There are about 50 small law firms around my office, this is one industry that does not have much IT. most of them outsource their accounting, they only make use of email, excel and PDF for their daily work. I reckon the basic need is accounting, quotation template and sales management which is available in openerp. was hoping someone who has done implementation to share their experiences. Did folks at openerp did this before because I saw some sample data in your document for analytic accounting.

A couple months ago, I made an analysis for of a 4 employees US law firm. The scope was: event tracking, time billing, supplier payments, timer (clock), phone call tracking, email tracking, contract management, court case numbers, arbitration cases, advanced contact management (defendant, plaintiff, petitioner, administrator,... all for one case/project), and even the management of the Client Trust Fund Account. OpenERP was able to do everything out of the box.

Fabrice, this is great! would you be so kind to list down these modules in openerp 7.

It is not a matter of having one module for each of these features. It's a matter of using the standard ones in the right way with the right configuration. The modules I used were the standard modules of project management, billing, accounting, & timesheet. The tricky part (especially the Client Trust Fund Account) was to identify how to configure the accounts in order to get the desired behavior. OpenERP is extremely generic and flexible and we can do almost anything we want with it. The trick is often not to know which module to use, but how they can be configured to get the expected effect.

thanks Fabrice.

Hello,

Did anybody find an efficient configuration for lawyers?

There is a software called Jurisconcept (http://jurisconcept.ca/en/software/juris-evolution/) which is made for lawyers and it does everything a lawyer could possibly want to do. The problem is the price.

So I'm trying to find a way to configure OpenERP to create (beautiful) invoices based on timesheets and to do some simple accounting (there are way too many options in OpenERP, that's hard to understand how it works).

So far, OpenERP is really hard to use and I can't find a way to make nice invoices. And OpenERP doesn't allow you to delete stuff. If you generate an invoice that contains an error, you can't simply delete it. You have to cancel it and there will always be an entry remaining.

Anybody here could give me a little help? Thank you in advance.

You can't delete an invoice after it has been "validate", you should cancel it to put it in draft mode and use it for your next invoice. Openerp is hard at first, however it is not for end user, if you must have some IT background it wouldn't take too long for you to like it.