PracticePanther Legal Software Reviews

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.

They add features on a regular basis and have loads of training. The support staff is super helpful and if they don't know the answer they will try to find it. I understand that every system is different and every one has it's pros and cons. I really think once we utilize every single feature this program has we will be a much better law firm.

The email integrations phase in and out on working. It may simply be the plugin I have for Gmail but that can be a struggle.

PracticePanther has helped keep my firm organized. We handle a large number of cases and we needed software that could help us manage them all, stay on top of tasks, and store information efficiently. PracticePanther has also been key in allowing for rapid growth in my practice.

My favorite feature is the payment plans through PantherPayments. My collections are significantly higher than some of my colleagues and it helped simplify this process. We can easily set up payment plans that automatically pull funds from a credit card or bank account which means I don't have to spend a ton of time chasing clients for money that I could be spending on their case.

I started out practicing solo and quickly grew to more staff. Every firm has growing pains, so I was initially worried about acclimating new staff to PracticePanther. Thankfully, those hesitations were put at bay and we've been able to use the platform with ease.

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!

I liked how it had all the necessary features for personal injury cases

I wish it would have been more simple to use.

Our entire office, from attorneys to support staff to office administrator, have all commented how intuitive and easy the software is to use. There is no doubt that our attorneys and paralegals have become more productive from using this software. Also, the reports for A/R, billable time per user, and many others are extremely valuable. We are a new firm, and this is our first (and last) billing software for our office.

If there is one thing I am "disappointed" with, it would have to be the add-on we purchased from Law Tool Box for court rules. When we first started using it, the rules for Nevada (where we practice), were almost all incorrect, or useless for our civil litigation practice. Despite providing Law Tool Box with all of the information on the proper court rules that apply here in Nevada over a month ago, they have still not made those changes. We have not been able to use or rely on it for anything. A great concept, but not functional. Useless.

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.

The product is very intuitive -- making it easy to use from the start. We had no problem transitioning our staff from the old system. We did not import our old data, so I cannot speak to that process. The other thing that I like about Practice Panther is the responsiveness of the customer service team, the availability of tutorials and other resources, and the willingness of Practice Panther to take suggestions for improvement and actually implement them.

Conflicts checks are a little clunky, but they do run names through the entire system. Reports were difficult to navigate for me, but I'm sure there are tutorials for that. I was impressed by the fact that the company offered to prepare report forms for whatever we need that isn't already included.

Prior to PracticePanther, I used three pieces of locally-downloaded software one for billing, one for client management, and another for form creation. PracticePanther has provided the firm with a cloud-based solution that has replaced all three pieces of software. Additionally, because it is cloud-based, the firm can utilize the software on a number of platforms and in any location in fact, I am using it right now on my iPad at a coffee shop, after entering billable time on my Android phone earlier in the day.

In addition, PracticePanther's client portal has been a game changer. While I have not yet fully utilized the email replacement offered by the portal (baby steps), it has helped immensely with billing and in giving clients a great image of the firm. I have received a number of compliments on the portal it makes sending bills easy, paying bills easy, and working with clients a breeze.

I do wish PracticePanther had a more robust document preparation and CRM platform (like Lexicata). I am sure PP is working on integrating other providers into its software, and the pros FAR outweigh the cons.