Amin Rahmani, Business Development Manager from Marketcircle Inc. took the floor to demo and discuss Daylite and Billings.

I had the fortunate pleasure of sitting next to Amin during Friday’s sessions, and we had a chance to talk a bit about the legal market. Daylite is not specifically marketed as a legal practice management application, but it’s one of the closest products we have on the Mac side to compete with the Windows-only applications like Amicus Attorney, AbacusLaw, and Time Matters. In talking with Amin, it was obvious to me that he and Marketcircle know their customers come from the business world, and they realize that lawyers are becoming an increasingly important piece of their market.

Amin demonstrated several features of Daylite including Apple Mail integration, creating action items, and customizing forms. Daylite is a beautiful program and for those who are willing to invest the time to take advantage of its extensive integration capabilities, it can easily become a full-fledged practice management system for any law office.

Amin then took a few minutes to describe Marketcircle’s Billings application which generates professional invoices. A question came up regarding how Billings can handle trust accounts, but then the point was made that Billings focuses more on invoicing and is not meant to be an accounting program.

Ben Stevens then spoke for a few minutes about how he and his law office uses Daylite. Since everyone in his office keeps their calendar in Daylite, he is able to see what everyone is doing from day to day. Ben also spoke about they set up “smart lists” for phone messages and other tasks so that actions items (including scanned snail-mail) get routed to the appropriate person in the office.

I like how the Daylite Website offers to “streamline your workflow” which is an extremely important point. If you don’t currently have an effective and efficient workflow set up at your office, then no practice management software is going to help you. Ross Kodner from MicroLaw has some great materials regarding the adoption of practice management applications (I especially like the first two presentations listed on that page).

Guest post by Brett Burney.