PracticePanther Legal Software

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.

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.

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.