Users

Endorsements

Attorney Jim Bruno, who has used Power Closer since July, 1999, wrote us the following letter.

Moran, Morehouse & Bruno
Erie, Pennsylvania

February 22, 2001

Dear Geoff and Bill:

     You have a first class product and run a first class operation. From the day I purchased your program, it has made my real estate practice so much easier.

     I suspect that the larger firms in town who have the high-priced closing programs don't have the degree of satisfaction and the confidence in the support that I do with you and your program.

     Please feel free to use me as a referral for anybody making inquiry into the usefulness and ease of your program. Thanks for everything.

Jim Bruno

Power Closer was reviewed in an article entitled "Automating the Power Closer" which appeared in the April/May 2001 issue of Law Office Computing Magazine, and which concludes as follows.

Pros: Greatly simplifies RESPA statement preparation

Cons: Limited use for real estate lawyers other than those preparing RESPA statements

Verdict: Recommended if you are representing lenders or developers, act as a settlement agent or prepare HUD forms

The magazine article was written by Jay Hollander, Esquire, of
Holland and Company LLC, who practices law in New York City.
The above excerpt is used with permission of the publishers.

Patrick F. Smith, who practices law in Birmingham,
Alabama, wrote the following e-mail to Neil J. Squillante,
manager of The TechnoLawyer Community discussion group.

From: Patrick F. Smith <pfsmith

quicklink.net>
To: Neil J. Squillante <nsquillante

netsquire.com;:
TechnoLawyer Discussion List <listserver

technolawyer.com>
Cc: West Group WebMaster <webmaster

westpub.com>; Geoff White <GeoffWhite

argosylegal.com>
Date: Friday, April 09, 1999 10:35 AM
Subject: Real Estate Settlement Software and Tech Support

I am writing to sing the praises of the usability of our new Real Estate Settlement Program and the technical support provided by the company that makes it. In the meantime, I am also going to have some less than kind things to say about our old program and its lack of technical support.

About 2 months ago, fed up with our old program and its manufacturer's non-existent technical support and un-fixed bugs in the program itself, we purchased and installed a 5-user version of POWER CLOSER manufactured by Argosy Legal Systems and distributed through Blumberg/Excelsior. I read through the manual before installing the program and then went about loading it onto our server (a Pentium Pro 200 Compaq Deskpro running NT Workstation 4.0), and on all of our workstations (2 Cyrix 166 and 2 AMD-K6 233's - the 166's have 32mb and the 233s have 64mb of RAM). I also purchased and installed Quicken Basic 99 to use to cut checks after exporting the closing data from Power Closer. Installation was seamless. Everything worked just exactly like it was supposed to. How often does that happen these days?

After I had the program up and running for a couple of weeks and we were starting to get the hang of it, I could not open the program on my workstation one morning. It would open on the others, but not on mine. I called Tech Support - got through to Geoff White, one of the owners - on the first call. He instantly diagnosed my problem as a being with the Microsoft Access database engine (I had installed new software that used an earlier version of the engine). There was a file on our installation disks to correct the problem and Geoff walked me through it and made sure that the program worked right before he let me off the phone. A couple of weeks later, I had a problem with a printer driver. Whenever I would try to print to the particular printer, the program locked up. Again a call to the company and again a live human being on the first call. This time Bill White. Bill again walked me through the installation of the printer and made sure that everything worked right before letting me off of the phone. I was very impressed.

My paralegal of 5 years recently left and after he left I started doing some of our closing documents myself. I quickly saw why he was so inefficient. He was keying in data two or three times to produce a settlement statement, checks and a closing package. I rewrote all of our merge documents using the data exported from Power Closer and now, all information is keyed in once, and all documents are produced from the single merge file. We are working so much more efficiently that I do not feel the need to replace the paralegal. This should mean a hefty boost to our bottom line due to reduced overhead associated with the paralegal.

We switched to Power Closer because the new Windows version of our old Program [name deleted] was very unsatisfactory. [A recital of problems encountered with the other program has been deleted.]

I looked at three or four different products. The top of the line products (LandTech, AIM, First Data) were impressive but, at $3000+ for our three user office, way out of my budget. I decided to give Power Closer a try and we have been very satisfied. It would be nice if the program had a few more features, like the ability to produce an amortization schedule from within the program and a built-in aggregate escrow adjustment calculator, as well as the ability to write checks from directly in the program, exporting the data to Quicken or QuickBooks after the checks are written. And it would be great if the program shipped with FNMA, FHA and VA multistate merge forms included. However, for the price (around $700 for the 5 user version), and the quality of support, this program gets my vote as one of the really good ones.

As for [program name deleted], it is going back to [vendor name deleted] with a request for a credit to my account. The program, in my opinion, does not live up to its billing.

Patrick F. Smith
Strickland & Smith
Birmingham, Alabama 35223
pfsmithquicklink.net

Patrick F. Smith
Strickland & Smith, Attorneys at Law
4 Office Park Circle, Suite 212
Birmingham, Alabama 35223
Phone 205/870-4440
Fax 205/870-3335
e-mail: pfsmithquicklink.net

Anyone interested in law office automation should consider subscribing to The TechnoLawyer Community's excellent discussion group,
where the above e-mail appeared.

October 21, 2003 Thanks for putting such a great product on the market at an affordable price. We should have bought it a long time before we did.
	Weldon P. Phillips Jr., Esq. Managing Member Integrity Title, LLC Denver CO

Gail Gearhiser, who has used Power Closer
since 1998, wrote us as follows:

Irwin, Myklebust, Savage & Brown, P.S.
Pullman, Washington
January 12, 2005

Bill,

Good to hear from you. I have to share a story with you about your program.

One of the title companies in Pullman had a major program crash of their "custom" software and, because they had several closings that day, called up to use our system. We set them up on a "guest" database and, with very little instruction, their agent was able to learn the program and get her closings done on time. She was shocked to learn what we paid vs. what they paid for a program which, as I understand it, works just as well if not better than their expensive custom software.

It is a terrific product and I also advised the agent that the customer support is one of the best!

Thanks Bill.

Gail

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