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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!"
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.
"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.
So much to do, so little bandwidth.
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Try Mozilla
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.