Clio

Clio is the best option for a solo or small firm law practice

Comments: After 3 years, I am still working at discarding habits and practices built up over 25 years as a practicing attorney to better incorporate Clio's feature into my daily work flow. One of Clio's driving philosophy's is to make lawyers more productive with their time, and make lawyers services more accessible to persons that need legal advice. Clio's focus on providing multiple access points, including mobile apps designed from the ground up with these two goals in mind, will pay off for both Clio and my practice in the long run.

Pros:

The Clio platform is not intended to be a closed, proprietary system. Instead, it forms the foundation for the day to day management of leads, clients, time, documents, and billing, supplemented by almost 200 third party integrations, with new offerings coming on line each month. Clio offers unlimited cloud storage and IOS/Android apps making all of your firm information, clients, and documents available 24/7. Clio continues to innovate and as the leading provider to small/medium law firms throughout the world, I don't worry about whether they will be in business a few years from now. Finally, all, yes all, of your data saved in Clio is easily exportable should you decide to change to a different vendor.

Cons:

Clio's growth means that feature changes must be more fully vetted as they are used by more than 150,000 legal professionals. As they broaden their perspective to encompass larger firms, the pace of change may continue to be more deliberate. The movement and management of files without a third party integration, such as FasterLaw, is cumbersome. Clio's own integrations with Office365 for emails and calendaring remain a work in progress.

Alternatives Considered: CosmoLex and Rocket Matter

Reasons for Choosing Clio: At the time I decided to look at alternatives, in 2017, the product was getting worse, not better.

Reasons for Switching to Clio: Largest user base and least likely to get assimilated or go out of business, forcing another vendor change.

Intuitive and Flexible

Comments: I am happy with Clio and the support they provide. It's helped keep the firm, as well as our third-party answering service, organized and consistent.

Pros:

The ability to integrate other software enable using other software to address aspects of Clio which are good, but not great. As an example, Clio Management's task management is good, but there is not a kanban or gantt feature, but I can easily integrate with Asana, Monday.com, etc.

Cons:

Some aspects address needs in a basic manner, but are not as robust as software which is specifically designed for a single purpose. Using the same example as mentioned in the "Pros" - the task management works and can be automated, but it does not have highly specific features such as kanban or gantt.Additionally, the syncing between Clio Grow and Clio Manage could improve. The two do not sync completely - certain items (ex. emails, I believe) do not sync.Lastly, when trying to export specific sets of data, Clio is time-consuming. We had an attorney who left our firm, and providing her the information from her clients required going to each client and selecting "export" for each aspect of the clients' data (such as, emails, documents, contacts, transactions, etc.)

Alternatives Considered: PracticePanther Legal Software

Reasons for Choosing Clio: Cosmolex is not intuitive. It took a long time for me to become comfortable with the system, and it was not worth the time and energy for getting additional people up to speedMyCase was more intuitive, but lacked integrations which could have enabled better automation than MyCase had.

Switched From: CosmoLex and MyCase

An honest review of CLIO

Pros:

Our timekeepers find the system easy to use. It captures time efficiently. It does what you need a billing system to do. It does a good job with calendaring and basic case management.

Cons:

No feature for tasks that repeat. Year after year, we have asked for this feature and year after year we have been told it was "coming." Seems that they are unable to actually solve this problem.Do NOT select their online payment option, if you have any institutional clients or any clients that prefer to pay by check, eCheck, or ACH. Your clients will be frustrated and Clio will take 2.8% of each payment as they direct all your clients to pay by credit card.

One of the first users of Clio and still give five stars.

Comments: Overall experience has been fantastic, and I have no intentions of ever-changing software. I will retire using Clio. Clio, along with Clio Grow, has enabled us to develop a smooth process for evaluating potential new clients using an intake questionnaire and customizing a pipeline.

Pros:

It's too difficult to describe what is best, I could not manage my practice without this software. It is incredibly user friendly and easy to learn. I use pretty much all aspects of the software on a daily basis and have been using it for more than 10 years. My practice has grown from just one attorney, me, to now four along with paralegals and clerks. Clio has made the growth seamless.

Cons:

I don't have any complaints whatsoever. The software has been essential to my practice in all ways.

Alternatives Considered: Time Tracker, CANVAS, Rocket Matter and Google Calendar

Reasons for Choosing Clio: I used these at other firms. When I opened up my own practice I chose to use Clio.

Switched From: Time Tracker and Asana

Reasons for Switching to Clio: Price, options, versatility, tech support.

Best in class

Comments: I operate an entirely virtual law practice. Keeping all of my workflows and processes in the same ecosystem helps ensure consistency and efficient operations.

Pros:

The single best part about Clio is the user interface. You can't overestimate the drain on your organization and your end-users by poor UX design. Clio is intuitive to use, and easy to customize. Their chat support is the best of any product I've used, in any category.

Cons:

The in-app document management isn't great. It's good enough, but most users will want to integrate with an existing DMS.

Alternatives Considered: CosmoLex and Actionstep

Reasons for Choosing Clio: Cosmolex had a less intuitive UI and didn't allow for batch changes, which makes it hard to iterate and improve. Actionstep has great automation potential, but didn't allow me to charge a second sales tax which is mandatory in my jurisdiction.

Switched From: CosmoLex and Actionstep