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Simply put, Law Office Essentials is a project to give law firms a choice when it comes to operating systems and software for their day-to-day use.
To give you a little more detail, Law Office Essentials aims to be the defacto standard for law office applications. To accomplish this, the Law Office Essentials Project will be creating a single application that will take care of all functionality that a law office requires to accomplish the required daily tasks of its attorneys and staff. This concept has been brewing in my mind for about 3 years now, and seems to be getting quite a bit closer to production. Once Law Office Essentials is in a state of production, we at the Project are hoping that it will gain wide support in the legal field.
Once Law Office Essentials is in use in law firms, the Project will start to evolve into my other "big" idea. That idea is to create a child support enforcement application that will maintain all enforcement client data in a data farm that is centrally located within the United States, which all child support enforcement jurisdictions will connect to for their data. By maintaining all support client data in a central data farm, whenever a client turns up in a new jurisdiction, the system will automatically initiate enforcement actions to that new jurisdiction.
You're right…which is why I need help. Please have a look at our Contributions page to see how you can pitch in and help. However, I don't plan on this system having a working binary for quite a while, so please don't be expecting to see anything on our Downloads page for some time yet. Hopefully, I'll at least get the whole web site up and running within the next few days or so. As I am currently the only one working on this project, it is going to be very slow-going.
This next section is here to give you a brief bio for the people who are bringing you LOE. We hope that these bios help you to better understand why Sean and PekinSOFT Systems are doing what they are doing. We also hope that their bios help you gain a little peace of mind about deciding to give these products a try.
Sean Carrick has been involved in computers, in one way or another, since the long-gone days of CP/M. His first computer was a Timex-Sinclair 1000 with 2K of RAM built in and a 16K expansion kit plugged in. Ah, those were the days…you plugged your good ol' computer right into your black and white television set, loaded your program from a cassette tape…
Since those long ago days, Sean has managed to get an education in computers, as well as obtain his Associate of Arts in Paralegal Studies. Sean has worked in various areas, including:
With these experiences in his pocket, Sean decided it was time to merge his passion for the law and his love of technology in an attempt to find true happiness. Hence, Linux for Law Firms was born. The idea for Linux for Law Firms first came into Sean's mind when he was in school, learning how to be a paralegal. He played with the idea again and again, refining it each time he pulled it out to look at it. After many, many times of viewing this idea, Sean decided that there was no way he could pull it off alone, so he decided to get the Project sponsored on SourceForge.net. After hearing what he had to say about it, SourceForge.net thought it sounded good and agreed to host the Project.
Sean decided that he needed a company to back the Project, so he came up with PekinSOFT Systems, after he returned to his hometown in Illinois. After establishing this "DBA", work on the Project began in earnest.
PekinSOFT Systems, having been born, caused Sean to think about the Project almost twenty-four hours each day. The more Sean thought about the Project from the view-point of PekinSOFT Systems, he decided that calling the Project "Linux for Law Firms" could isolate some clients and cause them to not want to try the case management system that Sean and PekinSOFT Systems were building. From this company perspective, Sean decided that the most important idea to get across was that he was creating a "better mousetrap" for law firms and corporate legal departments. That's when Sean got the idea for the current name of the Project, Law Office Essentials (LOE).
LOE seemed to best capture what Sean and PekinSOFT Systems are trying to accomplish…designing a one-application solution for the needs of attorneys from sole-practitioners to the largest firms to the largest corporate legal departments. The one thing that all of these target clients have in common is that they are subjugated to using Microsoft™ Windows® as their operating system, to run substandard, parochial applications to do their jobs. With this in mind, Sean started refining his Project ideas even further, from the viewpoint of a company that is wanting to gain clients and grow, to try and create an application that would be universally usable, while allowing for future practice area-specific plug-ins.
This section is here to provide details about what all is going to be involved with the Law Office Essentials (LOE) Project. If you think that you may be interested in volunteering on this Project, then this is the section that you will want to pay close attention to, as it is here to give you very detailed information regarding the overall plan for the LOE Project.
The proper use of the Law Office Essentials Project logo is as follows (in HTML):
<span class="loe"><sup>L</sup>O<sub>E</sub></span>
The logo is defined in styles/openLF2.css as follows:
/**********************************************
* Formatting for the LOE logo. *
**********************************************/
.loe /* The Letter 'O' */
{
font-family: Arial, sans-serif;
font-size: 1em;
font-style: normal;
}
.loe sup { /* The Letter 'L' */
vertical-align: 0.55ex;
margin-left: 0.1667em;
margin-right: -0.45em;
font-family: Arial, sans-serif;
font-size: 1em;
font-style: normal;
}
.loe sub { /* The Letter 'E' */
vertical-align: -0.55ex;
margin-left: -0.5em;
margin-right: -0.125em;
font-family: Arial, sans-serif;
font-size: 1em;
font-style: normal;
}
LOE will be comprised of the following features, once it arrives at the first release candidate.
LOE's primary interface will be a Graphic User Interface (GUI) as a desktop application, acting as a front-end to a MySQL database server. This interface will be achieved by using object oriented design in Java/Swing and the GUI will, by default, have the system default look and feel for the operating system on which it is being run:
Again, this functionality is going to be made available to the law firm. It is up to the individual law firm to make this functionality available to its employees on its own.
LOE will also have a Web interface that will enable attorneys and paralegals to access the database server from outside the law firm, provided that the law firm's SysAdmin sets up a web server to allow this access. By providing this capability, attorneys and paralegals will be able to access the system, even if the client is unable to come into the office and the attorney or paralegal is required to go to the client.
If the SysAdmin is wanting to do more than one thing in the command-line interface, s/he simply will need to pass the admin switch to the program. This will bring up a text-mode menu for the SysAdmin to do multiple things in one start-up of the system.
LOE will provide a command-line interface for a select few functions in the system. This interface will be provided so that SysAdmins need not start the GUI to take care of simple adminstrative tasks that could be done a lot faster than the GUI would take to start. Also, during my debugging of the PekinSOFT Resources Library 1.5 "Final", I found that an exception gets thrown when you try to view an application log file while the application is running. I do not view this as a bug, it is more like a feature, even though we do not allow changes to any of the log file text to be saved back to the log file, this will definitely prevent anyone from changing the log file through our Standard Log Viewer.
SysAdmins will be able to access the various administrative features, one at a time, by passing command-line switches to the LOE application. These command-line switches will be mutually exclusive, meaning that only one may be passed at a time. Of course, more than one may be put on the command-line, but only the first one will be read and acted upon by the system.
LOE will provide a client database and front-end for that database. This database will track all information for each client, with the exception of the client's case information, which will be tracked elsewhere.
LOE will use this part of the database to track the cases belonging to each client. The case record will maintain such information as the client's party designation (i.e., Plaintiff/Petitioner, Defendant/Respondent, etc.), court case number, date of rise of action, SOL of the claim, etc. This table will not maintain the evidence for the case, as that will be maintained in a different table.
The evidence management will be handled by a separate table in the case database. This table will maintain all information relating to each piece of evidence in the case. This table will also be where the individual allegation paragraphs for the pleadings will get pulled from.
Witnesses will be stored in this separate table, that is related to the cases table of the database.
LOE's timekeeping module will be as fully automated as possible, and will still allow manual timekeeping entry. This system will be tied into everything related to a client's record, so that way, as soon as any part of a client's record is accessed, time starts being kept and stops automatically when a different client's information is opened. An attorney, paralegal or other timekeeper within the firm will also be able to start and stop timekeeping manually via toolbar buttons.
This page contains some general information about LOE at the top of the page, followed by information about the Project Admin (Sean Carrick) and PekinSOFT Systems. About half-way down the page, you can find some detailed information about the LOE Project. I will post more details as I have time and the Project evolves.