Clio

Pros

The Clio platform is not intended to be a closed, proprietary system. Instead, it forms the foundation for the day to day management of leads, clients, time, documents, and billing, supplemented by almost 200 third party integrations, with new offerings coming on line each month. Clio offers unlimited cloud storage and IOS/Android apps making all of your firm information, clients, and documents available 24/7. Clio continues to innovate and as the leading provider to small/medium law firms throughout the world, I don't worry about whether they will be in business a few years from now. Finally, all, yes all, of your data saved in Clio is easily exportable should you decide to change to a different vendor.

Cons

Clio's growth means that feature changes must be more fully vetted as they are used by more than 150,000 legal professionals. As they broaden their perspective to encompass larger firms, the pace of change may continue to be more deliberate. The movement and management of files without a third party integration, such as FasterLaw, is cumbersome. Clio's own integrations with Office365 for emails and calendaring remain a work in progress.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Choosing Clio

Reasons for Switching to Clio

Pros

Custom sets of templates for client types and matter types is great. There are tons of integrations with so many other programs to add functionality is dizzying. We're still learning all this program can do and trying to maximize our use of it through best practices, but we're very hopeful and optimistic that it's going to make our lives much easier and more organized.

Cons

The implementation by Clio has been less than stellar. They've tried to integrate spreadsheets of information from our prior practice management software, plus other sources to get all of our client and matter data into the program. But getting the data migration specialists on the phone has been difficult. We noticed that one phase of the migration had not gone correctly, so we called and e-mailed like mad to make sure they wouldn't go to the next step of migration until we could get that prior data fixed. They ignored the calls and e-mails and went ahead with the next step. So that just compounded the problem by about 10,000 times. Now, we're having to go back through our spreadsheets to clean up the data again. Then they're going to have to somehow undo the migration steps they've taken already. Then we'll try it again. We've been using it almost 90 days, and we're still not at full usage yet, because the migration is so messed up.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Choosing Clio

Switched From

Reasons for Switching to Clio

Pros

I have nothing positive to say about Clio at this time. Integrating our firm into their software was a major learning experience, which will guide me with the next software I choose.

Cons

The items added in the time that we have been with Clio have caused no improvement to our use of the product, although they use these additions as an excuse for raising their prices significantly. The "client portal" that they added does not even allow you to see if clients have viewed documents, which their old version did. Their new payment system only adds to their profits, so why would they utilize that as an excuse to pass on additional costs to their clients?

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to Clio

Pros

Clio makes it easy to manage a case beginning to end. All of the client information is contained in one place. We can work on documents right in Clio and share documents to the client through the Clio Portal. Clients can safely upload their documents to us via the portal. We can communicate with clients through the portal or text messaging right in Clio. The Clio Support team is very helpful and has taken our enhancement requests back, some of which have already been implemented. We are able to keep everyone at the firm on track by using the task feature of Clio. There is no more wondering what is happening in a case because everything is tracking and tasked.

Cons

Our clients pay a monthly payment until their flat fee is paid in full. My current enhancement request is for Clio to have payment plan details written out on the client invoice. Currently we have to type this information out in the footer notes.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Choosing Clio

Switched From

Reasons for Switching to Clio