AJS turns 30 years old

Did you know that 2010 will be AJS’ 30th birthday? Originally released in 1980 on a Commodore computer, AJS continues to lead the legal accounting and practice management landscape today.

Of course, AJS is a very different product nowadays, and in addition to the rock-solid legal accounting platform, it has been enhanced to include a number of other productivity tools such as document management, electronic communication, contact management and FICA; and a host of other features designed to make law firms more profitable.

Today, AJS is trusted by more than five hundred law firms in South Africa, from small single-practitioner firms to many of the largest law firms in the country.

Good news! Free AJS training

As an AJS client, you’ll be pleased to hear that we have embarked on a campaign to offer free training to our clients around the country. Generally, we find that law firms shy away from training, yet they sometimes complain when they aren’t getting full use out of the system.

That’s why we have decided to offer this training to help our clients to get more out of our product, and in so doing, to increase their profitability. So keep an eye out for the training dates for your region.

How good are your legal accounting data backups?

If you’re like many other law firms out there, you probably aren’t too worried about losing your information. But, according to DataPreserve, an online backup vendor overseas, “Nineteen out of twenty firms that lose their data due to a hard drive crash, tape malfunction, fire or other data disaster, will file for bankruptcy.”

They’re just being alarmist, right? Maybe not. In the past 6 months AJS staff have come across three law firms that suffered data loss.

The first had a fire, which destroyed their file server, and along with it all their accounting information. Fortunately for them, they had good off-site backups, and they were limping along again after about a week.

The second firm had a hard disk crash, and ten days later, despite having reasonable backups, they were still battling to get up and running again.

The third firm to lose their hard drive had no backups. They had entrusted their backups to their hardware vendor, but the vendor hadn’t done them. Their only option was to start capturing their information again – from scratch. While that may not sound like a disaster, bear in mind that in addition to the disruption, they also lost much of their debtor information.

So, here is our advice:

1. Take your backups seriously.
2. Appoint a single senior person at the firm to take responsibility for ensuring your backups are sound.
3. Keep a copy of your backup off-site.
4. And lastly, ensure that your backup will actually restore if you need it to.

And don’t gamble that it won’t happen to you.

New version of AJS is released

In June 2009 we released version 5.7 of AJS, which includes a number of improvements over previous versions. The client-search has been simplified, and we’ve added a conflict of interest search. SMS communication has been enhanced to facilitate two-way communication, and there are also a number of new billing options in the fee book.

Tariffs have been updated to incorporate the recent tariff increase, and there are also a number of enhancements in the document management and attachments module. We have already started to roll-out the new version to clients, and we hope to have all of our clients on version 5.7 before the end of the year.

New people at AJS

Over the past few months there have been a number of appointments at AJS: Corné Maritz joins us as Account Manager in Bloemfontein, while Lazell Sprague joins us as Account Manager for the Western and Southern Cape. We also welcome Robin de Klerk as a Support Consultant in our Johannesburg office, and Francisca Keyser who manages our Help Desk. Lastly, Chris Pearson has joined the AJS group as Chairman after spending the past 21 years with Korbitec.