Clio

Clio is always adapting to improve and take feature requests into consideration while balancing innovation with consistency of interface and only incremental changes so as to not frustrate the user experience with too many changes all the ones. Beyond the tech, right from the beginning many years ago Clio stood out in customer service in terms of being very responsive, striving to find a solution to every problem where available, and being straight up in simply admitting that they don't have certain features developed yet and it's not available rather than trying to do a sales job or sugarcoat the fact that there will always be limitations in software meeting everyone's different needs perfectly. It's a very stable platform, secure, and the developers are even aware to do any sort of systemwide updates during times of low usage.

Maybe not so much a specific Clio issue, but rather mostly us as a user limited capacity challenge, there are many integrations and improvements which we could be adapting into our system but have just become stalled in locking the bandwidth. Quarterly or semiannually review (soft audit) of how each business such as ours is using the software would be beneficial with a systems person from Clio providing a couple recommendations of next steps that our group could take that would have a significant impact on better utilizing the tools.

Easy to switch from LawPay. Integrated easily with Clio (but so did LawPay). Supposedly lower fees.

Terrible turn around time for payments by credit card. 5-7 days! No explanation or customer service for the delays in processing time. Very difficult to switch back to LawPay - they make you schedule an appointment to talk to someone who takes your time to tell you how difficult it is to switch back to LawPay, plus they want you to cancel all your pending payments, which they didn’t require when switching from LawPay to Clio. No regular reporting or monthly statements - you have to figure out the reports on your own and calculate the fees charged yourself and download the transaction history periodically. The fees are deducted first before payments are made, which skews the income tracking for accounting purposes. I.e., the client payments from bills don’t match the bill amount. The customer service representatives have no power and don’t seem to care one way or another, though the sales reps cared about switching you over to Clio payments! Is Clio changing from a great company with real people who are concerned with helping law practices succeed to a mammoth company just concerned with its own bottom line? It’s starting to seem that way.

There is no such thing as a perfect legal case management software. There is nothing that is going to do everything the way you want it and Clio is no different. However, clio has numerous thrid party integrations. If this software doesn't do something there is probably something else out there that will fill in the gaps. However, what really makes clio great is its easy to use Open API. I have a saying with automation. Where there is a will there is a way and this API makes that possible. If there is something you want to have done or want to automate Clio's open API makes it possible.

There reporting could use some work although they have made some improvements. Some of their bigger improvements can take a lot of time. However, there are always making consistent and regular improvements. It does seem like at times they will make a partial release but complete release or complete functionality can take a back seat.

I was first introduced to Clio eight years ago at the ABA Tech Conference. I knew from the moment I saw it that it would revolutionize our practice, allowing us to work from anywhere yet stay on the same page, streamline our management of cases, and make the process easier for our clients, from following their case to being able to pay invoices online or through their phone. And I was right. Clio has done that for us and more.

Document Management was something that was missing for a long time, but Clio is improving there too. We hope to be able to get rid of our current document management system and transition to Clio Drive soon.