Actionstep in Richmond offers their flagship legal practice management software as an end-to-end solution, containing both matter management tools and business administration automation, with an internal billing and accounting system.
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Filevine
Score 8.5 out of 10
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Filevine is a project management and workflow automation platform for law firms from the company of the same name in Utah.
ActionStep is a powerful CRM and matter management tool. It provides many other good benefits too. For example powerful accounting and billing, time tracking and document management. Only in highly specific areas, like multiple many to many contact relations has it fallen short. But even in this highly specialized area, so many other benefits are provided that it hardly matters.
Filevine is well suited if you want to have a practice management program that is not Clio and that is difficult to use, lacks essential features, and is overpromised. It is not suitable for heavy litigation. What kind of legal practice system refers to the core elements as "projects"? Not matters or cases?
ActionStep is difficult to setup. I suggest working with a consultant which increases cost.
Needs mobile app.
One of our practice areas, Property Law, request we have a many to many contact relation. ActionStep cannot accommodate this. However, no other software I have reviewed can do this either. ActionStep is the most robust that I have seen and comes closest to making this work.
In my opinion, customer service is as bad as I have ever experienced anywhere. Even the IRS is more responsive than Filevine.
In my experience, their staffing and personnel changes so frequently that even if you do find someone who is responsive they either leave the company or are reassigned.
I think the layout is easy to navigate. There are just a few small things I wish were easier, like making contacts directly from the app, or utilizing the search bar for a specific case rather than all cases
I have worked with a lot of software. Each one has a different focus. ActionStep is better at workflow and task automation that the items above, in my opinion. However, having gone through many different deployments, what really matters is identifying your key requirements and needs. Then evaluation software against those. Once you have your requirements and software, focus on using that software to fix issues in existing workflow. This, when compared with ongoing training, is what it means to invest in software. Simply purchasing ActionStep or any software without identifying needs, problems in workflow or an investment in training is not a good plan. Neither is comparing the vendors to one another without knowing all of your specific needs.
Filevine is much easier to learn and use, the user interface is more appealing (with bigger fonts and easy-to-understand icons), and its customization feature is easier to use and understand.
I love the workflows that can be deployed for practice areas to ensure consistency. This has reduced new employee onboarding time and increased the speed at which we can complete matters.
Since ActionStep lives in the cloud, and we have O365 our firm is very mobile without spending lots of money in TS or other such infrastructure.
Creating the workflows is a bit complex, so this increases the overall cost and makes an ROI take longer. I suggest spending a bit more initially to get everything setup and working with a consultant to learn how to do this on your own during that initial setup.