Opiniones de PracticePanther Legal Software

Lo que mas me gusta del programa son la cantidad de funciones que ofrece, como pagos en linea con multitud de opciones, flujos de trabajo automatizados que te ahorran un monton de tiempo, copias de seguridad a tiempo real de todos los datos, seguimiento del tiempo facturable desde cualquier dispositivo y por supuesto tener todas tus finanzas controladas para evitarte mas de un susto....aplicacion muy completa

La unica desventaja que veo podria ser el precio... El plan mas basico se queda demasiado corto para cualquiera que necesite de este programa, y si optas por el plan intermedio y tu o tu empresa no manejais un flujo de datos demasiado grande, pagareis por demas, tanto como 80 euros al mes.Bien es cierto, que no he encontrado muchos programas con tal nivel de funcionalidad.

Muy bueno,realmente agil y rapido en todo.

Tendria que ser menos costoso y tener otras alternativas

I love how seamless this software makes my practice. It is so user-friendly. The client portal is wonderful, and I love how the accounting features are organized. Customer service is amazing. The templates feature saves me countless hours. The tasks feature really keeps me on track. I love how you can link relationships, create emails that sync automatically with the matter, and create events that send text notifications to clients. The support is quick and always friendly and helpful. The e-signature feature is also really cool.

(1) the phone app should be able to have multiple timers up at once, so you can go back and forth between working on different projects, like the desktop version.
(2) The "history" section at the bottom of matters should include time entry descriptions. I cannot stress that enough. I do not use the "history" section at all as it is currently operating, but it would be invaluable if that one change was made! If time entry descriptions were included, the "history" section would actually tell me the history of the work that's been done on the matter.
(3) We need a better text integration that's part of Practice Panther, so that clients can text us through the software, or something like how we can create a new email that links with the matter, but for texting.
(4) Company contacts - love the idea, but when you link a subordinate member of a company contact to a matter, the only email address you can actually auto-populate is the number one contact of the company contact. It's very annoying. I've had to create separate individual contacts for all the members of a company contact. Like for court services, I would like to be able to have all the employees of court services under the Court Services company contact, and then be able to link the particular officer assigned to supervise my particular client. But right now I have to link the court services company contact AND the individual contact to be able to send emails to the correct officer.

clients like the interface, auto posting of lawpay and accounts for trust versus other payments with ease.

The billing every month is SO PAINFUL. To review bills or edit them, you have to open every invoice in a separate window. There is no "next" button to review invoices like every other billing platform out there. When asked about adding this, the response from PP is they will check with the development team. Clearly their developers didnt actually try out invoice review/edits for more than a few clients at a time. This is not a good solution if you have more than 5 clients. The task management also doesnt send notifications to all those tagged in the tasks, and if you assign tasks but are not the one assigned to do them, you cant track the progress. So we are using Asana instead so now using two platforms instead of one integrated solution.

Integration with quickbooks and the ability to take credit card payments through PP helps make collections and billing work well with all team members being able to take payments without needing all of them to be able to get into quickbooks.

Having restart searches for contacts or matters when we did not find the one we were looking for i.e. multiple persons with same name. and having to search again. Would like to be able to have reporting using matter type. Being able to customize reports would be great. Some reports show graphs but are hard to get the information ranked like the graph

Having tried different types of practice management software and billing systems, finding PracticePanther changed this skeptical old dog by teaching her new tricks to make life easier and assure time gets captured and billed and contacts are at your fingertips. PracticePanther works seamlessly across all platforms, desktop, laptop, iPhone, iPad so you never have to be without the tools to have your law firm with you when you need to have the information. Easier to use than most software of similar types.

Not much to say here .. it works for us very well

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.

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!

The software sure does “look” nice. But it really missed the boat on some of the more nuanced features of a law practice. For example, when applying a discount to an invoice, the discount must be applied to the total invoice (fees AND costs). Discounts cannot be applied to just the fees. Why in the world would any attorney want to apply a discount to client costs advanced on behalf of the client??? When I inquired about this, their answer was “just put in a discounted custom rate for the matter”. This response is completely unacceptable since I may only want to apply a discount to one invoice rather than all work done on the matter! This is just one small example of the half hearted attempt of this company to make a legal management software. This is just one of several problems with the “features” of the software. The timers are always so buggy. The software is just not refined at all. None of the features were well thought out. It’s like the programmers decided “Hey! This is a cool feature to add!” But never really fined tuned any of them to a fully functioning feature that could work well. They all sort of work to only about 50-60 percent functionality. It should not come as any surprise, though, since neither the founders nor anyone else on the management team has any experience in the legal industry. The company would be well served to hire some actual attorneys to advise them on how to fine tune their software to make it a truly great legal software.

The lack of any real understanding of the nuances of a legal practice by the founders and creators of the company and software.

Practice Panther has a fairly intuitive interface for daily billing entries, templates for monthly billing and accounting for your trust and operating accounts for your clients. The learning curve was minimal in comparison to other systems I tried and the program was more responsive over other programs I tried over the internet. Tech Support and help files are easily available on every page. I found daily entries both fast and easy and the online billing system linked with LawPay is magnificent and has worked flawlessly for me. I was very skeptical of "secure" cloud-based billing and accounting but after more than a year it would take a lot to pull me away from Practice Panther.

There are two cons to this software to be aware of. First, there is no single backup system to backup and restore all your files with just a few clicks. While complete backup is available, it requires you to go through far too many steps to make sure you back up everything. I have not yet had to restore anything to Practice Panther but I am wary that a system that requires multiple steps could have glitches in trying to restore from their backups. It is more than possible that if a restoration were required it might involve more "downtime" for a practitioner than he or she would like in order to get back up and running. This is where I think they need to most work. Secondarily, their billing review system has an issue that will throw practitioners off. If you create a bill several months ago and you go back to look at the bill to see what the retainer balance was at the time of that bill, the historical bill actually pulls up the retainer that exists now. That should not occur on a historical bill. Once a bill has been saved, the bill should not change unless you intentionally change other things in your billing. An old bill should never show the current balance of the retainer. It should show the remaining balance of the retainer at the time the specific bill is generated.

Sent to clients straight the invoice periodically.

The program CANNOT pint out the invoice from the beginning with statements. In addition, when we tried to make an appointment to talk to support group, it is hard to get an appointment. Once appointment was made, they would not alert or start zoom; instead, they claimed that we cancel the first appointment; [sensitive content hidden], the appointment is scheduled on [sensitive content hidden], but [sensitive content hidden], I called and found out the appointment was cancelled again. If I am not pushing hard, it would be the the third appointment. After almost ONE attorney billable hour, [sensitive content hidden] wanted to tell me that it was our fault to cancel the appointments and offered me to talk to [sensitive content hidden]. If the computer does not send me the link to get on the link, how did they claim I cancelled the appointment. When I asked [sensitive content hidden] to ask their IT to figure the glitch, and ask the company developing the "roadmap" so that small firms can print out the whole historical entries all in one invoice with clear statements and payments that client has paid. [sensitive content hidden] tried so hard to persuade me that their computer showed "You cancelled the [sensitive content hidden] "training.

never any data corruption issues like Timeslips. Time consuming backups not necessary, can have users tracking time while billing is being run.
Web Based and can enter time tracking from anywhere on any computer or on your phone.

Some report features not available but over the past two years greater functionality has continued to be added

The customer service reps are always available (through the website/app!) and are extremely flexible as far as meeting individual requests. The software overall is very intuitive and once the basic information is inputted, training other attorneys and staff is easy. The PracticePanther reps even offered to help with training and do individualized training as necessary!
The iphone app is simple yet you can do everything on it you need to - right from court. I never have to worry about missing court dates or even reminders to review certain files or specific documents because in less than a minute I can have a task set, reminders set, and it will popup as I set it. The calendar syncs with Google Calendar and they imported all of our client contacts from Quickbooks Online, saving us many hours of data entry.
We are getting into the more advanced functions like templates, workflows, and other automation and that's really where the software shines. You create the custom fields, you choose what information is important for every matter, and you can add-on as you are creating matters. The flexibility and ease of access to everything - including client files from DropBox, which can mirror any network - is unrivaled.
Really happy we went with PracticePanther. The amount of time saved having customer care/customer service always available is invaluable. Highly recommended for law firms of all sizes.

Still working on getting the office transitioned from a paper filing and calendaring system to online. So the one suggestion I would have is to maybe have an app for the calendar that is independent from the phone app - similar to google calendar.
Also, there should be a way to turn the default settings to "Do not email assignees" when a workflow is applied. But that's a tiny suggestion. Overall no major complaints.