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Amicus brings new approach to court software
Clark County Clerk of Courts Ronald Vincent used to implement CourtView software but has migrated to Amicus and Vincent said that “it was a natural transition. He added that he is “looking forward to modeling it for other clerks of courts. They are asking me about it.” (Photo courtesy of Clark County Courthouse).
RICHARD WEINER
Legal News Reporter
Published: April 28, 2016
A long, long time ago, the Akron-based legal software company CourtView, and company co-founder Peter Zackaroff, helped revolutionize court software. Today, CourtView is a dominant force in the court management software (CMS) business space, with hundreds of installations in courts across the country.
With CourtView sold off, and then re-sold, Zackaroff and crew are at it again with a new company The Amicus Group, and a new approach to justice system software that Zackaroff thinks will be even more revolutionary than CourtView was.
It would need to be, he said. “The court management system is broken,” said Zackaroff. “With The Amicus Group, we decided to reimagine a CMS from the ground up.”
To do that, Zackaroff said that the new company’s approach would be from the attorney’s point of view.
“As an attorney, I look to the law for a business model. It is a challenge to get lawyers and programmers on the same page. So we try to tweak our codes to make the platforms more universal, to yield a more pliable solution set.”
That solution set includes completely automating the entire system from each input point, all the way from the beginning to the end.
That is where the name came from, Zackaroff said.
The word “amicus” means “friend of the court,” said Zackaroff. “We really mean what the name Amicus says. We want to be partners in the truest sense of the word.” He also noted that there is a Canadian legal software company with the same name, but said “we are not in the same space. We will never be in conflict with one another.”
Zackaroff said he never envisioned a life as a major legal software developer when he graduated from The University of Akron School of Law in 1980. Then, he said, “I got caught up in technology.”
After “working around town” for a few years, he found himself as general counsel for a local company where he said he “was trusted with managing their conversion from mainframe to client server system, which had over 400 offices worldwide and 4,000-plus employees.”
“The owner of the company that we selected to manage that process, David Crawford of Crawford Consulting in Fairlawn, is now my partner,” Zackaroff said.
Crawford and crew did the development and migration. As the program concluded successfully after a couple of years, Zackaroff said, “I remained friendly with Crawford. Then one day, he called me and said ‘I purchased this company. It has something to do with court management. Would you be interested in coming on board?’”
The product ultimately became CourtView Justice Solutions.
“We grew the company successfully,” Zackaroff said. Eventually, the company had 160 employees and had a presence in around 300 courts around the country, including 30 percent of Ohio courts.
CourtView “was eventually acquired by a larger company—Maximus out of Virginia, which was primarily a consulting company that acquired technology companies,” said Zackaroff.
Maximus kept him and several others on after the buyout, “but the business of technology in the court space provides very small profit margins,” Zackaroff said. Ultimately, Maximus sold CourtView to a Canadian company called Constellation.
“Life in that second acquisition,” he said, “was not attractive.”
So, about six years ago, he said, “We took a couple of key guys and left to start another company, self-funding it. We wanted to get back to our service roots.”
While the new product was in development, the new company kept busy, offering maintenance for CourtView and for other products that the previous company had developed.
This activity kept Amicus in touch with numerous CourtView customers, and, when the new product was ready, Zackaroff said he had a ready-made base of potential clients, including Rocky River Clerk of Courts Deborah Comery, who said that she has known Zackaroff, “since the late 1990s. When our court originally picked CourtView, Peter was the project manager. He is a really knowledgeable guy. He is an attorney, so he brings a wonderful skill set to his new endeavor and it is good to see him with his new CMS venture.”
Although Rocky River has not migrated to Amicus, previous CourtView customers Licking County and Clark County have.
The new Amicus platform solves three basic problems with current CMS platforms, Zackaroff said.
“The first problem is that the technology itself is difficult to keep updated, particularly by the user. The second is that the workarounds people use do not keep up with the technological change rate. And the third is that software maintenance is very expensive.”
In a two-hour demo, Zackaroff showed how Amicus solves these and other problems, primarily by creating an entire system based upon interactive modules that relate with one another through a single user interface that all users have access to. (For techies: it is built on an Oracle ADF platform “with a number of free and open source extensions,” he said).
One way to save costs, he said, is to use open source code whenever possible, like using Google Maps to locate a courthouse or the scene of a crime.
The modules themselves are built from “tentacles of code” that stretch throughout the entire system, he said. This allows the jurisdictionally-based flexibility that current CMS does not, allowing granular customization and which, most importantly, allows each user to update the system “on the fly,” eliminating the need for expensive maintenance.
Because of the user-accessible flexibility built into the code, Zackaroff said that he can sell the product for considerably less money than current CMS’s, and with no maintenance fees.
The end result is a system that allows each user to post and receive information along each step of a legal process—for instance, from an arrest, through an indictment, and through trial and appeal, Zackaroff said, automatically emailing each necessary document to each stakeholder along the way. And the open source add-ons make the system even more usable, he said.
“Tell me what document you have and the tasks associated with it,” Zackaroff said, “and our system can automate all of the process.”
There is also automatic calendar coordination, and an imaging solution attached to the system, which can sit in the cloud or on a local server, Zackaroff said.
As far as Clark County goes, it is “so far, so good,” said the county’s Clerk of Courts Ronald Vincent.
Clark County has recently replaced CourtView with Amicus and Vincent said that “it was a natural transition. He added that he is “looking forward to modeling it for other clerks of courts. They are asking me about it.”