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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Elite ProLaw
Score 4.5 out of 10
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ProLaw from Elite (formerly of Thomson Reuters) is the legal billing management software that connects the entire organization, helping teams deliver premier client service. By combining client and matter management, docketing, time entry, billing, and accounting, ProLaw helps simplify a practice while enhancing productivity firm-wide. ProLaw is software is designed to simplify and coordinate the work of lawyers and staff by combining case and matter management, time entry, billing,…
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.
once the software is set up, it streamlines the billing process and helps with E-discovery on cases. You can also customize some areas to fit your needs specific to your firm. Paperless Proforma eliminates a lot of paper and streamlines the Prebill process. It also incorporates email billing to eliminate wasted paper.
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.
ProLaw has been working on easier ways to add multiple documents to emails without flipping back and forth or changing document names to the storage number of the document in its database.
Although you can export billing information to an excel sheet, it would be beneficial if one could print all billed items for a matter that included the description of the billed event rather than just the amounts. Currently the only way to do this would be by printing statements.
In terms of usability, the tool is intuitive and easy to use. Initially, it might be a little bit difficult to grab all the functions it can perform, but with the experience, doing the tasks become an easy job and the tool improves your team's productivity and efficiency. It really helps you to deliver excellent service to your clients in less time and at a low cost.
ProLaw support is very good overall. Sometimes it takes some effort to get up the ladder if you need an expert's help but overall they do a very good job. There have been minor issues during projects but they allow one to schedule upgrades and available technicians for upgrades at request.
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.
Client base - numbers, Support of User Group Formation, location - hours of support, all in one product - eliminated document management and allowed through security for attorneys to access to ledger information, supported non-cloud solution as we were not ready to go to cloud, Non-modular so all parts of the system seemed to work better together and even if not ready immediately to utilize some parts, we adopted over time as we because familiar with the product, I knew firms that Prolaw already, Sales person - Tom Mulligan was wonderful to work with, ProLaw was the only software demo'ed that could report directly on our fee credits as we currently allocate - WE ARE AN EAT WHAT YOU KILL FIRM, Our outside IT firm had worked on ProLaw before, Software was capable of supporting a paperless environment, without additional cost I could get a second data base to run our internal leasing through with is technically a separate company from the business of law. We didn't need any additional hardware when we installed, we already had everything it needed to run
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.
