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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PracticePanther
Score 8.5 out of 10
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PracticePanther is law practice management software. Customers include solo practitioners, virtual, small, and mid-sized firms worldwide. The core of PracticePanther software includes contact & matter management, time & expense tracking, invoicing, calendaring, reporting, permissions, tasks, templates, intake forms, document management & automation. A free trial is available for 3 clients / 3 cases.
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.
It is perfect for law management as it has integrations with Lawpay, which is specific for operating and trust account billing. I am able to create custom intakes for a client to fill out, automated with a task when submitted, and then review and response. I am also able to use the forms for internal use to enter information and use templates to populate those fields onto documents that I create.
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.
There are some features that are available on one part of the software but not on others. E.g., when creating a task, you can add and make new tags. But during the creation of a workflow, when making a task, you can't make new tags. You have to make the task outside of the workflow space.
An event whereby you can invite outside users/clients without creating a client portal.
If the client portal was a bit more robust, I would like to use it. See the first item; I am unable to make tasks through workflows with links to be populated for my clients to make client task easier when I need to direct them to a different webpage to complete an item.
I love the Support team. Available through chat on any screen on your practice panther. They say they respond within 24 hours but it's usually at most 3 hours and they direct you a solution or that confirm no available solution. The team at PP is always helpful and know how to follow up with issues in a timely manner.
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.
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.
