In private use · not yet generally available
Practice management for Canadian law firms
Everything below is one package. None of it is an add-on.
The deadline, the undertaking it came from, the document that discharges it, the time you spent and the invoice it lands on are one chain, because none of them is a second copy.
Normally four or more products, from four or more vendors.
Four subscriptions, four support desks, four places the same client's name is typed. And the integrations meant to join them become the thing you maintain: a sync that runs overnight, a field that quietly stops mapping, two vendors who each say it is the other one's end. Kamenic is the one database underneath all of it, so there is nothing to join.
All eleven are on from your first day, and not one of them is compulsory. Use the notebook and nothing else, if that is what your practice needs — the rest waits, costing you no attention, until the day you reach for it. And not one of them is the junior version of a product you would otherwise buy on its own.
Your records stay in Canada. Your clients' documents stay in your own Microsoft 365.
Matters, time, ledgers and minute books are held on Canadian servers, in the Canada region — not for processing elsewhere, not for backup elsewhere, full stop.
Your clients' documents are different: the files stay in your firm's own Microsoft 365, where they already are, and we reach them with your permission. So that you can search inside them, Kamenic keeps an extracted copy of their text beside your matter, on the same Canadian servers. Switch that off and Kamenic purges what it holds.
Your practice, and the places you practise.
Legal software usually arrives with someone else's way of working already baked in, and the firm spends years bending around it. The things that differ most — firm to firm, and province to province — are the things Kamenic puts in your hands instead of guessing at. Set them once and every matter follows them.
Every firm has a way of doing things that took years to work out. Kamenic is built to take instruction from it.
An illustration, not a real firm's matter. Every row carries a shape and a word as well as a colour — an undertaking given and one received are never told apart by hue alone.
One notebook per matter — and one that holds all of them.
Everything that happens on a matter lands in one merged stream. Narrow it to notes, tasks, the calendar, deadlines, or undertakings — the records do not move, your view does.
Undertakings are first-class, given and received, each with its own state and its own discharge. Deadlines are computed from the event that triggers them and show the calculation and the rule they came from, so a date can be checked rather than trusted.
Open it on a single matter, or open the one that gathers everything you have written across every file you touch — each note still carrying the matter it belongs to. You have a personal notebook that belongs to no matter at all, and the firm has one of its own.
Drafted, versioned and compared where you practise.
Variables come from the matter, not from a merge field you filled in twice. Change the purchase price and every document that quotes it says so.
Every version is kept, none is overwritten, and comparing two of them — as a diff or as a redline — is a view, not an export to a different program and back.
The Purchaser shall pay $412,000.00 $418,500.00 on closing.
Both figures are the matter's {{purchase_price}} variable, at v6 and at v7. Four other documents quote it.
An illustration, not a real firm's document.
Typed from the 31 August statement. Kamenic cannot verify this figure.
142 entries to 31 August, none editable since posting
38 client ledgers, footed
An illustration, not a real firm's data. The amber line is the only permanently unverifiable figure in the accounting module — because a person reads it off a piece of paper, and the software will not pretend otherwise.
Every figure says what it rests on.
Time is captured beside the work that earned it. It becomes a pro forma you can argue with, then an invoice, then a receipt against the client's ledger — one chain, no re-keying, and the trust side is double-entry throughout.
The reconciliation is not a report the software writes about itself. It is the ledgers, footed, beside the one number a human had to type — labelled as such, every month, forever.
And it foots twice: the bank against the trust ledger, and the trust ledger against the sum of every client's ledger. A trust account can agree with the bank to the cent and still be wrong about whose money it is.
Rules the software holds itself to — not settings a firm turns on.
Every figure carries what it is made of and what it rests on. Where a figure depends on something the software genuinely cannot check, it says so, in a different colour, every time.
A report that is out by $432.00 renders “out by $432.00” and still shows every row. Hiding a discrepancy removes the evidence you would need to find it.
The database refuses to update or delete a posted ledger entry — for everyone, including the firm that owns it. A correction stands beside the entry it corrects.
Ask who the directors were on a date three years ago and it recalculates the answer from the resolutions. There is no separate register to fall out of step.
A refusal names its reason. So does a blank. An unadopted deadline rule will not produce a date, and it will tell you that is why.
Named, so you can ask for the one you need.
These are being built, not shipped. If one of them is the thing you need, say so — it moves up the list.
A law practice — whatever its size, whatever its province, whatever the work.
Status
Kamenic is in private use. We are not taking general sign-ups yet.
If you practise law in Canada and this sounds like the software you have been asking for, write to us. We will show you where it is up to, and we would like to hear what your practice needs — the early firms are the ones setting the order of what gets built.