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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!"
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.
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.
If bad puns were like deli meat, this would be the wurst
Why informative? The suggestion here is not only poorly made, but rejected in the original submission.
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.
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