of FOSS accounting software out there, including one that is almost exactly what I'm looking for. My father just left a large law firm to set up his own shop, and has been having all sorts of adventures with one of the leading legal billing software packages. It's expensive, inflexible, and monolithic. App by app I'm moving him to open source, which brings me to the question (finally!): is there anything comparable out there in FOSS-land? And if not, a) what's the closest thing, and b) would there be any interest in creating / adapting something for the kinds of time-tracking needs that lawyers have? We're talking minute-by-minute time billing, mostly. With some basic accounting tossed in. I'm hoping to do the lawyer thing in a few years myself, so I figure I should start getting the tools I'll be needing together now. Planning ahead, and all. Thanks a bunch!"
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Open Source Apps for a Law Office? More

Open Source Apps for a Law Office?

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  • What no one wants to help out the lawyers? (Score:4, Informative)

    by hubs99 ( 318852 ) on Tuesday September 07, 2004 @06:50PM (#10183225)
    Here is a few that I found at http://www.sf.net/ [sf.net] and I searched for lawyer.

    http://etude.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
    http://www.yoma.com.au/products/cmfpractice [yoma.com.au]

    I hope these help.

    I cannot validate how useful these will be for you since I myself have no idea about what it takes to run a law office or be a laywer but theseshould be a good start for you.
    • Utterly useless, in short. There's nothing out there yet, in part because everyone who makes good law office management software is smart enough to turn a profit by selling it to law offices. Just like we have no equivalent of PeopleSoft, we have nothing like Time Matters for lawyers. These are some of the major application areas that free software hasn't even bothered with.

      Another thing I would like to see is a collection of TeX or LaTeX styles/forms for use in law practice. Nothing there, either, a

  • GnuCash is NOT good! (Score:4, Informative)

    by manual_overide ( 134872 ) <slashdot@duder.net> on Tuesday September 07, 2004 @06:53PM (#10183261) Homepage Journal
    I know a squillion people with suggest gnucash with even thinking about it, just because someone wants something with "accounting" in it. However, gnucash, bastion of free accounting software, has a secret. it sucks! I realize that writing free accounting software in your spare time isn't most people's idea of fun (hence the astounding lack of free accounting software), but for cripes sake, if you are going to do something, at least do it right!

    gnucash is the perfect example of software written without the end user in mind. Compare check writing, for example, in gnucash with any modern accounting software system. The "checks" in gnucash are a random layout of textboxes and comboboxes. Most people expect the layout of a check! The whole gnucash system is unintuitive. I realize that doing every double-entry transaction by hand is the pinnacle of power, but for the love of toast, it's damn trivial to automate most of that, which would also eliminate most mistakes.

    I won't go into how ugly it is, because I know they've been having a developer shortage and have to write a lot of specialized widgets.

    Luckily I write accounting software for a living and can use that software for my needs, but I need a windows box to do that. If gnucash could get it's UI down, it would rock. I would switch to gnucash because it's a pain for me to TS into my windows box to do my bank stuffs.

    As for staying on topic, gnucash won't do time billing like he needs, so it's a bad suggestion to start with.

    BTW, check out http://www.rentmanager.com/ [rentmanager.com] It won't do what he needs either, but it IS what keeps me in waffles and beer.
    • IS it really supposed to be a proper accounting package: I always regarded it as more of a fairly sophisticated personal finance app or a small business accounts package - the only person I know using it is an accoutnant (bot currently working as one though) who is using it for a very straightforward small business and he is quite happy.

  • Not Free... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ari_j ( 90255 ) on Tuesday September 07, 2004 @06:54PM (#10183274)
    I'd love it if there were free equivalents, but there simply aren't. A firm I've worked for used Time Matters [timematters.com] for case and office management (law office groupware, including a mini-IM system for phone messages; the office went from a mess of pink phone call slips to tidy in a week) and Timeslips [timeslips.com] for billing. Time Matters will integrate with Timeslips pretty well, too.

    A friend and I were going to invest the time to develop an open-source law office groupware suite, but never got off the ground. A system built on PostgreSQL with Jabber to get alerts around was what I had in mind, with either a C# GUI frontend or a web-based frontend with some kind of Java applet or ActiveX control for the realtime-pertinent stuff like phone messages.
  • Of professional billing? I do all my billing for my little computer consulting company in a spreadsheet- list the items done in the first column, list the price per hour for that item in the second, number of hours in the third and total in the fourth. Record total of totals in a second sheet for who got billed and when.
    • Lawyers micro-bill their time.

      If you phone them and talk for 2 minutes, they bill you 0.1 hour.

      If they print documents, make photocopies, or fax something related to your file, they bill you for it.

      I doubt anyone wants to diddle with that many spreadsheet entries each and every day.
      • It's not that at all. It's that they don't think it'd be fair to bill you for the time it takes to enter the billing for those activities.
        • The first answer made some sense- and made me want to provide the source code to the VB application I wrote and use for this purpose (Not a terribly unusual interface- pick a project, pick an activity, hit start, hit end when you're done, and at the end of the week generates a report for billing purposes). Only reason it's in VB is because that's what I'm being paid to write in- you could do it in any language you want that can display a user interface and recieve timer events and access a database.

          But it

          • But it doesn't allow you to avoid billing for the accounting related to the project.

            Easy, put a table in your database that gives you the billing rate as a function of the identity of the person doing the work and the type of activity. The total amount billed can then be calculated in SQL. Generating a complete bill is more difficult, but most law firms don't give a complete breakdown of professional services because of the resultilng size of the bill. The only accounting that needs to be done happens wh

  • I dunno if it'll work for legal billing but I'm testing it out for my own technical services time-based billing and it seems okay so far. (YMMV, IANAL, ETC :)

  • Horde (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Zapper ( 68283 )
    Hermes [horde.org] may be the thing.
    "Hermes is a time-tracking application integrated with the Horde Framework."

    The Horde Framework is the glue that all Horde applications [horde.org] have in common.

    There are many applications [horde.org] that run on this frame work. Calendaring, mail, task lists, contact management, and more.

    Will it work for law practice purposes? I don't know, IANAL :-), but it looks good.

  • LaTeX (Score:2)

    by kajoob ( 62237 )
    I don't have any answers, but I will share one thing I have been working on....

    Every court has their own rules for how documents must be submitted (margins, typeface, font size, character spacing) and it can get extremely detailed. A large part of my writing time is getting everything formatted and making sure your citations are right. So upon sharing this with a geek friend, he recommended that I try to create templates for each court for use with LaTeX. I'm a LaTeX n00b so I don't have anything for yo
    • I've been looking for LaTeX templates for court and other legal documents. If you can keep me informed of this, I'd appreciate it greatly. IANALY, but when I earn my IAAL I'd rather not deal with MS or other word processor inconsistencies. I want a nice predictable:

      \documentclass{12b6motion}
      \plaintiff{...}
      ...
      \begin{document}
      ...
      \end{document}

      It shouldn't be too much to ask, but I can't do it all myself right now because I don't even have clue 1 where I'll be taking the bar, much less what that j
      • Well I'm nowhere near completing it, but what I will say is DO NOT use Word. Use Wordperfect. Word is a very capable word processor, but you can't see what is going on behind the scenes re:formatting. Wordperfect's reveal codes helped me tremendously and since you're here on /. I assume you're somewhat proficient with html - it's just like that. If some formatting is screwed up, just look at the reveal codes and tweak it by hand. Since 2 years ago when I made the switch, I've typed all my legal docum
        • Call it "LawTeX". Same pronunciation as LaTeX is the only drawback.

          I think the key is collaboration. One form will not vary vastly from one jurisdiction to another, and oftentimes will only need minor modifications. The geek community can probably help make this even better...

          \documentclass{amicusbrief}
          \jurisdiction{6cir}
          ...

          Then, with the basic templates, it would be easy to add jurisdictions and contribute them back to a central repository. I submit that there is at least one TeXable attorney in

          • You've got it basically right (although the top-level grouping for templates should probably be by jurisdiction to cater for the differences across jurisdiction; they do exist and they are significant enough to cause an effort like this problems), the trick is knowing what general classes of document exist and what basic information needs to be passed through the interface to your templates. If you want to internationalize the effort then bear in mind that the United States is somewhat different procedurall

            • I respectfully dissent. :P

              The reason I grouped by document and then by jurisdiction is that it would make adding a jurisdiction to a document type easier - in essence, for jurisdictions that are procedurally similar enough, I see the jurisdiction as acting like a stylesheet. I can anticipate that logic being turned against me - why not just apply the "6th Circuit" stylesheet to all documents?

              The reason is that having one template per document with a stylesheet selector for jurisdiction seems to fall

              • The reason I grouped by document and then by jurisdiction is that it would make adding a jurisdiction to a document type easier - in essence, for jurisdictions that are procedurally similar enough, I see the jurisdiction as acting like a stylesheet.

                This works for general classes of documents that are similar across all jurisdictions (e.g. originating process) but when you get down to the nitty-gritty, most jurisdictions do at least something differently that requires a new class of docment or a substanti

                • I made the erroneous assumption that you were in the USA. With memos, what I was getting as is that each law firm is essentially its own "jurisdiction" in terms of formatting rules. I think the analogy is appropriate on an informal level.

                  I suppose a directory tree would make more sense than a one-document-with-multiple-ifthen's system, if you want to go international with the idea (which is definitely wise since the only two people interested are in vastly separated nations).

                  As to the typist problem

                  • And what would be wrong with teaching them Emacs. Better than teaching them vi ;p. A lot of the tedious typing of TeX commands could be replaced with macros, and Emacs comes with a fairly nice graphical front-end for X nowadays. I also know of at least one graphical LaTeX editor [lyx.org].

                    At any rate, most clerical staff who work for law firms seem to have to learn at least one specialist system in addition to their general office suite skills, so we're not replacing their learning curve with a cliff here.

                    The real

                    • Even I have trouble getting used to using Emacs. I come from a vi background, but all the same...I don't want to hire a secretary who is more of a Lisp hacker than I am! ;) LyX is good as a word processor, but I don't know how it holds up to custom LaTeX styles. I don't believe it does well at all, though I would hope to be wrong here.

                      I want to find time to check into Debian-Lex, but I don't have high hopes that it implements anything that I couldn't find elsewhere, which means it will fall short and
                    • LyX is good as a word processor, but I don't know how it holds up to custom LaTeX styles. I don't believe it does well at all, though I would hope to be wrong here.

                      It's a pain to set up new classes, LyX needs a class file of its own to go with each document class, but once it's done it's done.

                    • One thing I forgot: I mentioned in other posts that firms seem to have specialist or custom systems to automate common tasks. What I was getting at was that staff already have to learn all sorts of weird commands. At one firm I worked with there were all sorts of strange keyboard macros grafted onto MS Word with VBA that you had to use to, for example, create a new document from the precedents system, or even just to print a document (there was, for example, a dedicated "print letter" function that printed
                    • Perhaps. Since I'm having trouble getting up to speed on Emacs myself, though, I have my doubts. One of my biggest problems is that it craps all over - #blah# and blah~ and so forth dumped wherever it feels like. I want to be the only one putting files anywhere outside of /tmp (my vimrc puts .swp files there, even). That, and there are other issues that slow me down compared to vi, mostly paradigmatic things that I just need to work on. I'm already light years ahead of where I was 3 months ago, just us
        • In most large firms what you're talking about is a Solved Problem. Their precedent systems (usually) have the added advantage of being integrated with the firm's client database so that all you have to say is "Create a claim for file x to file in court y" and you'll have a blank claim with all the basic details (names of parties, etc) filled in. In most cases they use Word templates rather than LaTeX and you'll be forced to work with that, but don't let that hold you back from creating alternatives for the

  • IWBALBNM (I Will Be A Lawyer By Next Monday), and from my own experience you should consider a custom app. Each firm generally has its own systems that might not quite fit the Way as envisaged by the vendor of your choice. Additionally, your requirements aren't very demanding: all you need is a system to track clients, matters, and time-sheet entries, and a way to link those together. This is the job that relational databases were built for.

    Additionally, if you pick an RDBMS that integrates well with whate

    • I can say this is not the way to go. You want to use a standard, well-known accounting package. If you roll-your-own, you have a lot of accouting rules that HAVE to be followed (else the auditors have a field day at your expense). A plus of a standard accounting package is that you might higher someone who already has experience with that package. At work, we're using Solomon IV with FRx for accounting (proprietary, Windows only), but it's well known and we haven't had any problems using it. Setting it

      • Your point is taken, but tracking billable hours != accounting. In addition, lawyers usually (YMMV depending on jurisdiction) have their own set of rules to follow for trust accounting.

        A legal billing system has to be accessible to everybody in the office who works on a particular matter and can work out how much the client needs to pay on the basis of the type of work and the position of the person doing it. What the submitter was asking for, as I see it, was a system where practitioners can simply enter

  • In Debian there is at least one guy who tries to collect information about FOSS for laywers, see the website of debian-lex [debian.org] project. There is also a mailing list [debian.org] available (with public archive). Perhaps it is worthwile to ask there, too.
  • that way crooks would be supporting crooks...
  • I am a sole practitioner in Pennsylvania. For time tracking and billing, I use Quickbooks Pro. I use free or OSS apps wherever I can if a viable tool is available, such as OpenOffice (which my office uses exclusively), Mozilla, Pegasus Mail (non-OSS, but free and more importantly, not Outlook), and the Palm Desktop for scheduling.

    I looked far and wide for an OSS "lawyer" app, but eventually, I gave up and spent a few hundred USD on Quickbooks. For my office, it does everything I need for time tracking, bil

    • Re:A lawyer's advice (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      As a sole practitioner in NYC, I agree with GF's comments, but note that a Mac version of Quickbooks Pro (version 6) is published and works quite nicely on the Mac. You don't need a Windoze box.

      - spinoza

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