MyCase And LawPay — Better Together
Why small and midsize firms win big in a blockbuster merger.
Legal practice management software is the backbone of any law firm. Whether you’re adopting new technology or considering a change to your long-held platform, the latest features can revolutionize your practice. The reviews in this buyer’s guide provide a glimpse of just how easy it can be — and how your firm can instantly become more efficient and profitable.
The LegalTech Publishing Buyer's Guides and the products and services listings below are supported by vendor sponsorships.For an even deeper look at Practice Management solutions,
Check out our Practice Management by Practice Area Buyer’s Guide here »
AbacusLaw is a comprehensive practice management tool that provides a central location to manage day-to-day activities as well as the financial business of the firm. Host the system on-premises or securely in a private cloud. The platform is easily customizable for whatever a firm needs, including input screens, automation rules, documents, reports, and more.
Over 40,000 professionals in the legal business rely on Assembly Software’s products to power their firms. Their flagship, cloud-based platform, Neos, configures precisely to a firm’s needs with its case checklist, document management, and analytics features. Assembly’s brands include Needles, Trialworks, and Neos.
Clio eases the day-to-day of over 150,000 legal professionals spanning 90 countries with intuitive time tracking, billing, matter management, mobile apps, and more to streamline every task from client intake to invoice.
Filevine is the leading cloud-based collaborative work solution for law firms. Powering everything from case management and document management to client communication and business analytics, Filevine’s custom and bespoke tools simplify and elevate practice management and growth.
At Get Staffed Up, we staff your law firm with incredible, full-time, offshore virtual assistants in two key areas: Administrative Virtual Assistant and Marketing Virtual Assistant.
Lawmatics is the #1 automation platform for law firms, offering Legal client intake, CRM, marketing automation, billing, and much more, all in one easy-to-use software. With Lawmatics, law firms streamline their operations, impress clients, and win more business. To learn more, visit www.lawmatics.com.
Connecting Legal. Litify is the complete legal operating platform that breaks down business silos to power better business outcomes for legal teams and better legal outcomes for their clients.
Moxtra powers your OneStop Customer Portal – your digital branch, with continuous collaboration experiences, helping you retain and grow customers, manage your distributed organization, and lower your costs for doing business. Moxtra’s Customer Collaboration Platform can power your branded OneStop Customer Portal as a fluid extension of your existing website, web or mobile app, or as a standalone web and mobile app.
MyCase is a complete law practice management solution that helps firms run efficiently from anywhere, provide an exceptional client experience, and easily track firm performance so that they can reach their business goals.
Legal Practice Management Software Built for Today’s Busy Firms
SmartAdvocate is a fully integrated legal case management system made to handle the challenges of today’s fast paced, highly competitive, and technologically demanding world. Initially designed by and for personal injury and mass tort litigation firms, SmartAdvocate is now used by a wide range of practices.
Zola Suite provides firms with the most comprehensive, cloud-based practice management solution that eliminates data silos and helps your firm maximize efficiency and increase profitability. With best-in-class matter management tools and robust billing, accounting and reporting, Zola Suite’s end-to-end platform connects your front and back offices, delivering a single source of truth for your firm.
Jared speaks with Joshua Hostilo of Filevine, Blake Roberts of Lawmatics, Marie Burgess of Paradigm, and Igor Selizhuk of SmartAdvocate.
Highlights
Jared is joined by Joshua Lenon of Clio, Dr. Cain Elliot of Filevine, Matt Spiegel of Lawmatics, Tomas Suros of AbacusNext, and Karrtik Rao of Moxtra. Together, they discuss the most compelling feature-based argument for a law firm to adopt a case management software as well as how a law practice management system can help in integrating lead management and utilizing data.
Highlights
Jared speaks with a fabulous foursome of guests: Dov Slansky of Litify, Jim Garrett of Assembly Software,Colin Li of Paradigm and Igor Selizhuk of Smart Advocate. They discuss what merger mania means for your practice management tech.
Highlights
What does law practice management software do?
From finding new clients to accounting for payments received, the best law practice management software forms the backbone of a law firm’s business operations, bringing together varied tasks into one centralized system.
What are the best practice management systems?
The best case management systems — like the ones listed in our buyers guide — create a relational database that aggregates all kinds of information to specific matters and clients. This includes everything from intake to invoicing. Doing so allows for a holistic overview of your practice and breaks down silos between different types of information, allowing for greater efficiency, easier communication, and increased data security.
What are the top legal practice management software functions?
Lawyers live in emails and love to draft documents, and at its core this software provides one centralized trove of information. Key functions include filing systems, calendaring, real-time collaboration among lawyers and clients, deadline tracking, secure messaging, signature tools, and billing systems.
How do you set up new case management software?
There are two components: onboarding the new software, and getting the data into the new system. Migrating data like contacts and calendars is self-explanatory, but migrating more complex data should be done by a vendor with experience setting up these types of systems. The best software companies will provide on-demand training resources as well as support specialists who help to set it up and remain available to maximize its benefits upon implementation.
There’s a term for when attorneys use Latin and other arcane languages to describe legal processes to consumers: “legalese.”
But there’s no similar term for when vendors use technical and other arcane languages to describe their legal software operations to lawyers.
True, this dynamic may seem unfair. But now we have The Legal Tech-to-English Dictionary to help us cope.
Read on for a crash course in practice management terms.
Law Practice Management Software
1. A database for managing law firm clients that organizes primary case information under matter files.
2. A platform for systematizing client data collected from integrated systems via software integrations.
3. Client files organized by email subfolders … in 2002.
Lawyer 1: I just bought a new law practice management software, and I’m spending so much less time looking for everything because it’s all in one place now!
Lawyer 2: Yeah, you should see this Excel file I put together. It’s badass.
Lawyer 1: Just … stop.
Cf. Organization porn.
Relational Database
1. A software that recognizes relationships between segments of data.
2. A system based on the relational model of data, created by Edgar F. Codd.
Cf. Law practice management software
Cf. The Oracle of (Kevin) Bacon.
Client Portal
1. A software system feature that allows law firms to share certain data with clients via an in-system, encrypted holding container, which clients can access using a unique password or PIN (personal identification number).
2. The means by which unwieldy assignments can seamlessly enter your workflow.
Lawyer 1: The good news is that my clients can send me stuff via our portal. That’s also the bad news.
Lawyer 2: Ba-dum-cha.
Lawyer 1: Thanks. I’m here till Thursday. Try the veal.
Cf. Online document drives, most of which are de facto customer portals, also allow users to share information with others in a secure format. Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, Dropbox, et al. offer such features. These can also be connected to law practice management software via integrations.
Cf. Like how in action movies, there’s always a portal with all these aliens coming in to invade the planet. Honestly, I don’t know which portal is worse: that one, or the one that drops a 90-page contract in your lap for review.
Integration
1. Connecting two softwares via an API (application programming interface) that allows each software system to share data with the other.
2. Connecting two softwares via an intermediary program (like Zapier) so that the two programs can share data without the need of an API.
3. A primary reason modern practice management software can be life-changing, particularly for those currently using a combination of dictation machines, hard-copy markups, and the Logo turtle.
Cf. Linking a law practice management software to a productivity software (email, calendar) allows users to sync emails, events and tasks with client files within the law practice management software, cementing that program as a holistic solution for law firm data management. Linking an accounting program to a law practice management software allows users to push expense and invoice data into the accounting program.
Business Intelligence
1. A method for collecting and aggregating data into a digestible format that allows software users to make data-driven business decisions.
2. Reports generated from software systems focused on specific business metrics, including key performance indicators.
3. You know, pretty much everything your law school neglected to tell you about. But, hey: You still know what the Rule Against Perpetuities is!
Lawyer 1: How’s your P&L statement looking for the last quarter?
Lawyer 2: Uh. Um. Res Ipsa Loquitur.
Lawyer 1: Say what?
Cf. NOT the Edsel.
Jared Correia is the host of the Non-Eventcast.
Jared Correia is the host of the Non-Eventcast.
In curating the Non-Event, we’re lucky to have some of the best data regarding our audience’s general areas of interest. Our top resource is our marketing partner Bombora: the largest B2B data cooperative, where numerous publishers pool anonymized user data to determine areas of reader interest.
Courtesy of Bombora, we bring you the practice management-related topics of interest to Above the Law readers, based on surging interest from April–June 2021. (Figures will be updated periodically.)
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