Open Source Apps for a Law Office? 38
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!"
Re:Accounting? No Problemo... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Accounting? No Problemo... (Score:2, Informative)
What no one wants to help out the lawyers? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:What no one wants to help out the lawyers? (Score:1, Flamebait)
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)
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.
Re:GnuCash is NOT good! (Score:2)
Not Free... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Why is this any different than any other form (Score:2)
Re:Why is this any different than any other form (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Why is this any different than any other form (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Why is this any different than any other form (Score:2)
But it
Re:Why is this any different than any other form (Score:2)
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
Compiere? (Score:2)
Horde (Score:2, Insightful)
"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.
Re:Horde (Score:1)
-Leigh
LaTeX (Score:2)
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
Re:LaTeX (Score:2)
\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
Re:LaTeX (Score:2)
Re:LaTeX (Score:2)
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...
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
Re:LaTeX (Score:2)
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
Re:LaTeX (Score:2)
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
Re:LaTeX (Score:2)
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
Re:LaTeX (Score:2)
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
Re:LaTeX (Score:2)
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
Re:LaTeX (Score:2)
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
Re:LaTeX (Score:2)
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.
Re:LaTeX (Score:2)
Re:LaTeX (Score:2)
Re:LaTeX (Score:2)
Go custom (Score:2)
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
Re:Go custom (Score:1)
Re:Go custom (Score:2)
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
Someone you could ask, too: debian-lex (Score:2, Insightful)
lawyers should be forced to use M$ (Score:1)
A lawyer's advice (Score:2)
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)
- spinoza