Firm Central

This is a great Case Management system if your willing to invest the money to purchase the add on's like Custom Forms, Westlaw, Company investigator and etc. It can get extremely expensive however, our Firm saw the financial benefits in several ways once we committed to using all its features. The biggest benefit was the ability to automate the Custom Form Builder from data out of Firm Central.

The Firm Central Plug in for Outlook was terrible and unreliable. Firm Central should have put more focus on that aspect of the software because Lawyers and law firms live out of their email.

When it was introduced, there was nothing else on the market like it except the then-clunky Amicus Attorney that was server-based only. This was the first cloud-based practice management solution. So the cloud-based aspect of it is what drew me in over 9 years ago.

Unfortunately, it's like West has abandoned this program. They tied all access to it to your Westlaw subscription. So any time your firm grows and you need to add another user, it takes at least two to three business days just to add the additional user, because they have to contact your sales rep so they can write a new contract to extend your Westlaw contract to add the other user. In the meantime, we've been asking them to add additional features for years, but nothing new has been implemented that I can recall since it was first introduced. We've since changed to Clio, but -- while we could export our clients, contacts, and matters data, the actual documents in each matter cannot be exported. For this reason, we'll never be able to move completely from Firm Central since they effectively OWN YOUR CLIENTS' DOCUMENTS, and your firm's e-mails and documents forever. We've asked several times what happens with the data when we close the firm/retire/die, and no one has a good answer. Apparently it's not even as good as a Facebook account which can be archived and downloaded for eternal access if needed. Once you stop paying, thousands of documents, records, and gigabytes of data are simply gone. For this reason alone, I warn everyone to stay away from FirmCentral.

Very stable platform, no glitches or bugs. Love the customizable dashboard for matters and the "status" feed on each matter.

While "usable" on a Mac, it caused us a lot of version control issues. Mac users must download, save locally, and re-upload. We thought this was manageable inconvenience, but found that because one often downloads the same document, one's local drive will rename the file by adding (1) to the end of the file name, for example. If you want to maintain version control, you have to delete any local copies to save the file using the same name before you download. Far to labor intensive. Also, even though we are using lots of Westlaw products, the integration with WL wasn't worth the loss of integration with all other platforms. And once you sign the contract, you are stuck with it. No month to month option.