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.

It worked well, and allowed relatively easy billing and access to client payment history, but it cost more than Clio.

When I decided to switch to Clio due to the cost difference, I could not leave. They took the money from my credit card and would not refund it. Practice Panther's alias is Hotel California. You can check out but you can never leave. My advice is don't check in.

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.

Practice Panther has two features I really like. First, the design of the software makes it easy to work with. Second, it comes ready to use "out of the box," with very little learning curve required.

Practice Panther is for generalists, in my opinion. If you are an estate planner, you can use it. Family law, no problem. Real estate law, you can't go wrong. However, if you want specialized features unique to a particular practice area, then Practice Panther is probably not going to suit your needs. I switched from it because I needed software that was tailored specifically to personal injury.

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.

That it made time tracking and billing easy

Too many glitches in the software that caused serious issues with my pricing and billing

Super easy to use! We love that we can create custom fields for a contact or matter and have really enjoyed the automation portion of the software. The templates are easy to create and automatically pull the information from the contact and matter sections that we need.

Under Matter, instead of editing the whole section, it would be nice if I could hoover over the field I only need to update.

I also wish I could highlight text in the matter or notes section.

I create multiple matters under one client and some of the information in the fields is always the same. It would be nice if I could select an option so any time I create a new matter for that client, the information in the matter auto fills for any new case going forward.

The product has great functionality in tracking time, ease of performing and switching functions with multiple access points to product features (such as editing time entries and invoices), and creating professional looking invoices.

That certain convenient features are only included in the more expensive version, although all of the functionality is still present in the base version

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.

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.

Before PracticePanther, there was no aggregation of data that would allow me to analyze in real-time how we were performing, and we were leaving a lot of pennies on the table because of it. We were able to take an outdated, paper-based reporting system and modernize it. This allowed us to get a clear picture and make adjustments as needed. In a world where there is more remote work, it becomes more important than ever to be able to track those things so that your business is maximizing its profitability and efficiency with its employees.

The most stressful part for us was getting all the data into the system in a format that would work. Once it’s in there and rolling, it cuts down on so much work. There’s a little pain upfront, but you’ll find that with any software like this, that it takes a bit of time to get it right, once it’s in there you really do wonder how you lived without it.

The look and feel was one of our deciding factors to go with PracticePanther. It’s incredibly intuitive, and most of your data is available whenever you need it. In immigration law, there’s a lot of very important dates and information that need to be tracked, so being able to create all the custom fields we needed was a big win. I also love how easy it is to track our billing. We can automatically track who has paid, and then follow-up with anyone we still need to collect from. Giving extra transparency to our clients really showcases our ability to use technology to enhance our services.

When starting with any new software you need to approach it with some patience. There’s a lot of training available, both videos and text-based. So getting ramped-up and knowing that we needed to experiment with customization and intake forms, and get the team to support using it was going to take some time.