ProLaw Agent Setup & Outlook Programmatic Access

I have struggled mightily with the implementation of the ProLaw agent at multiple law firms. The agent is an integral piece to disseminating information to firm leaders and responsible professionals automatically. I consider daily/weekly docketing reports for litigation a requirement for law firm over 3 or 4 professionals.

The ProLaw agent setup is fairly easy the first piece is to make a login. It's the same process as a normal ProLaw shortcut, except there is a slash agent at the end.

\\ProLaw\ProLaw\ProLawLocal.exe /agent

If you have never used the agent before, you'll have to assign the agent a license. Every ProLaw firm is given licenses for the Agent when you purchase ProLaw, but some firms unknowingly use that license for users later on. You have to have an account with a license for the agent to launch.

The next obstacle and the purpose of this blog post really lies with an office/outlook configuration requirement. If IT does not change the default outlook configuration, the agent will not send emails automatically. This isn't an issue with ProLaw, but rather Outlook. Programmatic access has to be disabled in order for ProLaw to send emails automatically. If you just give access for 10 minutes, the agent won't be able to send emails the next day.

You have to right click and run outlook as an administrator in order to change the preference, but once a reboot occurs, or you log off and on, the setting will not stay.

Solution:

I think the right way to fix this is to create a group policy and assign that policy to the agent login or the computer that the agent is logging into. Click here for how to create a group policy. This shouldn't be a global policy, but only for the agent.

Second option is to add a registry key for the machine manually. Click here for a good website with the registry key variants by office version. This is the less technical approach and usually a good solution. More info from Microsoft.

To test if the agent is working, you should be able to log off, and then back on, launch the agent (and sometimes outlook depending on your ProLaw/Windows version), and the emails should send automatically. I will typically go to the agent and remove the last run date on one of the reports to verify.