PracticePanther Legal Software reviews

The user experience from the moment a client logs onto our website, uses the embedded intake form, to create a client profile to PP is seamless. This is just one of the time-saving tools we have discovered. This automated way of working and being able to integrate systems has forced M Legal to rethink how we work and more importantly, how to we can simplify our working processes.
While many of us worked with CRMs in the past, most of them were clunky and stand-alone systems that could not work with other applications or software. PP has made managing clients much easier, where our lawyers are in control from the moment a case is initiated, all the way through to billing clients.
We have experienced our fair share of poor technical support teams when using other software programs. With PP, despite the time differences between Miami and Sydney, their technical support team are always available, whether it is through the chat portal, email or by phone. Each technical person is professional, knowledgeable and continues to take care of your matter until it is resolved. Further, they always have something new to teach you about the PP system on each call. I cannot express how impressed we are, with what we consider as stellar service from this tech support team.

Naturally, a product such as this is not going to have universal application across all legal fields. I would say that in the immigration space the status of a case is really important, so having a status bar that is customisable would be a feature that could be improved. Also, a lot of our data from clients are taken from in-take forms - we require intake forms that are easier to build and that have the capability of storing more information. While these are work in progress type issues, this certainly does not take away from PP's product, which we believe is a well designed and thought through CRM system.

Price - either $59/mo or $49/mo if paid the year in full.
Fee to bill clients on-line: $.20 per transaction plus 1.95%
Workflow customizable - Yes, you can customize the workflow on different case-types.
Activity Log - easy access history.
Create Contact on the fly as creating matter - easy to create a Contact during the process of creating a matter.
Intake form for new clients - Yes, can put a link on your website so new clients can fill-out a new client form, and that info will auto fill into the client's PP account.
Time tracking timers - you can have multiple different timers open and running at the same time and assign them.
Mobile App - there is no mobile App, but the site is mobile optimized.
E-file integration - there is No e-file integration.
Color assignments - there are up to 6 colors that you can assign to parties & roles.
Task customizable - Yes, you can customize task flows.
Easy to create and merge documents - Yes, it's very easy to create and merge documents with the program.
PDF-auto convert - No, it cannot auto PDF convert a document.
Create documents that can merged - Yes. This program makes it easy to create documents that can be merged.
Support - Yes, support seems to be free.
Notify client when upload a document - Yes, you can notify a client a document gets uploaded that you want them to review or be aware of.
Email syncing - very good syncing with Gmail and Outlook.
Emails linked to a matter - Yes. Easy to link emails to a matter.
Client Portal - Yes.

The only thing that kept me from staying with PracticePanther, is that MyCase allows you to be able to set future billing to go out to a client(s) and forget it.
PracticePanther has a bit of a 'workaround' if you get the client's Visa/Debit card on file, but many times clients are uneasy giving you their card number.
With Criminal Defense clients that need to make monthly (or future) payments on a retainer amount, MyCase allows you to set-up future dates where a client will be emailed a bill, which they can tap on a button and pay on-line. This is the main thing that made me go with MyCase.
But if not for that, I would have stayed with either PracticePanther or Smokeball. Smokeball had/has the slickest software for being able to send emails from (either) Outlook or Gmail, and a small window at the bottom allows you to connect that email to a matter. Smokeball's software also made/makes it very easy to sync a Word document with a Client/Matter.

Dead simple instant deployment, and intuitive features that require little to no training.

All clients are organized as an individual person, who might be associated with a company, but to use all of the features, you need to designate an individual as the client. Invoicing by e-mail, credit card payments, and e-mail tracking don't work well when you try to make a company a client without an individual's contact information.

The ease of PP is paramount! I have found it very simple to use, invite clients to use, and for staff to train and use.

I dislike the cost of using PP to collect credit card payments from clients, and I dislike that I cannot assign more than a single email to a client account/matter.

This software is intuitive, easy to navigate and very user-friendly. Tech support is promptly available and they are very patient. Practice Panther continues to make improvements on the software and they listen to their customers feedback. They have fixed our issues with our calendar being very slow to load. It's fast now and working very well.

There are still room for improvement in terms of features and functions. (1) The format (layout) of the calendar is not user-friendly for mid to large firms with more than 10 employees. Everyone's events are scattered across the calendar and overlap with each other which makes difficult to identify availability for specific staff. Events are displayed with different colors assigned to each staff. It's hard to follow 10+ different colors on computer screen and it is definitely not working for staff who are color-blind. It's really difficult to see who has appointments at each hour throughout the day. We suggested to have columns for each staff so that it only takes a glance to identify who is available when, just like how calendars are in Time Matters from Lexis Nexis. (2) Sorting function for customized fields is not available unfortunately. What makes this software great is the customization you can make to fit it to your exact needs. However, customized fields are not sort-able, and without the sorting function for the customized fields, data is not as valuable and usable as it should be. As a legal administrator who manages the data and runs productivity report for legal staff, we are currently spending a lot of time downloading the information from the software to MS Excel, sorting and manipulating the data in Excel, and finally coming back to the PracticePanther to make necessary changes within the software. (Continues to overall experience)

I love the IT help, the invoicing system and the templates feature. I had a lot of questions and needed a lot of help in the beginning. Being able to schedule times to discuss my issues with the IT guys at PracticePanther was great. The fact that they can take over your computer remotely so they can see what you see in real time is even better. Their response time to non-scheduled issues is pretty fast. I have also found their FAQs and how to videos to be extremely helpful but having a live person to speak with who can access your computer is just as good as having someone standing next to me while I work.

The invoicing system is phenomenal. It keeps track of all of my client banking accounts. I can see at any time how much is in my IOLTA account, how much is in my operating account, how much a client owes, how much a client has paid and how much I have billed a client but not yet invoiced. I can do this client by client, matter by matter or as an overall total. LawPay is free if you sign up through PracticePanther which is awesome because it handles my credit card transactions and when a client pays, it automatically updates my invoicing and accounts. PracticePanther also knows how to deduct things from a client's retainer when sending out an invoice so you don't have to worry about that either. Their timing device feeds right into the system. It is awesome.

Unlike a number of the cheaper practice management software programs on the market today, Practice Panther has a wide range of functions within the software which are easy to use. Instead of just having "Tasks" or "to-dos", PP allows you to create Activities which can be "Events" "E-mails" "Phone calls" or "Tasks". On the Task front, PP allows you to set sub-reminders that can send you e-mails or text messages in advance, like say "7 days before," and "3 days before," for a filing deadline. I also think it is pretty fantastic that PP shows whether a time entry has been completed for EVERY SINGLE ACTIVITY marked "completed" or "in progress". This would be incredibly useful for practitioners (mostly civil) managing staff and trying to deal with staff not accounting for all of their time in billing. The "mail sync" function is also easy to use, and allows you to e-mail out of your native software (MS Outlook, GMAIL, etc) and simply "bcc" the client matter itself. When you do this, the e-mail is automatically saved into the matter. Almost every other program out there that I have used requires you to use their client messaging portal to get the same functionality.

The templates are easy to use for creating documents to merge out of PP also. Think client engagement letters, releases, and basic letterheads that you use in every file. We don't use PP for accepting payments so I cannot comment on that portion.

1. Matter pre-bills or invoicing. In many civil cases there will be a time when you need to prepare a billing report to present to the court solely for a claim of attorney's fees. In other software that I have used, you can run a report for a set period of time or type of billing entries which will then create a printable draft invoice-looking document. You would then be able to slap an exhibit sticker on that document and use it for your attorney's fee request. I haven't found a way to easily do this in PP yet, and it seems like you would have to utilize a draft invoice which captures all time billed in the matter. I could be wrong.

2. No Batch Entry System for E-mails. PP has a GREAT syncing system that works with your native e-mail so you can BCC messages into the matter when you send or receive them. However, if you forget to include the mail-sync in your BCC line, or don't forward a message to the mail-sync, there is no easy way to subsequently get the e-mails into the matter in PP. What I mean is this: say you have a number of e-mails from someone that weren't saved into a client PP matter and instead lived in your Outlook before the client actually hired. You would have to manually forward each one of your emails to the mail-sync to get them into PP.

Additionally, if you are a federal criminal lawyer and use CORRLINKS to communicate with your clients you will know that you can't forward out of that system. PP doesn't let you copy/paste emails so your stuck.

It's very hard to pinpoint what I like the most about PracticePanther since there are so many features I rely on for my law practice. I very much like that I can find everything related to a contact or matter in one place. All emails and their attachments, notes, documents, billing, payments, calendar, "to do" list (Tasks), time entries, and communications for a contact and matter can be found in PracticePanther. I use the templates and workflows on a daily basis, which save me time and keep me on track. With a simple click I can send an online questionnaire to a client that, once completed, is kept in the client account.

The tags allow me to filter and label my contacts and matters any way I want. I use PantherPay for online payments which is very easy and shows all payments in the billing account immediately.

I also like that new features are made available regularly - the software is always improving!

1) Would like for clients to start, save, and continue an intake form at a later time and have them receive a copy of their answers after being submitted.

2) The timer buffers endlessly if the page has not been refreshed. I realize you are working on this. :-/

3) If a client has a PP account with another law firm, that client cannot open a new account with my firm using that same email address. Is there a way to fix this?

4) Would love to have conditional/dynamic fields in the intake forms.

What I loved about this software is that it is very complete. It allows you to have a database of all your clients with all the information you will need to work on their case. Also, time tracker to track work time for every client. It doesn't only do that, it allows you to issue an invoice and send it to clients. In addition to this, the program allows to create matters, this makes it very easy to track the work and very useful because every client we had could have several matters open. The task assignment is amazing and the calendar features incredible. The support I received whenever I had an issue, was very good quality.

What I didn't like was that it has an amazing sync with your dropbox and email BUT if you deleted any matter the whole folder in dropbox erased. So, if we deleted something just to close the case it would be deleted from our database in dropbox. We as lawyer, needed to keep files for at least 3 years.

Our team has a number of favorite features, being able to access Box via the Panther Mobile app is a big one, and being able to shoot text reminders to clients about appointments and deadlines is another favorite, but how much time Panther has shaved off of our billing cycle is definitely the top. Using Panther, we have cut in half the time it takes to review and approve pre-bills, invoice the client, and get paid.

Being a larger firm and having migrated case management software several times already made the transition and adoption challenging. Practice Panther allows for very easy import and export of information as csv files, which is great for producing your own reports, but created a lot of front end work massaging data from the previous system in order to import into Panther. As of Summer 2018, the QuickBooks integration is a little basic and still needs some work.

I really love every aspect of this operating software. It saves me time, and frustration. It is also accessible from anywhere, and extremely easy to use.

There is nothing that I do not like. When I find something that can be "improved" such as adding sound to reminders... they added it into the software.