Second Opinions

We Need Criminal Law Case Management

Richard Frankoff asks: "I am president-elect of the Harris County Criminal Lawyer's Association. We have more than 400 solo practitioners. I have been searching for case and client management software geared for the criminal defense solo practitioner. All that I have found is software for large firms or public defender's offices with prohibitive prices for the solo practitioner. Do you have any suggestions?

By Grace Suarez

THERE ARE two ways to go here: Off-the-shelf programs and roll-your-own. On the commercial side, I am most familiar with Amicus Attorney. One version is included in the excellent Corel WordPerfect Suite Legal Edition (7/8/2000). Amicus also sells several standalone versions and upgrades from the Corel version.

Amicus Attorney is quite inexpensive. In fact, when included in the Corel suite, it's actually free. A standalone version suitable for solos costs $129. Using intuitive calendar, Rolodex and file folder designs, the program can be used to set appointments, keep to-do lists, track people and phone calls, draft documents using HotDocs (also included in some of the Corel legal suites) (http://www.capsoft.com/) or Word or WordPerfect merges, and record billable time.

Some of the Corel versions are not as customizable as the standalone, and attorneys specializing in criminal work will probably want to upgrade to the Amicus version.

You start by entering a new matter, either for an existing client or a new one. Information about the client, opposing counsel, the judge, witnesses, etc. is added using a Rolodex card format.

The card file is available to all the cases you set up, so if you have entered the name of a prosecutor or a police officer in one case, you can link it to another case without re-entering the information. The same goes for court personnel, judges, etc.

The program presents all the information about one case in a open file folder format, with people information on the left hand side, and information about calls, notes, and documents on the right side.

Court appearances, appointments and reminders about deadlines are automatically transferred to the calendar, which then informs you when those events come up, assuming you allow Amicus to run on your computer in the background.

Establish Links

You can establish links with other programs, such as Timeslips, and set up connections to Palm organizers. The documents section lets users set up links to word processing documents, so that by clicking a hypertext link, users are taken straight to the documents relating to the case. The Amicus version even supports Paperport, so that scanned paper documents can be linked to the Amicus file.

Design Forms

If you're willing to spend some time (okay, quite a bit of time) you can design form documents (using either your word processor's merge commands or HotDocs), that will accept information from Amicus Attorney. Then, with little more than a click, you can prepare letters, agreements, and motions that include information from Amicus. It saves a lot of re-typing at the very least, and you can create a fully customized library of motions and forms. It would be a great way for our prosecutor correspondent to send out his subpoenas.

I have been using Amicus Attorney for a couple of years, and even though I could design my own database (more about that below), Amicus gives me much more power and functionality with much less effort.

Write Your Own

If you're handy with database programming, you can write your own client management application, using Access, Approach, FileMaker, or Paradox.

Basically, it involves designing tables for people, cases, documents, and events, and linking them all together to form a relational database.

Clearly, it's a lot more work, and demands a fair degree of technical knowledge, but the advantage is that you can customize the application to work exactly the way you want. I suspect most attorneys will not go that route, though I do know a very talented public defender who has written a beautiful application for handling habeas corpus cases in FileMaker Pro.

And if you (or someone you know) can program in Visual Basic, you can write a really nifty, totally personalized application that will do just about anything you can think of. Take a look at Visual Basic 6 -- Hands On by Sharon Podlin and Pamela Palmer (Prima Tech, 1998), It includes a CD-ROM with a working client management system.

Grace Suarez is the head of research, writs and appeals for the San Francisco Public Defender's Office, and Webmaster of its Intranet.