Stefano Sutti was kind enough to respond to my earlier post about Knomos in Australia. He has given permission for me to post his reply to the list, which I now do below. Knomos is a very promising project. I'm looking forward to version 1.0d which will be out soon.
regards, Darryl Barlow ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Studio Legale Sutti <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: 21-Oct-2005 20:48 Subject: Knomos in Australia and elsewhere To: Darryl Barlow <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], Gianluca Gilardi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, michel morelli <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Massimo Chieruzzi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Dear Darryl, I was forwarded your message concerning Knomos which was circulated in the "Debian-lex" list. Please feel free to circulate my reply also there if you believe it may be of interest. Let me thank you first for your interest in our little Open Source project. Yes, the application was developed having in mind Italian and other continental legal systems where public tariff-based systems exist which must be supported either for billing purposes, or because the tariff is the criteria applicable for the recovery of legal costs from the losing party or the debtor in litigation and arbitration. Knomos automatically calculates the amounts involved, on the basis of the tables available and of the specifics of each matter, but i) such accounting stays conveniently out of the way if one is not interested , and just bills by the hour or by any other method; ii) it could theoretically be useful elsewhere for firms wishing to develop and apply a "private" tariff system in dealing with a given client or a plurality thereof (e.g., the price of one letter in a matter worth "x" is "y"), something which is for example very widespread amongst patent attorneys, including in common-law jurisdictions; the tables used by the program to make the necessary calculations are in fact freely configurable and extensible by each administrator. We are however very proud of Knomos's sophisticated hourly billing features. Each user is assigned a hourly rate - which is hardly a great achievement -, which is taken by default from the higher rate amongst rates applicable to groups of which he is a member, if any; but this rate can be altered to a fix amount, or in percentage, for specific clients, kinds of matters, single matters. Additionally, for specific clients, kinds of matters, or single matters, fixed rates can be defined which overcome individual rates entirely. Last but not least, the result can still be corrected before being "dropped" in the field to be used for billing, but the original value is however kept for verification, statistical and other possible internal purposes. As far as the language versions available, it happens that most of them have been released at a very early stage of development, exactly to allow people to have an early experience of the package, and perhaps start working on additional language versions.. The version 1.0d, which is due in some 15 days should complet and fix the current "pidgin English" version and add German, French and perhaps Spanish to the languages already available. All news concerning future developments, as well as some documentation under way on how to install, configure and use Knomos, along with a brief description of its philosophy, are and will be made available in different languages at http://www.knomos.org. Setup: this is a sore point. Actually, not only do Knomos offer very limited setup instructions in English, but this is also the case for Italian or any other language. The pure truth is while we have obvious pressures to fix and develop the product for our own use, including that of SLS members who are not Italian mother-tongue, we *know* how to install it, and accordingly the development of an automated or well-documented procedure to do that remains a relatively low priority in comparison with other objectives. In our experience, however, most people who know their way around Apache, MySQL and PHP ultimately succeed in installing and configuring Knomos. We are also happy to provide some basic assistance to colleagues who may want to call our headquarters to get some hints.. OK, this is far from ideal and from the slick and polished experience one may have with things like SUSE 10, but this for the time being is the simple truth. Yours sincerely, -- Stefano Sutti, LL.M. Managing Partner ------------------------- Studio Legale Sutti Via Montenapoleone 8 20121 Milan, Italy Central e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Web http://www.sutti.com Tel. +39 02 76204.1 Fax +39 02 76204806
