Aderant Handshake vs. Thomson Reuters Practical Law

The user of Handshake takes a certain amount of user computer literacy and the user needs to be resourceful. When building our site, I needed to google quite a bit. On the contrary, if budget allows, Handshake developers will do it all for you.

Incentivized

PracticalLaw offers excellent Practice Notes, Checklists, Precedents, and Toolkits for a variety of practice areas - which is very helpful to in-house counsel and law clerks that are working on files across different practice areas. Less appropriate when there are already many resources available to me to help in drafting documents - then there is not much use to look up PLC.

Incentivized

• The main reason we got Handshake was to display visual gadgets for our accounting systems. We always provided spreadsheet type reports, but pictures and more engaging. Attorney gets a dashboard in real time of where they stand financially.
• Additional use as FAQ's in different departments in the firm, that is, accounting, IT, and office services.
• Knowledgebase - How to's and software.

Incentivized

• News articles.
• Specific content on areas of law.
• Research jury verdicts and dispositive motions decisions.

• Documentation is weak, but hopefully, since Aderant just acquired the company, that will improve

Incentivized

• Some resources are more detailed and on point than others
• Competitors offer platforms that are more user-friendly
• Sometimes navigating back to an old resource takes a bit more time than other platforms

Incentivized

None. Always need about Handshake's interface with Aderant, way before Aderant purchased them. Seemed like a natural fit.

Incentivized

Lexis Practice Advisor is an excellent alternative - but Practical Law has more comprehensive coverage of topics and practice areas - as well as more frequent updates to tools and checklists. Also, Practice Law integrates well with WestLaw which is great for having all the legal research and files centralized.

Incentivized

• Hard to say, but ultimately putting knowledge in the hands of fee earners immediately it is positive.

Incentivized

• Cost savings related to proactive training is easily in the hundreds of thousands.
• Having various types of content available in one platform makes research efficient.
• I have used Practical Law to search for judgments and lessons learned from my training sessions for our leadership.