PracticePanther Legal Software

Helps me manage my solo practice all by myself. My clients are satisfied with their client portal and ability to send me messages.

I would like to be able to make payment plan invoices for my clients, so I do not have to remind them to pay every month. Most clients would not want to set up automatic payments, so with payment plan invoices, it would help alot and relieve the burden of reminding clients every month, that a payment needs to be made.

It's easy to learn the basics. The calendar is good, it's helpful that they show tasks there. Searching is great. It's totally adequate if all you do is bill for time and integrate with Quickbooks.

Panther has no report on Items (e.g. how much of your revenue is from Document Drafting vs Litigation). To get such a report, you MUST integrate with Quickbooks. But the biggest problem is that Fixed Price billing (what they call "Flat Fee") is worthless.

Fixed Price billing was clearly an afterthought, and their implementation has not changed at all since the early days when I started using it: 1) It does not let you assign an Item as you can with time entries, so you can't easily tell Quickbooks that a Fixed Price invoice was for a trademark application, not doc review; 2) You can't assign a lawyer to a Fixed Price billing, so you cannot get a report to help you pay everyone proportionally to their Fixed Price billings; 3) Fixed Price matters become immediately billable even if no work has been done, so you must manually keep track of when it's time to invoice for a Fixed Price matter, and there's no report on billable Fixed Price matters; 4) When entering time on a Fixed Price matter, there's way no way to check whether you are about to exceed the budget, and no way anywhere to compare budgeted vs actual.

If you're a modern firm moving to fixed price as much as possible, you'll spend a LOT of time looking for work-arounds, and you'll find that implementing your work-arounds will chew up any time saving you might have gotten from using the rest of the software.

I can't wait to change to software that does Fixed Price right.

I love the ease of use for conflicts checking. I love the secure client portal, as I often exchange sensitive documents with the client. I love the client notes feature and the calendaring.

I have had clients who could not get the secure portal to work - that may have been user error, but there are enough of them that I had to develop a back up plan. I would like to see a better overview of available features so I can decide what works best for me. I do not use most of the billing features, so I would like a way to disable that, rather than have it look like I am running a huge deficit! I would like to learn more about integration with Wealth Counsel software. Cross-population of clients would be a huge benefit for me!