Amicus Attorney Shortcuts That Streamline Your Work – Free Training Fridays

Amicus, Amicus, what can we say about Amicus Attorney? It’s a beloved case management system that has won the hearts and minds of attorneys and legal professionals everywhere. But even though Amicus Attorney takes your practice to new heights of productivity, we wanted to provide you with some great tips and tricks to streamline your operations. So we asked Paul Fihrer, our senior solutions architect, to provide you with our tips and tricks in this week’s Free Training Fridays.

About Free Training Friday: Since the beginning of 2017, we have been holding these free, 30-minute training hosted by our industry-leading experts and innovators who will teach you about AbacusLaw, Amicus Attorney, the Abacus Private Cloud, and everything in between. If you would like to request a topic, please emailwebinars@abacusnext.com.

Video Transcription

Hello and thank you for joining us. Today, I'm going to talk about Amicus Attorney shortcuts. I'm going to talk about three different things:

One is the toolbar shortcuts, the regular shortcuts, like Ctrl+Shift+S, which will bring up shortcuts.

I'm going to talk about shortcuts with respect to the to-do buttons and hyperlinks.

Then we’ll cover other shortcuts with respect to auto-text in the system. For those who haven’t used thembefore, auto-text refers to when I type a word or a phrase and that will put out a sentence.

Toolbar Shortcuts

Let's start out with the toolbar. The toolbar allows me to, without taking my hand off the mouse, quickly and easily get to places in the system, or modules in the system. It is important because I can very quickly and easily contact the people and see the communications in the system. For example, I can quickly and easily go to billing. And if I want to jump to the file index, I can jump to the file index and open up a client file. In a few short clicks I can quickly open up a file index.

Oneof the nice things about Amicus is there are some functions that I do on a regular basis that can be made readily available. For example, when I'm on a file, I might have an inbound phone call so I can quickly and easily open up a phone call and start typing. "This is a call that I am on." Once I'm done with that call, I can associate it to a client's file and a client and I'm done.

I can also make a note about the call. But if I use Ctrl+Shift+K, I can bring up a note. In fact, there are two different ways where I can bring up a note or instant message. This is where auto-text comes in. If I click "cn" and hit the space bar, that will allow me to enable auto-texting, which is part of a word that allows me to extend that word. How I actually did that was if I come to Office, Preferences, and I go to Spell Check, at the bottom there, is the ability for me to add my own auto-text.

The "cn" that I just added there was the ability for me to add my own text. Whatever, if it's one, two, three, four letters, then add my word or phrase that I want to add here. Coming back to here and coming back to my notes, you know "ad" will allow me to add "attend discovery" there.

The other thing is the ability to hyperlink in the system. You can see here we've added the document module to the notes here so I can hyperlink one or many documents or folders. When I send this note, I'm going to send it to myself. I've now sent this document to myself, and I now have this document in here with all that content assigned to myself.

I can now quickly and easily navigate through the system using the toolbar shortcuts and the ability to quickly and easily bring up a note, bring up a search. Let’s say I am looking for the Bailey file. If I was looking for Bailey from an events perspective, I could bring up any Bailey event. I could also search for “Bailey” thoughout the program in the advanced search option.

I could search for things relative to myself or relative to the whole firm. I can also save searches. In this example, you can see I'm doing a search based on a date. I'm looking for all court information and I'm finding just information relative to this month, and then drill into it based on this month. Remember, everything is hyperlinked (which is a form of shortcutting). I'm linking to everything based on just that piece of content.

Here are other shortcuts:

Ctrl+Shift+S allows me to bring up the search very quickly and easily.

Ctrl+Shift+K allows me to bring up the notepad.

Ctrl+Shift+P allows me to bring up a phone call without clicking on there no matter where I am in the system.

If I was on the dailies and I want to do Ctrl+Shift+3, that would actually do the same thing without bringing up the toolbar.

And if I want to add a timestamp, I would add Ctrl+T.

Speaking of timestamps, I have heard clients say “I'd like to actually put my own timestamp with my name and then actually type some text in there."

You can actually add this yourself! Let’s say you can send note. You can know exactly when I've dated and time-stamped this note, and I am going to send this to Bailey. I can send this to myself, and/or whoever I'm sending this to so I know exactly when I sent this, how I sent this. Ctrl+T will allow you to timestamp exactly when this went out.

One of the other nice things is if I did a Ctrl+Shift+K (to bring up the notepad), and I wanted to actually do a timestamp, Ctrl+T would allow me to actually do a timestamp.

Let's say I need to phone somebody tomorrow. Instead of setting up the call or phoning them, I can actually click on this button and it will call them for me. I can actually type in information here. "This is a call that I am on." I can type the information in here.

To actually do this, all I would need to do is click "Call with Janet." I can assign this to whoever I want to, and then all I would need to do is go here and assign the task, there is the telephone number. If I wanted to do a document-generation, I could assign this and then pick the specific thing that I wanted to do. Document generation, assign, maybe a retainer letter, or it may be a blank letter. Now, when it comes to generating a letter, creating a letter, all I need to do in the future is generate that letter.

Thank you for joining this session.

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