Criminal Defense Law With An Apple

In case you were living under a rock, Apple updated just about everything. The real excitement and media buzz is focused on fanboy favorite: iPhone. See the guided tour here.

I had a chance to do a web conference with Nick Lightbody, at Desk Space, to take a look at the new Case Management program that is being released in the coming days.  We spent about an hour looking at the interface and a bit of time looking at the programming behind the scenes of this Legal Practice Management Program.

Desk Space is a very robust program and it looks as though Nick, and his team, have been taking notes on what people want. What do they want? Well, for starters, a lot of folks want control of their data. Desk Space is a child of the File Maker program.  As such, the program resides on your computer. What else is the legal community looking for? Not much else, except…everything. Contacts, calendars, billing, documents (with merging capabilities) and accounting all within one program. Enter Desk Space.

Like similar File Maker Practice Management programs, Desk Space uses a tabs and icon interface but still provides a very clean interface. Like any good Mac program designer should, Desk Space focuses on elegant simplicity. To appreciate what is really going on with Desk Space, underneath the simple design, there would likely be a learning curve, to get the most out of the program. I believe this would be true of all robust practice management systems.

There are some tools (such as job or workflow tracking) that would not be a meaningful tool in my practice. However, if your practice blends civil work, this would be a critical tool. On the other hand, the merge tools built into this program is a unique feature not offered by many competitors. The program also has many of the tools we would expect in a comprehensive program: time management, client management, contacts with “spotlight” search, financial reporting, billing and more.

An immediately noticeable criticism is that many of the naming conventions for the tabs and icons were inconsistent with my own practice. Good news. All the names can be customized to suit your practice. Everything is constructed “soft wired” and the team at Desk Space can change the way anything is described. In addition, many of the features can be finessed to the way you practice. 

Desk Space is also platform agnostic. Meaning it can run on that old PC collecting dust in the closet. But why would you do that?

Overall, I was impressed with the time and thought that was put into Desk Space. It has all the markings of a comprehensive Practice Management tool. Of course, I have not used Desk Space myself, so I am limited to say that it looks very useful. If you are a Desk Space user, we would welcome your first hand impressions in the comments. 

Prices for Desk Space are competitive to what you would see for similar Practice Management Systems on a Mac. Nick did provide that for a short time he would be allowing users to purchase Desk Space at a discount, with some features limited, in order to determine whether this was the right tool for your practice.

For those not ready for SaaS and think the other Practice Management alternatives require to much bending, Desk Space may be for you. The program is designed to be flexible and simple to use. According to Nick, during the beginning phase of introducing Desk Space, early adopters are going to get special attention.  You can contact Nick for a demo: nick.lightbody at deskspace.com

I have been slowing testing the stability and reliability of Mobile Me for the last 6 months. It is always difficult to go back to a program that has proved problematic in the past. But I had a one year subscription and even Apple deserves to have a bumpy software roll-out.

After six months of using calendar and address book things have been going remarkably well. The program has synced across all three computers and an iPhone.  My caveat, I have only used Mobile Me for my personal contacts and calendar. Also, I have not used mobile me for document management or email. 

The one thing I did discover was that using Onyx will wreak havoc on Mobile Me. I am sure if it is a bug that needs to be worked out or who needs to work it out. If you run Onyx, then open up your calendars, you may experience multiple repeated calendar titles (as many as five). I suppose that is better than having them disappear. I am not married to Onyx, but it is a nice program to keep things clean, zippy and spiffy. But I am liking the idea of having a constantly synced calendar and address book. Now we are in search of a new tweaking/optimization program.