Posted by DeepLogin 12 hours ago
Invoicing and tracking payments: InvoicePlane
Time tracking: Kimai
But no ERP? I presume their accountant is doing the books then?
You then ask how many employees they have, suggesting it's a one person company...I mean, it's right there on the website. It's Neil and Sandra, a husband and wife team. https://decoded.legal/diversity/ . They've been running successfully for five years, suggesting your concerns are unfounded.
Could you recommend me a way to gently introduce some kind of software/automation to her office?
TIA
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[0]: https://theredline.versionstory.com/p/on-the-immortality-of-...
I’d try to learn a bit more about her workflow. My partner has a contract with the state, cyber insurance, and has some records retention requirements which inform a lot of the technology. As an example discovery for some cases can run 100gbs and require 10 years of retention. She has to file a monthly report with very specific data requirements and we’re working on the extract out of the matter management because it doesn’t support an effective-as-of for the various fields which is needed.
I’ve found a good place to start is with how email and calendaring is used and implementing more security. Presuming she’s using hosted email (m365/gmail) or similar.
Maybe start with her calendar especially if she’s doing it on paper even more so if she’s using that to drive any client contact.
If she never uses ai at work at all, start with something dead simple: -do research with it -put a large corpus of documents into LLM context and ask questions of it
That's probably where I'd start.
Honestly that wouldn’t be a terrible product: Pull in all of a judges written judgements or stated logic about their rulings and preemptively craft your case around their biases.
Find a web-hosted practice management system, start with the piece she finds most valuable and easy to use (maybe a calendar?).
I have been extensively using LibreOffice in my court drafting, research, report writings and it has helped.. Over the years i have seen the progression of software, bugs I reported having been fixed in 2-3-5 releases always makes me happy.
People hate it for reasons that feel wrong.
They want a "mirror" of word, that's... Not going to happen, at least not in the UX department.
For compatibility, it is being improved iteratively.
I am on the fence for wordcraft by storytold for now.
That said, I do self host email using mailinabox.
I do use KDE neon for my own machine.
I have to use some business software which are windows based so I have to use that.. I just rdp into the machine and it works.
I don't use collaborative software because most of the time it's just me.
The bulk of it is run through ERPnext, which handles timesheets, invoices (client and member side), and accounting. We built some modules for ERPnext to make that as automated as possible, some of which I've finally got together this week: https://github.com/508-dev/erp_rules https://github.com/508-dev/books_health I used to use Crater for accounting, but it could only handle very basic accounting, so I switched to GnuCash, which I found too complicated but also too difficult to collaborate with, thus ERPnext.
We run member application management and BD pipeline through EspoCRM. Outline for wiki. Authentik for identity provider. Keila for newsletter emails. Vaultwarden for password management. Docuseal in place of Docusign. Nextcloud for basically all Google Drive / Docs / Calendar features, though it's quite slow in comparison. Coolify as a generic PAAS for MVPs or random member projects. Cal.com for appointments. Oh, to be fair, I still just route those to Google Meet.
I wish we could get a self hosted Discord alternative, however I found Matrix to be too unintuitive of a UX, and member participation was plummeting.
I've given a couple talks on self hosting and FOSS. Especially in the age of LLMs, I think it's very viable to move away from expensive SaaS. Just this week I had claude adding a ton of automations to our ERP, which probably isn't as possible for proprietary SaaS. Being able to straight up clone the codebase down and read/modify it directly makes for some interesting possibilities that we can then just as easily deploy ourselves since we self host. Using VPSs
To the lawyers, they can use software being available for free both as in for $0 and freedom as in libre (including choosing to not pay for it and not being obligated to pay developers at all) while their service of legal advice is not free and always costs money.
Guess who wins here? (Hint: It isn't the volunteer open source developer)
Why not? Do you think open source developers all have the same goals? Do you think they don't like it when people use their software?
Cool story bro, but surely your time is worth too much to spend it fiddling about linux and command lines.
I know a lot of open source software is a pain in the ass, but so is a lot of proprietary software. You use what you know, understand, and can support.
> "I'm a mechanic and I hand forge new spanners every time I work on a car."
This is a bad analogy. It's not like he's writing new software every time he has to do something. It's more like using tools that your machinist friends built.