AbacusLaw

AbacusLaw — General and Background Information

AbacusLaw^® was one of the first case management programs for law firms. The earliest versions worked in DOS, because there was no Windows at the time. Since then it has steadily evolved into one of the most solid and most full-featured law office practice management programs on the market. It now includes full billing, trust account management, double entry accounting, credit card collection and more — all in addition to AbacusLaw's extensive case management capabilities. There's very little information processes in your office that AbacusLaw can't make easier and more effective.

The same people that founded AbacusLaw^® are still running it today. It has always been a company devoted to product quality and customer service, and as a privately held company they are not swayed by the need for short-term profits or the short-term thinking so common with larger corporations. The principals at Abacus Data Systems have no financial incentive to use short-term thinking.

There are certain features you can expect from all the major practice management packages today. These include maintenance of your calendar (personal and office), todos, cases, contacts, phone calls, integration with Outlook, integration with your Blackberry or other PDA, basic document management, and the ability to merge all the fields into Word or WordPerfect forms.

These are some of the basics, and AbacusLaw handles these and many more very well. As I develop this site I hope to explain some things you can do to make AbacusLaw work for you very effectively. But as you probably know, it's not the list of features that matter most (but they do matter), so much as

1. The accessibility of the features. How easy is it to
      (a) figure out how to do what you want
      (b) to do what you want, once you know how
2. The degree of protection of your data. How safe is it from being corrupted?
3. The speed of the program. How much CPU speed and memory do you need to run the program, and then how long does it take to run a report or find a piece of information. Will you need to buy all new computers just to run the program?
4. The functionality of the feature. It's easy to say you can check for conflicts of interest, for example, but how easy is it? How thorough a check of your database does it make? Can it use fuzzy logic to find close (eg misspelled) matches? If you have a large database, how long does it take to accomplish from start to finish?
.

The feature list is important, and you can click here to see a list of features on Abacus's website, but what I'd really like to emphasize is how secure the data is in Abacus. They store their data in the Sybase Advantage database which is known as among the fastest and most reliable SQL databases. It's almost unheard of to get data corruption with AbacusLaw. To assure the integrity of your data, Abacus requires all multiuser installations use a dedicated server. That sever does not need to be a client server computer, even though that would be nice, but it does need to be a computer not used by anyone to run applications, including AbacusLaw.

If you're interested in purchasing AbacusLaw or in help with the the installation, training, or or customization of AbacusLaw. Or if you need support in troubleshooting an AbacusLaw problem; Steve Henes Computer Support can provide that support. I have been certified by Abacus Data Systems and specialize in complex customizations and training.