Clio

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.

Vorteile

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.

Nachteile

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.

Support easy super good. Clio fixed problems with non english characters in days, Timemattes did not fix it in 20 years we have been complaining.
Clio has extremely good search features and all sorts of filtering. For instance universal search that goes through matters, contacts, events, notes, tasks, time/expenses logs, documents content, doc, names, and communications (emails, sec. mess, phone log).

clio portal for clients, e sign easy to make form-documents connects to IP phone etc.

Faster law is a must I would say. To make a great package even better we subscribed also to Faster Law which has done a fantastic add on to Clio. There you get tools to capture your time automatically, the programs keeps track on how long you spend working on case files, e mails etc. in different cases and suggests billable time for that. There is a lot more like file handling, better way to link e mails, save and link attachments and files, you can explore your files on Clio’s serves in you file explorer.

Vorteile

For us the program has changed everything in the workflow to the better. In our opinion Clio’s forte is how flexible it is. Every law firm has its own different way of organizing workflow and Clio can accommodate for that, at least our whims and quirks which we have abundant of. The program is like potty in your hand. You mold and sculp the program according to your own special needs in the workflow. The only barrier is your own imagination. You decide how information is inserted, in what order and form and how it is presented. You make your own work procedures. You can organize and make chains of tasks beforehand and set the relevant type of chain of tasks to fit the case you are working on. Then, there and now, the future workflow is decided and set for that case.

Nachteile

You can not copy matters/cases and clients. It is not easy to move data fram TM to clio. We decided not to to it. Integration between outlook calander and clio calander does not work, it is so slow it is not usable. But the integration between google cal and clio cal is excellent.

Clio set us up for LawPay. Less than 1 week into this month we suddenly can't take anyone's payments. We call Clio and they tell us there is no problem, must be the customer's problem. On two separate occasions they told us there was no limit to the payments we could intake for bills. Finally contact Lawpay who says there is a limit, we exceeded it, and now we can't take another 70 some odd payments this month and the clients all think we are idiots. Why would they sign us up for a program that limits retainers and payments to $10,000 when Clio knows we have 4 full time employees based on the licensees we have?

Vorteile

I thought everything was integrated and intuitive.

Nachteile

Always something that seems like a simple question but impossible to find the answer. The live customer service has mislead us on two or more occasions.

If you're not used to a system, this can be made into a good system for you. There are a lot of functions missing--like being able to track time associated with flat fee activities (so you can't track productivity or if you do, you can't print out your billable hours without some discussion to the ethics board). You can track e-mails and phone calls, but not faxes, letters, or text messages. You can set tasks for others that you can update, but the update doesn't get sent to the other person. You can set pop-ups on your calendar for yourself, but not for other people. You can track the budget of a case, but not the running total of transactions or expenses. You can integrate with Quickbooks, but you have to import and export the information--the information does not flow freely between the two. The calendar has all of the same pitfalls as Google Calendar because it is Google calendar but with some functions missing. You can upload and download documents, and you must do that in order to save any changes with Clio (unless you pay for HIPAA-compliant Google Drive Professional). Your receptionist has to separately capture phone messages from your client to you because only you can have conversations. Wandering between the conversations page and the logs page means that you will always end up back in the Matters tab. If you're trying to capture a phone call with a person not in the system you have to exit the phone call and lose all of the information to enter that person before you can save the conversation to a file. It's not customizeable. There are some pros over Amicus but many features I miss (such as being able to track time directly with the phone call, including the time the call was initiated) but it has good parts about it. If you're into nitty-gritty capturing of information and you have the time to invest it can be a good platform but trying to teach established attorneys how to rework their legal practice around it is difficult.

Vorteile

It's online.
The timer can be stopped and started easily.

Nachteile

I spend about two (2) hours a day implementing workarounds to make the system work because it was not built for family law practice or file review. It's a good backup system but it's nothing very reliable unless you're willing to invest the time into making it work.

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Think about how you use your legal practice--if you couldn't go online today, this is not going to make you online tomorrow. You have to completely rework how you do things because of the amount of upload/download, import/export time that you do. This is NOT an all-in-one system and it CANNOT all be done online at this time. The next updates were pushed back until September so I don't know what will be resolved between now and then.

My overall experience has been great! They are always making sure to take the next step in integrations and constantly keep their software up to date and secure.

Vorteile

I liked how the IT team literally walked me through the entire set-up/integration. To be 100% honest, they recovered & transferred my crashed billing entries from Timeslips into their system. There are so many positives re: Clio software that I cannot pick what I like most; however, the Quick Bill & Payment Plan features are very convenient. Oh, I can't write a review and not mention the LawPay integration. That is also a great feature!

Nachteile

I hate when I am asked for instructions on setting up their client portal because I have no instructions to give them. I wish Clio had a .pdf that I could hand to every new client. I also wish there were more options re: billing history printouts for the Court. This is VERY important when asking for ATTY fees.