Clio is web-based legal practice management software for solo practitioners and small firms. It is designed to replace multiple different systems (like document management, case management, and accounting software) to streamline the amount of technology that small firms need to manage.
$49
per month
ETO Software (legacy)
Score 7.0 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
ETO Software is a legacy case management solution supported by Social Solutions, acquired by Bonterra, and later sold as Bonterra ETO. The application is not the company's current case management solution.
N/A
Pricing
Clio
ETO Software (legacy)
Editions & Modules
EasyStart
$49
per user/per month
Clio Grow
$59
per user/per month
Essentials
$89
per month per user
Advanced
$129
per month per user
Complete
$159
per month per user
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Clio
ETO Software (legacy)
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
Required
Additional Details
All pricing tiers have a 7-day free trial. Discount available for annual pricing.
Clio allows our law firm to track all aspects of a matter, such as documents, emails, time entries, tasks, and notes, in one place. This is ideal for our mid-sized law firm, which handles general litigation, personal injury, and family law. A feature we appreciate is the client portal's secure way to share updates, documents, and invoices.
ETO Social Solutions should be avoided until they start caring about the problems generated by their software. In regards specifically to the ARMS suite utilized by the entire state of California, until the ETO software learns how to speak with SOMS, and unless it can be customized by knowledgeable people who consult with front-line users. It is not appropriate to provide the state legislature with bad data. I have 6 years of experience with it and I have multiple sources of agreement from fellow users throughout the state.
Provides an interface with NextChapter Bankruptcy.
Provides an interface with the forms on our website and landing pages to allow for easy transmission of potential clients into our Clio system from these sources with little human intervention.
Its billing, invoicing and payment integration makes the billing cycle for clients easier.
ETO's customization allows for the use of so many different and unique applications.
The ability to build extremely customized reports also allows us to get very detail oriented results or very broad building wide stats.
The additional added features such as workflow, referrals, and ETO Engage are useful in their own way and add more ways to better track and record data while simplifying some end-user processes.
Document management. It's still far easier for me to create Word templates and just use Word.
Centralized filing of client files. Like I said, I use Word. I work on a Mac and use Mac's tag structure. Clio should find a way to gather all files that have a certain tag and allow me to access them through Clio. Instead, I use Hazel and DropBox.
Case planning and budgeting. I use OmniFocus for project management, a self-created Excel spreadsheet for project budgeting and a cloud-based service for Gantt charts. How hard would it be to add robust project management tools to Clio?
Search feature for stored documents and information. Evernote has Clio beat hands-down, but I don't put client-sensitive information (only caselaw) on Evernote.
Case notes. This feature may be useful for high-volume practices, but I never use it.
The user interface is not intuitive and exceptionally difficult for non-tech savvy people to learn.
The system is not as customizable as we were led to believe at the initial purchase.
The system does not interface well with other systems. Organizationally we are moving towards data integration, and we will likely replace ETO because of this limitation.
Considering the limitations of the system, the cost is quite high. We've seen only marginal benefits of this system over pen and paper, and the ROI is not promising.
The initial build process was very frustrating. We didn't understand what the developer was billing us for. Something like simple touchpoint forms was billed for more hours than it would seem to require.
A system like this should be both fully mobile compatible and have offline functionality.
We would benefit from more nuanced security settings.
We have been able to streamline our task management and everyday office procedures by using Clio to its fullest potential. We have a hire client retention rate because we can easily keep track of leads and follow ups. Clio Draft is saving us time on drafting legal documents and correspondence espondence. Overall, we are able to save time and money on everything tasks
Social Solutions has been great for our organization. It has allowed us to not only report on data, but to dive into it to see trends and give snapshots of the current status of our neighbors. Social Solutions has been helpful in getting us to see additional ways we can use our data and ways that it is easier for front line staff to use this tool
Clio is intuitive and easy to learn. Even new staff or attorneys with limited tech experience can quickly navigate through tasks, matters, billing, and calendars. This reduces training time and increases productivity, especially in a busy mid-sized law firm. Because it’s cloud-based, Clio can be accessed from any device, anywhere. Whether I am working in the office, at home, or in court, I have full access to my cases, documents, and time entries.
As a technically savvy person with experience learning new database software systems I find ETO relatively straightforward now that I've been trained in it's use. However, many of our staff are less technically savvy and the learning curve for ETO can be grueling for many, who require frequent troubleshooting and support from me. Additionally, there are small quality of life improvements that would increase usability even for me - such as allowing multiple tabs to be open simultaneously or being able to use the browser's "back" and "forward" buttons.
Routine maintenance is announced with plenty of lead time, and the few times I've been unable to log in to the system properly a simple refresh was all that was required to fix.
Mostly really strong now, although I understand that for some years before switching their hosting service to AWS performance was a real issue with ETO and we had frequent problems with pages timing out or other glitches stemming from performance issues. With AWS that is mostly a thing of the past, although it is still a major issue with the reporting tool which is unable to run reports on the entire database due to performance limitations, instead requiring admins to define universes prior to running queries.
When I contact them, I am told that the person who can help me cannot be reached but that I should call back. When I call, I cannot get ahold of anyone who can help. Sales/support does not respond to my emails. Maybe if you are part of a large firm they treat you differently.
We love the first tier customer support folks! They're friendly, helpful, and knowledgeable within the scope of their position. The experiences we've had with their supervisors have also been mostly good and again they seem to be doing what they can within the scope of their positions. This is what prevents me from selecting 1. Unfortunately, none of these wonderful folks can offer real solutions when things are actually broken. They verify there's a problem and send it to the black hole called "the developers". After that, we don't hear anything useful and we figure out how to live with/work around the problem ourselves. (Requests for updates typically get "still with the developer" responses.) This is highly frustrating given that most of our issues are basic system issues (functionality that worked then broke after an update by Social Solutions, servers not syncing, report universes not flattening automatically, etc.). All we want is for the system to work as designed and to be fixed in a timely fashion when it doesn't. Apparently, that's too much to ask. (And no, we don't expect it to happen instantly, programming and quality control checks obviously take time.)
Really good trainer and exhaustive curriculum covered, but ETO is a complex enough system that you don't *really* know how to use it until you've been in the trenches for a few weeks. For instance, I took a Report Writing training and emerged with some fluency in the reports interface and a vague understanding of the process, but immediately encountered a legion of instance-specific idiosyncrasies that would have been totally impossible to address in a webinar training for a dozen folks from different orgs working in different instances.
Hard to say, as I was not with the agency at the time. However, based on our use of the software ~5years later I can say that there were no catastrophic design choices made during implementation that have become unduly burdensome as we've scaled up.
We did not use any other practice management software, but I did evaluate Rocket Matter as a potential alternative. Rocket Matter does not have the same robust intake software that Clio Grow does and therefore it was not even a plausible alternative for us to implement. Clio is constantly updating and evolving based on feedback from users and that makes it the kind of program that can grow with your business needs.
When we made our decision several years ago Social Solutions had just acquired Apricot. At that time it was recommended to use ETO based off our revenue stream. However, it seems like Social Solutions has put in a lot more time and effort into Apricot over ETO and it seems more modern and user friendly. I think it is worth a second look once our contract expires
The core product scales well, and we've grown quite a bit as an agency during our use of ETO. However, there are some real pain points particularly around creating new programs and managing report universes that require extensive offline checklist resources and a full-spectrum understanding of how changing settings in one part of ETO can have downstream impact in other areas. This can introduce a "chilling" effect on proposed changes to the system, where there is strong incentive to leave things as-is to avoid unforeseen consequences.
I would say that at this point the overall ROI has been negative as we aren't getting much more out of our data by the switch we made to ETO, but the cost is much higher. I anticipate that will change as we get better at using ETO.
Most users that have switched to ETO in our organization prefer it to what they were using before and some are more appreciative of the value they can get from the data.
