Likelihood to Recommend Clio is a wonderful practice management solution for small firms that do billable work. The Clio manage software is excellent for tracking your time at different rates, tracking matter budgets, and tracking expenses. Clio is also great for firms that want to implement and use tech in their offices. If clients are at least somewhat tech-savvy (have and know how to use email), they will also benefit and enjoy the implementation of Clio.
Read full review It is ideal where security is your number one concern or where there is a need to share securely across different physical locations. Speed is less than ideal in certain usage scenarios. It is limited by the speed of the internet and it can be difficult to pull large quantities of documents when researching or answering discovery requests, although, that being said, it can be addressed by maintaining your own secure server to contain a mirror of your online documents. But then the security for a mirror falls back on the organization.
Rick Hahn Consultant \ Law Office Practice Management & Accounting Software
Read full review Pros 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. Read full review Searching: NetDocuments' searching capabilities put it on par with other legal search engines used for research and knowledge management purposes. Scalability: Despite the ever-increasing number of items stored in the repository, time searching is unaffected. Innovation: NetDocuments continuously looks for new solutions and updates their product regularly. Ease of Update: Because it is Web-based, updates to the software do not require local installation. Read full review Cons 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. Read full review Delay. At times, there is a delay between saving a document into Netdocuments and actually seeing them in the appropriate workspace. Such a delay is caused by the system indexing the newly added file. Netdocuments' servers slow down at times causing users to receive error messages. This can be quickly remedied, but can become a nuisance. Read full review Usability You really have to get creative to make Clio work well. Support suggested tonight that I use other products instead since Clio can't even do simple things it promises like notify clients of their court dates. Insane.
Read full review The product is simple to learn and adheres to well-known web user protocols. The NetDocuments team spends a lot of time talking to customers regarding how to improve their interface, and are pretty quick about implementing good ideas. The system is reliable and repeatable, and similar functions are laid out consistently and in formats that users are used to.
Read full review Performance NetDocuments is a performant web app. It is reliable and provides all the functionality of a sophisticated document management system. It also can serve, through its APIs, as a base system for other applications, which enhances its value. Other vendors find the company easy to work with, and it consistently seems to be the first to offer new features and technologies to its customers.
Read full review Support Rating Rather than talk in generalities, I'll give two specific examples. First, after updating my OS, I got locked out of Clio. I was back in, up and running, with no loss of data, within an hour thanks to Clio customer support. Second, I made some specific recommendation for features that I thought would be useful. Those recommendations fell in a black hole, with the suggestion that I try a very buggy third party integration app. Clio is making lots of money from lawyers using its software. Why can't Clio create the integrations and test them if Clio is not willing to build them into its platform?
Read full review I've never had to contact support, but I won't give it a ten. We've had a few hiccups along the way, but nothing that couldn't be fixed within 24 hours.
Read full review Alternatives Considered CLIO Grow is custom-tailored for law firms to use off the shelf with some advanced customization options. CLIO Grow has some superior API integration options that integrate with answering services, online chatbot, website contact forms to capture new leads and automatically include them in the intake pipeline. As mentioned previously it integrates with HelloSign for no additional costs. CLIO Grow also offers API integrations with
Mailchimp to add prospects to email drip campaigns in addition to built-in automated email campaigns within its own software. These features make it far more user friendly, automated, and robust compared with
MyCase 's CRM feature, and
Pipedrive (a non-legal specific CRM).
Read full review We switched to NetDocuments 11 years ago. So, to be fair and accurate... the OpenText product at that time was called PC Docs and the company (that OpenText acquired) was
Hummingbird . I can't remember who owned iManage at the time. Anyway, NetDocuments was a superior product at the time, in general, and more specifically because the search and remote access features\functions were superior (and still are).
Read full review Return on Investment Hard to judge ROI, but it saves us money compared to our old server based system (ProLaw) More accessible from more places. I was able to continue working during a two week trip to the beach. The Client Portal (Clio Connect) is a positive way to send clients document securely, avoids the forwarded email / forwarded attachment problem. Read full review Improved mobility Eliminated issues with strucutre The conversion was difficult, not ND fault, change is hard, but training and support helped. Read full review ScreenShots