Open Source Apps for a Law Office?

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!"

Comments

Accounting? No Problemo...

[Lord Prox]

Take a look at GNUCash I don't think it has any Law Office specific talents, but it is totally decent.

Bad part... No Win32 port that I know of...

Re:Accounting? No Problemo...

[SpaceLifeForm]

But will it handle more than 24 billable hours per day per staff-person?

Re:Accounting? No Problemo...

[ari_j]

Why informative? The suggestion here is not only poorly made, but rejected in the original submission.

What no one wants to help out the lawyers?

[hubs99]

Here is a few that I found at http://www.sf.net/ and I searched for lawyer.

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

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?

[ari_j]

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, aside from a pleading template or two from a German comp.text.tex user.

GnuCash is NOT good!

[manual_overide]

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/ It won't do what he needs either, but it IS what keeps me in waffles and beer.

Re:GnuCash is NOT good!

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget gnucash's inability to print multiple checks to a sheet. Even given that I could tolerate the interface, that's pretty much a showstopper.

~~~

Re:GnuCash is NOT good!

[the_womble]

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...

[ari_j]

I'd love it if there were free equivalents, but there simply aren't. A firm I've worked for used Time Matters 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 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.

Why is this any different than any other form

[Marxist Hacker 42]

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.

Re:Why is this any different than any other form

[Clover_Kicker]

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.

Re:Why is this any different than any other form

[ari_j]

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.

Re:Why is this any different than any other form

[Marxist Hacker 42]

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 doesn't allow you to avoid billing for the accounting related to the project. Not sure why you'd want to avoid that.

Re:Why is this any different than any other form

[cthugha]

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 when money changes hands.

Compiere?

[itwerx]

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

[Zapper]

Hermes 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 have in common.

There are many applications 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

[Pandora's Vox]

Now that looks awesome. Especially seeing as I already have Horde on my server :-)

-Leigh

LaTeX

[kajoob]

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 you there, but so far it looks promising... Imagine only having to reference a case and you can refer to it throughout and the the document updates the cites on the fly??? Hope that helps!

Re:LaTeX

[ari_j]

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 jurisdiction's rules for document formatting are. :)

Re:LaTeX

[kajoob]

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 documents in Wordperfect and I'm a little saner for it. If I ever do get the LaTeX/Legal (LeGaL-TeX?) I will certainly post the templates somewhere, but I will need help from the Geek/Law community because I likely only create templates for 3rd District and Delaware/Pennsylvania/New Jersey State courts.

Re:LaTeX

[ari_j]

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 each Circuit who could contribute templates for that Circuit, and probably the same applies to many Districts and states.

I'm more likely to use OpenOffice.org than WordPerfect. I've never been a WordPerfect person. Indeed, I grew up on XyWrite. I'm still more likely to tweak TeX into a per-use tool than I am to use WordPerfect. Word doesn't bother me as much but it's still rough. One of the roughest things I've ever done was convert a law firm's forms from XyWrite to Word.

Re:LaTeX

[cthugha]

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 profession at large to try.

Re:LaTeX

[cthugha]

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 procedurally from other common law jurisdictions.

You should also consider the move towards electronic filing of documents, and have a look at what's being done about mandated filing formats in jurisdictions near you.

Re:LaTeX

[ari_j]

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 more in line with LaTeX practices. "a4", "letter", "12pt", and so on are options for the "article" class, not vice versa.

I think this decision turns on whether the documents within a jurisdiction are more similar to each other than the documents of any particular purpose are between jurisdictions. It's far too early for me to determine that off the top of my head - let me know your thoughts.

One more thought - the documents a particular person will use will change style based on more than jurisdiction, and jurisdictions overlap within one man's office. For example, a "memo" would have to be customized per firm in the larger firms, and for a given case, it's more likely that you'll change the jurisdiction setting for a particular document than change the document type - meaning that jurisdiction is a finer-grained control level than document type. (For example, your prayer for relief will never become a retainer letter, but it may be filed in more than one court.)

Of course, most of this is of a truly cosmetic nature - but why sacrifice vanity unncecessarily? :) The most important thing is simply using TeX in your practice. TeX creates more attractive, more readable output than any word processer I've seen. Of course, you're not likely to have a typist capable of doing it all in TeX, but that could be solved in a number of ways. Then again, I'm also unlikely to find a typist better than myself... ;)

Re:LaTeX

[cthugha]

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 substantial alteration to an existing class. As an example, your example of the amicus brief doesn't even exist in my jurisdiction (Queensland, Australia) despite the fact that the United States and Australia are both common law countries. Even in Australia there are differences: class actions only exist in the state of Victoria and in the Federal Court, and the process for appealing to the High Court is different from the process for appealing to the State or Federal Courts of Appeal, which is diffeent again from appealing to the District (or County) Court from decisions of the Magistrates Court. There are better examples, the intricacies of procedure are myriad and subtle, they're just the ones I could think of off the top of my head.

For example, a "memo" would have to be customized per firm in the larger firms, and for a given case, it's more likely that you'll change the jurisdiction setting for a particular document than change the document type - meaning that jurisdiction is a finer-grained control level than document type.

Internal documents don't usually care about jurisdiction, a memo is a memo regardless of what kind of matter it concerns. The only way it would matter is if it dealt with a highly specialized area (e.g. family law) with its own court, jurisdiction, and process, in which case that court usually has its own specialized processes and its own set of forms.

I agree with your last point about LaTeX being better, but you will be using a typist because it's generally quicker to dictate than to type, and most large firms will be set up so that you spend all your time at your desk doing productive work instead of busywork, e.g. thinking about what should be said rather than just typing it out. Either that, or you'll be farming out most of the drafting to a paralegal or clerk.

Re:LaTeX

[ari_j]

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, what do you think there are for possible solutions? It'd be error-prone to convert from any other format, except for a custom XML format or something of the sort, and an editor for that would have to be custom, as well, unless you want to teach Emacs to a typist. ;)

Re:LaTeX

[cthugha]

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.

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 challenge is database integration (see some of my other posts in this discussion for more). If we do that, then we've got a winning solution. You might also want to check out Debian-Lex, a project to make a "legally aware" distribution of Debian, and which I first heard of in this discussion.

Re:LaTeX

[ari_j]

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 just be a very well-organized failed effort. :| (I'm an optimist in theory. ;)

Re:LaTeX

[cthugha]

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.

Re:LaTeX

[cthugha]

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 a copy of the document on letterhead to be sent out and another on plain green paper for the file). Oddly enough, they seemed to like it that way. If you set up your secretary's .emacs so that she only has to memorize a few special keystrokes for common tasks, there should be no problem.

Re:LaTeX

[ari_j]

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 using Emacs occasionally. I even used it exclusively in a class the other day for my notes (I use DokuWiki and unison to synchronize the flat files on my laptop to my web server).

Go custom

[cthugha]

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 whatever office suite you choose then it's fairly easy to tie the firm's database in with its precedent system, allowing you to auto-generate letters and court documents with all the basic details (names and addresses, names of parties to proceedings, etc) already filled in.

Doing it right can be challenging, but I can tell you that working with a system that forces you to work according to its assumptions about what should be done is extremely frustrating.

Re:Go custom

[slashjames]

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 up is a pain, but once it's set up, you can forget about it.

Re:Go custom

[cthugha]

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 their identity, the number of billable units allocated and a short narration for each item of work done. Tracking monies received and the outlays for each matter is a separate problem that's only related by the fact that professional fees are worked out on the basis of what's in the timesheets.

Someone you could ask, too: debian-lex

[djpig]

In Debian there is at least one guy who tries to collect information about FOSS for laywers, see the website of debian-lex project. There is also a mailing list available (with public archive). Perhaps it is worthwile to ask there, too.

lawyers should be forced to use M$

[maximus21]

that way crooks would be supporting crooks...

A lawyer's advice

[guacamolefoo]

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, billing, trust accounting, check-writing, etc. I just could not rationalize trying to kludge something together when I simply needed something that worked.

The time I would have spent trying to put something together would have been far outweighed by the cost of not doing billable client work, and I couldn't afford to have a critical system based on an immature product. I decided that my business was that of a law office, and not a software development house, so I decided against trying to build something from scratch.

In any case, with the proliferation of relatively inexpensive products that do exactly what I needed, I thought it would be penny wise and pound foolish to try to do it with products that aren't ready. I need to feed my family and my student loan company, and evangelism for the sake of evangelism didn't strike me as being something I wanted to do under these circumstances.

My advice is to go to Staples, plunk down a few hundred for Quickbooks and be done with it. You'll save yourself a lot of headaches.

For what it's worth, QB is not immediately intuitive on how to do certain things (like client trust accouts, for instance) but it does handle them reasonably well in my circumstances. Also, client credits and contingent fee cases are less than intuitive, but I've made it work pretty well for me. I also do not like the fact that I cannot figure out how to make the thing print a batch of invoices (not just a "statement") for all accounts with balances that are outstanding. In addition, I wish there was (or that I knew of) some way to apply time from time sheets to clients' accounts automatically, rather than having to do it manually. That is a big annoyance. Fortunately, I have a small base of clients for whom I do a lot of work, so that issue is not critical for me -- I just have to create invoices for a few clients each month. If it were dozens (or more), it would be a royal pain in the ass.

QB could be much better if it were tweaked somewhat to make a special "Lawyer Edition" but the Pro edition will be workable under most small firm scenarios I can imagine. Unfortunately, you'll need a Windows box. I note that QB Pro would occasionally barf on me under Win 98, but under XP is has been very reliable.

My old office used PC Law, and I hated it vigorously. I have not used Time Matters or Time Slips, so I cannot intelligently opine about those products. I even know some folks who just use Quicken. From speaking to others, however, I think that there is no "perfect" solution, which is why the commercial software market for attorneys is so fractured -- each product has strengths and weaknesses, and there is no clear "winner" yet.

Because the commercial market is still (IMHO) without a clear winner, a good OSS project could conceivably come in and win the day. I would be receptive to something along those lines, but it would need to come a long way from any of the examples I either looked at or saw referred in this article and the subsequent posts.

GF

Re:A lawyer's advice

[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