AbacusLaw

Unlike competing software that forces you to work within the constraints of the program, AbacusLaw is designed to let you choose how you want to practice, then configures to your unique needs.

So whether you practice in one area of law or many, you seamlessly move from one matter to another. You won’t feel trapped or limited by what you can and cannot do and you’ll always have the right screens, information, rules, reports and terminology you choose for the types of matters you handle.

Video Overview

You Won’t Waste Time Searching for Information

All documents, emails, notes, events, client communications and phone messages are linked to your case files for quick and easy retrieval. Search and find all details instantly using full-text search bars and access your in formation from any smart phone or tablet.

You Won’t Feel Out of Control Again

Assign, manage and view activity for every matter and your entire staff from one location, eliminate scheduling conflicts and easily generate over 100 standard reports as well as unlimited custom reports.

You’ll Reduce Your Risk

Eliminate missed deadlines, appointments and malpractice risks, avoid conflicts of interest and reduce errors in document and form production.

Accounting

Maximize your profits. Minimize office expenses. Spend more time practicing law and less time crunching numbers. AbacusLaw legal software can make it happen.

AbacusLaw’s multitasking software provides a simple-to-use interface designed to make office accounting more intuitive and efficient.

• Stay on top of your payables and vendors.
• Process A/P invoices that have distributions to both the client and the firm.
• Process 1099s and 1096s for vendors.
• Set up default General Ledger Accounts and descriptions.
• AP Reports include cash requirements report by vendor/client (for client expenses), an A/P aging report, and a vendor transaction list.
• Continue working into the new year even before the year-end is processed.
• Bank reconciliation is standard.
• Reconcile unlimited operating and trust bank accounts.
• Detailed reports including payables, cash flow, receivables.
• Detailed receivables, invoice, and expense management.
• Export invoices to PDF, HTML, and RTF files
• Export data to TXT and CSV files
• Export reports to PDF, HTML, and RTF files
• Pop-up reminders to send invoices.
• Track billable and non-billable hours
• Reports by client, project, and date

Billing

Any Fee Arrangement. All Billing Schedules.

AbacusLaw is designed to be completely configurable. Everything from the chart of accounts to the format of your bills, fee arrangements and billing schedules are flexible and customizable to meet your needs. Change fonts, wording, placement of text, or add your firm’s logo.

Print Accurate Bills the First Time

Unlike other legal billing systems that require you to print pre-bills, AbacusLaw lets you preview bills and make changes directly on screen – instantly and accurately.

Instantly & Easily Collect Payments From Your Clients

Accept credit card payments from your clients and you’ll never have to worry about chasing fees. AbacusLaw has a built-in credit card processing module, XCharge.

Other AbacusLaw Billing Features Include:

• Interim statements: Send interim reminder statements half way through the billing period to encourage prompt payments.
• Past due notices: Automatically calculate a late charge based on a user-defined percentage.
• Electronic billing: Generate an actual bill in LEDES 1998B format.
• Split billing: Select a matter, then define the sub client/matters to be billed, with assigned percentages of fees and costs.

Case Management

You don’t want to make a mistake purchasing case management software. It needs to seamlessly configure to your unique needs.

AbacusLaw lets you seamlessly move from one case to the next.

Unlike competing software that forces you to work within the constraints of the program, AbacusLaw is designed to let you choose how you want to practice, then configures to your needs. So whether you practice in one area of law or many, you seamlessly move from one matter to another.

You won’t feel trapped or limited by what you can and cannot do and you’ll always have the right screens, information, rules, reports and terminology you choose for the types of matters you handle.

Don’t Let Sloppy Case Management Ruin Your Practice.

• Search and get all case details instantly
• Store, organize and retrieve an unlimited amount of information for each case
• Add unlimited fields to your screens
• Access case information from your smart phone or tablet
• Get a chronological overview of all case activities
• Create and track lists of actions
• Automate court form and document production

Check Writing

End the confusion of manual check writing! Achieve seamless bank reconciliations. Increases check accuracy and ledger clarity.

• Convenient check formats.
• Easily manage multiple checking accounts.
• Painless checkbook reconciliation for both operating & trusts.
• Easy-to-use demand check writer.
• Auto-fill vendor information.
• Online banking.
• Eliminates duplicate payments for an invoice.

Contact Management

Don’t make the mistake of trusting generic contact management software. It needs to be integrated with your practice management software so you can manage all client details with just a click.

AbacusLaw lets you add unlimited fields to your contact screens.

Unlike standalone programs, AbacusLaw puts all contact information in one central location for quick and easy retrieval. With just a couple of clicks you can:

• Send emails
• Dial phone numbers
• Print envelopes, labels, letters, bills and more
• Access contact information from any smart phone or tablet

Limitless Possibilities

Contact screens come with fields for basic information such as name, address, telephone number and email. You can easily add any other fields as your matters dictate. Need to track someone’s license plate number? Add a field for that. Want to track the names of your client’s children? Birthdays? The possibilities are endless.

Credit Card Integration

AbacusLaw is the only time, billing and accounting software for law firms that seamlessly integrates with X-Charge payment processing to quickly and easily collect credit card payments from your clients.

Firms that accept credit card payments experience the following benefits:

• Increased billables: 44% of law firms state they receive more business by accepting credit cards. Clients will hire the attorney who makes payment easy. What is easier than a credit card?
• Improved cash flow: A recent study found that 94% of law firms accepting credit cards experienced improved cash flow, with 88% experiencing a significant improvement in the time it takes for bills to be paid.
• No hidden fees: Other companies charge for setup, per user and credit card registration fees. Not Abacus.
• No scanner or terminal required: What good is accepting credit cards if you need your client and their card in your office in order to swipe it? AbacusLaw securely stores your client’s credit card information on the X-Charge server so you can charge them at any time.
• All major credit cards and electronic checks accepted: Other companies charge extra for ACH payments. Abacus doesn’t.

Banks and Other Merchant Services Don’t Understand How Law Firms Operate

If you consult the cross-default or cross-collateralization provisions found in the terms and conditions of your merchant account agreement you’ll see that they’ve secured your obligations to all your accounts. So in the event of a breach of any of those obligations, such as a late payment for a line of credit, they have the right to transfer funds from existing accounts to fund the monies then owned – without any notice!

How This Puts You at Risk

If that transfer happens to come from your credit card trust account, you have unknowingly violated your ethical obligations established by your State Bar. Moreover, you are responsible for the wrongful and unlawful invasion of your trust account by the bank. You may be subject to review and possible disciplinary action.

Unlike Banks, AbacusLaw and X-Charge Understand the Unique Needs of Your Law Firm

Requirements for law firm trust accounts vary by state. Abacus and X-Charge have you covered.

• Invasion of trust accounts: AbacusLaw and X-Charge set up your trust account so it cannot be invaded for charge backs and costs associated with trust account processing fees.
• Separate trust and operating accounts: AbacusLaw and X-Charge establish both of these accounts
• Prohibition on credit card acceptance: Some states prohibit accepting credit card payment for services rendered in divorce or criminal actions (Chi. Bar Assn. 79-4; Ohio Supreme Court, Board of Comm. Op 91-12, Opinion 29).
• Accepting retainers: Does your state restrict accepting retainer payments by credit card?

Document and Form Generation

The key to increasing your firms productivity by at least 6.5% is to use document and form templates.

Baker & McKenzie, one of the world’s largest law firms, saw a 6.5% productivity increase by investing less than 0.1% in document and form production.

No matter your jurisdictions or practice areas, AbacusLaw seamlessly configures to easily and accurately fill out your court forms and other important documents. You’ll have error-free, signature-ready forms in minutes using features including:

You’ll Have Error-Free, Signature-Ready Forms in Minutes With AbacusLaw. Here Are Just Some of the Helpful Features:

• Reduce errors: AbacusLaw eliminates the chance of mistakes by automatically filling out your court forms using the information in your existing database.
• Stop redundant, manual data entry: You have already taken the time to input the information into AbacusLaw, why waste time inputting the same data to another program?
• Increase productivity: Increase the number of forms you create in the same amount of time. Enter the data once and Abacus automatically fills in all related fields.
• Improve organization: No more searching your computer for completed forms. With Abacus, all your finished forms are linked to the matter for easy retrieval.
• Import Legal Solutions profiles: Thousands of law firms have switched from Legal Solutions to AbacusLaw and imported their case profiles.
• Compatible with all e-filing providers: All saved PDF forms are in PDF or PDF/A format and are full text searchable.
• Don’t wait for updates via snail mail: All updates are provided online for quick and easy installation.
• Open and work on multiple forms simultaneously: You can even fill multiple forms for the same case at the same time!

Document Management

The average employee spends 18 minutes searching for a misplaced document. Don’t waste your valuable time this way.

Only AbacusLaw lets you store an unlimited amount of documents for quick and easy retrieval.

• Full-text search: Search all documents by file type, file name, keywords or words contained
• Restrict access: Ensure client confidentially and security of proprietary information by allowing only certain users access to certain documents
• All file types: Store PDF documents, Word documents, images, videos and more.

The document management and tracking in AbacusLaw puts all your critical documents in order on your computer.

• Instantly view all your documents, word processing files and scanned images linked to a name or case.
• Click on a file, and AbacusLaw will display it with the correct application, whether a document, spreadsheet, graphic, or information requiring some application to run.
• Use Windows Explorer to drag any file to AbacusLaw.
• Store locations including box ID of archived documents.
• Tag files for Discovery.
• Print reports of your documents.

Email Management

Don’t put your firm at risk by losing important email correspondence.

No matter who in your office sends or receives an email, it’s centrally available to everyone.

If your email isn’t properly organized, your firm is at risk of losing important information, upsetting clients by not replying, forgetting to bill for time and embarrassing yourself by having multiple people reply to the same email.

AbacusLaw works in conjunction with Outlook to increase your productivity and keep you organized.

• Outgoing and incoming emails (text and attachments) are saved to the corresponding matter. If a client loses an email, the original is safe in AbacusLaw.
• Once an email is saved in AbacusLaw, you can delete the original from Outlook and still have access to it from within AbacusLaw.
• Send emails from any name screen by clicking the email icon.
• Link emails to AbacusLaw from within Outlook.
• Access linked emails on your smart phone or tablet with Abacus Mobile.
• Bill for emails as you send them.

Outlook contact, calendar and schedule information is also synced to AbacusLaw so you know what’s coming up.

General Ledger

You can have an office of brilliant lawyers and still come up short in financial management. Get clarity and accuracy with AbacusLaw software that manages both your cases and your finances. Save time and money on even the most complex financial management tasks.

“Comprehensive,” “easy to use,” “flexible”-these are just a few of the customer comments describing the AbacusLaw General Ledger system. The system is open-ended and does not require a “hard close” at the end of each month. The chart of accounts is defined by you. Recurring journal entries can be set up for automatic entry of repetitive withdrawals. Reports can be printed or displayed to the screen at any time.

• Compare this year versus last year.
• Cash or accrual accounting.
• Recurring journal entries for repetitive withdrawals.
• Easy-to-use financial reports including balance sheet and income statements.
• Quickly review general ledger via each journal entry.
• Access data through individual accounts or by journal entry number.
• Client payments, demand checks, A/P checks are all integrated into the AbacusLaw General Ledger system.
• Journal entries are easy to enter and also appear in the Bank Reconciliation program. Beginning balances are easy to enter for the initial setup of Abacus Accounting.
• Easily delete entries while maintaining an audit trail of all changes.

Budgeting

This feature assigns expenses to their associated accounts. This enables income/cost analysis that can be used to adjust expenses to keep on budget and check budget estimates and actual expense.

Cost Recovery (N/C)

This optional feature integrates with your cost recovery system. You’ll be able to automatically record the use of office hardware (copiers, phones, etc.) related to a case and add the itemized cost of those expenses to the bill. This allows a firm to recover in-office expenses while ensuring consistency and transparency.

Real Estate Closing Package Integration (N/C)

AbacusLaw integrates with a number of real estate closing packages. If you have one of these packages you can purchase the integration module and then most of the work is done for you. When integrating with a real estate closing package AbacusLaw imports all deposit and disbursement data. All you have to do is print your trust deposit posting file. Then you can cut the checks that are waiting in the trust check request area. The time saved is substantial and accuracy is not a problem either. If you do a lot of real estate closing, then this is essential. Compatible programs include Land Tech, DoubleTime, and Display Soft.

Multiple Company Books

Abacus allows you to maintain as many separate sets of books (accounting databases) as you need. This enables you to keep track of accounting records for other businesses that you might own/manage, such as title companies, real estate businesses, personal books, etc. Note: A separate practice management database is needed for each set of books.

Legal Calendaring

From statutes of limitations to staff assignments, AbacusLaw tracks everything and everyone in one master calendar with multiple views. You choose what type of calendar, layout and content you want – daily, weekly, monthly or side-by-side staff calendar. Drag and drop events, change the colors and more.

Reduce calendar errors with AbacusLaw:

• View and update your calendar from your smart phone or tablet.
• Create, modify and edit limitless calendar rules to automatically schedule (and reschedule) sequential deadlines and reminders.
• Setup rules with your intake forms to automatically calendar meetings, appointments, deadlines and other milestones for each of your clients.
• Smart alarms alert you of upcoming tasks at designated intervals.
• Over 100 included reports help you stay on track of all deadlines. Use any report out-of-the-box or easily create your own to suit your needs. Learn more about reports here. * The malpractice alert report details any matters that have no future activities calendared. * Print a calendar report to see all events scheduled for a particular attorney or your entire office.

Messaging

Don’t make the mistake of thinking potential clients will call back. If you don’t answer your phone, clients will call another attorney who will.

As the old saying goes, you only have one opportunity to make a good first impression. For law firms, answering the phone is your first chance to start building a positive relationship with potential clients. If you fail to answer your phone, prospects will call another attorney who will.

Never Miss an Important Message

Just like the days of carbon paper, fax machines and dusty libraries, phone message slips are long gone.

Unlike other programs, AbacusLaw includes a Call Manager to track and access your messages to help ensure clients receive a prompt response.

• Take phone messages for unavailable colleagues.
• Link messages to any client or matter with just a click. All messages are automatically archived.
• Take unlimited notes on-screen for incoming and outgoing calls.
• Send instant messages to colleagues to ask if they want to take a call

Only AbacusLaw Offers MessageSlips, a Built-in Employee Only Instant Messaging System.

Messages written on post-it notes are likely to be lost. Don’t risk losing or forgetting important information. AbacusLaw MessageSlips" works like your favorite instant messaging program to help you communicate with your colleagues.

• Improve productivity: MessageSlips" is limited to only AbacusLaw users so employees can’t converse with friends and family.
• Increase communication: See who is currently in the office and immediately send and receive text messages with all other users.
• Stay organized: Create notes from important messages to be saved to matter and client files.
• Don’t lose messages: Send colleagues messages who are out of the office and even schedule call back reminders.

Payroll

Say goodbye to overpriced payroll services that do not provide the service you deserve. Whether you have two employees or a hundred employees, AbacusLaw’s Payroll Processing function will streamline and automate your firm’s payroll.

• Individual employee profiles have customized deductions and benefits
• Easy access to payroll tax tables to meet ever-changing tax reporting requirements
• Calculations and deductions are automatically handled with pay information stored for future reference and reporting
• Payroll integrates with your General Ledger, utilizing multiple account distributions
• Employer’s portion of FICA and Medicare is automatically calculated and journalized
• Easily handles overtime for hourly employees
• Supports 401K and group insurance deductions
• Supports taxable, non-taxable, and annuity deductions
• Tax tables are automatically updated each December by AbacusLaw
• Tracks employee vacation and sick time
• Accommodates bonus pay
• Maintains year-to-date and quarterly totals
• Maintains profiles for every employee
• Prints W-2 & W-3 forms
• Prints 941 quarterly tax return reports
• Integrates with the Abacus General Ledger
• Supports all 50 states
• Quicken check format

Productivity Reporting

Work in Process Report

This report shows work that has not yet been billed. Hours and expenses are automatically updated from the associated time and billing record. This report is effective in summarizing contingency cases that aren’t billed until the end of the case.

Financial Report Groups

Create groups of any number/combination of reports. For example you could set up a group titled “Month End” consisting of the Trial Balance, Income Statement and Accounts Receivable reports. Then, instead of having to print each of these reports individually each month, simply select your “Month End” report group to print.

1099 Reporting

When you pay contractors who are not incorporated, you’ll need to issue 1099 reports for tax purposes. Let AbacusLaw do this for you.

Reporting

AbacusLaw Report Groups creates and prints custom reports with the push of a button. Set up your group of reports, and then once a week, month, or quarter, simply enter the required date range. Individually select the exact criteria you want for printing at anytime. Create a group of reports custom-made for each individual in your office.

AbacusLaw delivers information you want, the way you want it.

Sample Reports and Invoices

• AbacusLaw includes hundreds of pre-defined accounting reports and productivity reports.
• Simply select the information you need and print it to the screen, to a file, email, or to your printer easily and quickly.
• Customize report format to get only the information that is important to you.
• Set it and forget it! Schedule periodic reports to be automatically generated.

Rules-Based Calendaring

The AbacusLaw rules engine calculates all critical deadlines for a matter based on the appropriate Federal, State and Local court rules that you can get from AbacusLaw or create on your own. You can also use it for workflows and to set milestones that can be assigned to different staff and tracked.

Reduce your calendaring risks with AbacusLaw

• Don’t waste time searching for calendar rules
• Stop miscalculating deadlines on your fingers
• Don’t be late for appointments or double book yourself
• Change an event and all related dates are automatically updated
• Pre-programmed rules and timelines available include:
  • Federal Rules of Civil Procedure
  • Generic Federal rules for all of USA
  • Federal rules for defined states
  • Federal rules for districts within states
  • State court rules for your jurisdiction (all states)
  • California county local rules (all counties)

Time Capture

Only AbacusLaw Lets You Automatically Capture All Time and Bill Your Clients With Just a Click

Third-party time tracking programs aren’t integrated with your practice management software so you have to manually enter information from one program to another. Not only does this waste time, but it’s error-prone and can lead to missing billable hours. What good is a log of your time if it’s not billed?

Bill While You Work With Just a Click

Timers ensure that time is recorded accurately and completely for each activity. So whether you’re drafting or reading emails, creating documents, at appointments or other calendared events, timers ensure your time is properly accounted for. When a task is done, click the BILL button and AbacusLaw creates a bill slip for the time you just spent working. You won’t lose billable time.

Even if you don’t bill for your time, you need to know how productive your staff is and what they’re working on. AbacusLaw lets you easily track and manage everyone’s time

Trust Accounting

Unlike all other time, billing and accounting software, only AbacusLaw Gold integrates perfectly with AbacusLaw. Don’t waste time crunching numbers. AbacusLaw accounting is flexible, configurable and intuitive.

• Stay on top of your payables and vendors
• You define the chart of accounts
• Supports accrual or cash accounting
• Process A/P invoices that have distributions to both the client and the firm
• Process 1099s and 1096s for vendors
• Set up default General Ledger Accounts and descriptions
• Continue working into a new month before the previous month is processed
• Bank reconciliation is standard
• Reconcile unlimited operating and trust bank accounts
• Detailed reports including payables, cash flow, receivables and by client, project and date
• Detailed receivables, invoice, and expense management
• Export invoices to PDF, HTML, and RTF files
• Export data to TXT and CSV files
• Export reports to PDF, HTML, and RTF files
• Pop-up reminders to send invoices
• Track billable and non-billable hours

Multiple Company Books

AbacusLaw allows you to maintain as many separate sets of books (accounting databases) as you need. This enables you to keep track of accounting records for other businesses that you might own/manage, such as title companies, real estate businesses, personal books, etc. Note: A separate practice management database is needed for each set of books.