Panther software review

Easy to link emails to a matter. Client Portal - Yes. The only thing that kept me from staying with PracticePanther, is that MyCase allows you to be able to set future billing to go out to a client s and forget it. With Criminal Defense clients that need to make monthly or future payments on a retainer amount, MyCase allows you to set-up future dates where a client will be emailed a bill, which they can tap on a button and pay on-line.

This is the main thing that made me go with MyCase. But if not for that, I would have stayed with either PracticePanther or Smokeball. I ended up going with MyCase because it has the auto future filling of clients. My overall experience is amazing. I love this software and it makes my life so much easier.

I would recommend to anyone with a law firm. I love how seamless this software makes my practice. It is so user-friendly. The client portal is wonderful, and I love how the accounting features are organized. Customer service is amazing. The templates feature saves me countless hours.

The tasks feature really keeps me on track. I love how you can link relationships, create emails that sync automatically with the matter, and create events that send text notifications to clients. The support is quick and always friendly and helpful. The e-signature feature is also really cool. I cannot stress that enough. I do not use the "history" section at all as it is currently operating, but it would be invaluable if that one change was made!

If time entry descriptions were included, the "history" section would actually tell me the history of the work that's been done on the matter. It's very annoying. I've had to create separate individual contacts for all the members of a company contact.

Like for court services, I would like to be able to have all the employees of court services under the Court Services company contact, and then be able to link the particular officer assigned to supervise my particular client.

But right now I have to link the court services company contact AND the individual contact to be able to send emails to the correct officer. I felt like Practice Panther was just as good as Clio, but more cost appropriate for my smaller firm. Also, I liked that I always have the option to figure things out myself, or with a virtual helper, instead of having to call support. The same was true with the purchasing experience. I didn't get bombarded with phone calls, but I knew someone would be available to speak with me if I wanted to have a conversation.

I felt that spoke volumes to the kind of company you are and the understanding and respect you have for your customers' time. PracticePanther is like having a full time employee at a fraction of the cost without any employment law issues. I couldn't run my law firm without PracticePanther. The software is easy to use, the PP support is excellent, and the company is always rolling out new features to make running my law office easier and more efficiently!

It's very hard to pinpoint what I like the most about PracticePanther since there are so many features I rely on for my law practice. I very much like that I can find everything related to a contact or matter in one place.

All emails and their attachments, notes, documents, billing, payments, calendar, "to do" list Tasks , time entries, and communications for a contact and matter can be found in PracticePanther. I use the templates and workflows on a daily basis, which save me time and keep me on track. With a simple click I can send an online questionnaire to a client that, once completed, is kept in the client account. The tags allow me to filter and label my contacts and matters any way I want.

I use PantherPay for online payments which is very easy and shows all payments in the billing account immediately. I also like that new features are made available regularly - the software is always improving! I realize you are working on this. Is there a way to fix this? PracticePanther had a good online review and the cost was reasonable. But, it was the template feature that really made the decision for me. Christopher from Law Office of Christopher A.

Pearsall, Esquire. I still had an excellent experience. I suspect that in time PracticePanther will address these issues and I will gladly give it a 5-Star rating. Practice Panther has a fairly intuitive interface for daily billing entries, templates for monthly billing and accounting for your trust and operating accounts for your clients.

The learning curve was minimal in comparison to other systems I tried and the program was more responsive over other programs I tried over the internet. Tech Support and help files are easily available on every page. I found daily entries both fast and easy and the online billing system linked with LawPay is magnificent and has worked flawlessly for me.

I was very skeptical of "secure" cloud-based billing and accounting but after more than a year it would take a lot to pull me away from Practice Panther. There are two cons to this software to be aware of. First, there is no single backup system to backup and restore all your files with just a few clicks. While complete backup is available, it requires you to go through far too many steps to make sure you back up everything.

I have not yet had to restore anything to Practice Panther but I am wary that a system that requires multiple steps could have glitches in trying to restore from their backups. It is more than possible that if a restoration were required it might involve more "downtime" for a practitioner than he or she would like in order to get back up and running.

This is where I think they need to most work. Secondarily, their billing review system has an issue that will throw practitioners off. If you create a bill several months ago and you go back to look at the bill to see what the retainer balance was at the time of that bill, the historical bill actually pulls up the retainer that exists now.

That should not occur on a historical bill. Once a bill has been saved, the bill should not change unless you intentionally change other things in your billing. An old bill should never show the current balance of the retainer. It should show the remaining balance of the retainer at the time the specific bill is generated.

I chose PracticePanther because in my opinion its user interface was more intuitive and it more effectively implemented necessary functions for my practice without overburdening the user with so many functions that it tried to be a swiss army knife for everyone looking for online billing.

Additionally, the ease of help and customer support links at every turn made it more likely I would succeed with the software faster than the other products I considered. John from John R. Easy to learn. Easy access to tutorials and the help area is full of information. It has been a great decision to switch.

I know that i have been able to capture more of my time and reduce time needed for billing. There are simple reports and a great dashboard to see how much is outstanding, to be billed, and the amount in my trust account. Practice panther has cut down on the time it takes for billing and made my office more efficient.

I print checks directly from practice panther, which takes several steps, but it makes it easy to add the cost to the client's billing. Practice panther has needed features for a law firm that are not available in quick books. It is much easier to use than quick books. I used to use quick books for billing, but it is not as geared to attorneys as practice panther. Contingency cases were especially difficult.

Practice panther even has a feature for evergreen retainers. Alexis from Right Law Group. I use Practice Panther as my main case managment system. It is far better than the alternatives I have used in the past and in other firms. We have it downloaded on all computers and phones for easy access in court at all times. I like the intuitive interface, clean look, and the ability to customize my own workflows.

I would like to see a private server capability added in instead of having to rely on Box. One that we can access via VPN would be helpful. I wish we could add in a bit more automation customization. For example, I would like to be able to send my clients a customized email with attachments and helpful info before specific events, rather than the generic reminder email. I would also like the ability to create conditional logic in certain events.

The main reason I initially chose it was price and interface look. Now I wouldn't change for anything because it is constantly evolving with my firm's growth and provides all the support we need. There was much more functionality and customization available with PP than Abacus. User-friendly software but there are still room for improvement to effectively serve larger firms.

If the search function in Tags was more comprehensive, it will allow users to expand the usage of tags and give users more flexibility as to how we can efficiently search the data we need.

Practice Panther Tech Support has been aware of the suggestions listed above. However, there has not been any update on the progress, and we do not know if these functions will be ever available. We definitely would like to see them implemented very soon. I am open to revise this review once these functionalities become available. This software is intuitive, easy to navigate and very user-friendly. Tech support is promptly available and they are very patient. Practice Panther continues to make improvements on the software and they listen to their customers feedback.

They have fixed our issues with our calendar being very slow to load. It's fast now and working very well. There are still room for improvement in terms of features and functions. Everyone's events are scattered across the calendar and overlap with each other which makes difficult to identify availability for specific staff. Events are displayed with different colors assigned to each staff. It's really difficult to see who has appointments at each hour throughout the day.

We suggested to have columns for each staff so that it only takes a glance to identify who is available when, just like how calendars are in Time Matters from Lexis Nexis. What makes this software great is the customization you can make to fit it to your exact needs. However, customized fields are not sort-able, and without the sorting function for the customized fields, data is not as valuable and usable as it should be.

As a legal administrator who manages the data and runs productivity report for legal staff, we are currently spending a lot of time downloading the information from the software to MS Excel, sorting and manipulating the data in Excel, and finally coming back to the PracticePanther to make necessary changes within the software. Continues to overall experience. Easy to use practice management software with top-end functionality at low price.

Easy of keeping track of deadlines and client contacts. Overall, the best practice management software I have seen for the price.

Unlike a number of the cheaper practice management software programs on the market today, Practice Panther has a wide range of functions within the software which are easy to use. On the Task front, PP allows you to set sub-reminders that can send you e-mails or text messages in advance, like say "7 days before," and "3 days before," for a filing deadline. This would be incredibly useful for practitioners mostly civil managing staff and trying to deal with staff not accounting for all of their time in billing.

The "mail sync" function is also easy to use, and allows you to e-mail out of your native software MS Outlook, GMAIL, etc and simply "bcc" the client matter itself. When you do this, the e-mail is automatically saved into the matter. Almost every other program out there that I have used requires you to use their client messaging portal to get the same functionality.

The templates are easy to use for creating documents to merge out of PP also. Think client engagement letters, releases, and basic letterheads that you use in every file. We don't use PP for accepting payments so I cannot comment on that portion.

Matter pre-bills or invoicing. In many civil cases there will be a time when you need to prepare a billing report to present to the court solely for a claim of attorney's fees. In other software that I have used, you can run a report for a set period of time or type of billing entries which will then create a printable draft invoice-looking document. You would then be able to slap an exhibit sticker on that document and use it for your attorney's fee request. I haven't found a way to easily do this in PP yet, and it seems like you would have to utilize a draft invoice which captures all time billed in the matter.

I could be wrong. No Batch Entry System for E-mails. However, if you forget to include the mail-sync in your BCC line, or don't forward a message to the mail-sync, there is no easy way to subsequently get the e-mails into the matter in PP.

What I mean is this: say you have a number of e-mails from someone that weren't saved into a client PP matter and instead lived in your Outlook before the client actually hired. You would have to manually forward each one of your emails to the mail-sync to get them into PP. Sofia from M Legal Australia. A well designed CRM and so far, we cannot be happier with the product. Part of M Legal's mission is to stay innovative. The user experience from the moment a client logs onto our website, uses the embedded intake form, to create a client profile to PP is seamless.

This is just one of the time-saving tools we have discovered. This automated way of working and being able to integrate systems has forced M Legal to rethink how we work and more importantly, how to we can simplify our working processes. This has been a real game-changer for the business. While many of us worked with CRMs in the past, most of them were clunky and stand-alone systems that could not work with other applications or software.

PP has made managing clients much easier, where our lawyers are in control from the moment a case is initiated, all the way through to billing clients. This has also given a level of transparency across the practice as lawyers can pick up any file from where the last person left off and delegate their work during absences. This transparency was a key selling point for us as we believe it is a core component of running an effective law firm. We have experienced our fair share of poor technical support teams when using other software programs.

With PP, despite the time differences between Miami and Sydney, their technical support team are always available, whether it is through the chat portal, email or by phone.

Each technical person is professional, knowledgeable and continues to take care of your matter until it is resolved.

Further, they always have something new to teach you about the PP system on each call. I cannot express how impressed we are, with what we consider as stellar service from this tech support team. Naturally, a product such as this is not going to have universal application across all legal fields. I would say that in the immigration space the status of a case is really important, so having a status bar that is customisable would be a feature that could be improved.

Also, a lot of our data from clients are taken from in-take forms - we require intake forms that are easier to build and that have the capability of storing more information. While these are work in progress type issues, this certainly does not take away from PP's product, which we believe is a well designed and thought through CRM system.

Time Used: Free Trial. Before PracticePanther my client information was all over my computer. I kept track of billable hours and financials in Exel, client emails in Google, and my forms intake, representation, agreements, court filings etc in Word. This meant in order to have everything as it pertained to a specific client in one place, I had to print everything out. And, I was using nonlegal software to send out billing invoices which lead to long hours of transcribing information from Excel to the service I was using.

The rate of error of retyping information like addresses or agreements or billable hours into different software programs was high.

I am a solo practitioner who does not have a clerk, secretary or paralegal. So after a long day of work, I then had to become the marketing, IT and accounting departments. I spent a lot of time doing things two and three times. I knew I needed a case management system but was afraid it would be too expensive or time consuming to learn.

After doing my due diligence I found PracticePanther. Not only was PP one of the most affordable options out there, they had very intuitive methods of doing things so the learning curve did not take much time.

Now anything and everything pertaining to a specific client is kept in one place. All billables, emails, evidence, representation agreements I even enter details of phone calls and meetings I have on matters in the Notes section for each matter so I have a documented history of what was discussed on what day.

I use that time to grow my practice, network or do pro bono work. I love the IT help, the invoicing system and the templates feature.

I had a lot of questions and needed a lot of help in the beginning. Being able to schedule times to discuss my issues with the IT guys at PracticePanther was great.

The fact that they can take over your computer remotely so they can see what you see in real time is even better. Their response time to non-scheduled issues is pretty fast. I have also found their FAQs and how to videos to be extremely helpful but having a live person to speak with who can access your computer is just as good as having someone standing next to me while I work.

The invoicing system is phenomenal. It keeps track of all of my client banking accounts. I can see at any time how much is in my IOLTA account, how much is in my operating account, how much a client owes, how much a client has paid and how much I have billed a client but not yet invoiced. I can do this client by client, matter by matter or as an overall total. LawPay is free if you sign up through PracticePanther which is awesome because it handles my credit card transactions and when a client pays, it automatically updates my invoicing and accounts.

PracticePanther also knows how to deduct things from a client's retainer when sending out an invoice so you don't have to worry about that either.

Their timing device feeds right into the system. It is awesome. This is an update to a previous review I made. The folks at Panther are impressive. They've taken recommendations I and others have made and implemented them; they've quickly addressed issues I've had; and they are always courteous and responsive. The overall layout has vastly improved since my first review, and looks downright beautiful. We live by the search feature and it now works on custom fields.

Custom fields can now also be listed in reports. You can now group custom fields so that you may show only those fields in a matter or contact that pertain to their specific situation. We have structured Panther so we can use it as a basic CRM We asked for Dropbox integration and what they produced is perfect considering the limitations of Dropbox.

Time keeping is a snap and reachable from any screen. We asked to be able to a log call without assigning it to a matter, and they changed that so now we can. The tasking feature and its integration with the calendar is fantastic, I could not service so many clients without it. And the Panther folks have taken it on themselves to make some minor changes that have made the workflow of using the program much faster than in my previous review. I now can answer the question I posed in my earlier review of whether I love or hate Panther: We love it.

I admit that it's not perfect a couple of basic features in billing need to be addressed before I am willing to use that portion of the program , but Panther saves us many hours a week. I tried many firm management products before settling on Practice Panther, and I am glad I stayed with them.

It's already better than the others, and it keeps getting better all the time thanks to their team. You cannot go wrong choosing Practice Panther. Final note: To my surprise one lawyer told me Panther seemed expensive. It seems well priced to me, and if you try to save a few dollars a month with some inferior product you will pay dearly for that choice in lost time.

Beautiful layout, easy to use, functions as a basic CRM, matter and time management, and billing program all in one. Flat fee billing is not well thought out, and the billing module presents clients with a reckoning of my operating account as well as their trust account. I understand Panther may have made the operating account info optional by now, or that is in their near term plan. Practice Panther meets the need for small lawfirms.

PP has been very affordable and user friendly. Attorneys who have been in practice for 20 years who never entered their own time are now doing it themselves. Time consuming backups not necessary, can have users tracking time while billing is being run. Web Based and can enter time tracking from anywhere on any computer or on your phone.

Some report features not available but over the past two years greater functionality has continued to be added. The user-interface is designed for quick and easy navigation. You can look at your dashboard and very clearly see everything you need to know for your day to run smoothly well as smoothly as possible.

It is cost effective and the onboarding and training are taken care of with Practice Panther's incredible customer service. Before PracticePanther we had started an Excel spreadsheet to log our contacts for conflicts checks. We created a joint email account with Gmail so our email would be centralized and that also gave us a central calendar that we all had access to in order to set appointments, record deadlines, etc.

We also created a Dropbox account for file storage. While everything was low cost or free, all the parts felt scattered. PracticePanther pulls it all together in one beautiful, user-friendly interface. All of the components of PracticePanther are really easy to use.

The entire program is designed for efficiency and ease of use. Color-coding allows you to see and understand your financial details in mere seconds. Tasks, events, and timekeeping are easy. I would like to see the software integrate with more programs. Quickbooks is great, but my brain works better with Wave Accounting; LawPay is great, but being able to integrate with PayPal also, would be even better. However, these are minor things and not worth seeking a different program I like as much as Practice Panther.

I had shopped around quite a bit before choosing Practice Panther; I doubt I would find anything I like as much. Hands down, our favorite thing about PracticePanther is the superior support staff.

If you have a problem and leave a message after hours in the chat box, you get a response generally within the hour. There is also training videos and a help center that will help you find the help that you need.

We highly recommend LawPay for a number of reasons, but if you must use PayPal, we do have an integration available. We will reach out to you to show you how it works. Thank you so much! Register here. It's free! Join Lawyerist Insider Back to login. First Last. Enter Password Confirm Password.

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New Podcast Episode! Back to Top. View all Law Practice Management Software. Legal product reviews and business guidance from industry experts. Lawyerist Rating for PracticePanther. Community Rating: 4. Composite Rating: 4. Visit PracticePanther. What is PracticePanther? Starting Cost:. Pros Cloud-based Intake Customizability.

PracticePanther Demo. Product Details. Core Features For Law Practice Management Software, the following are essential features, and you should therefore expect to see a check in every box in this section. Calendar As with email, this feature means a full calendar client, not just an integration with Outlook or Google Calendar.

Timekeeping Timekeeping is a core feature of practice management software, essential for lawyers who bill by the hour but useful even for those who don't. Conflict Checking An actual conflict checker is more than just a search box. Email Client Does it include a full email client? Text Messaging Can you send and receive text messages and associate them with your matters?

Secure Client Portal. Basic Bookkeeping This means basic checkbook register—style bookkeeping, which is more limited than full accounting. Trust Accounting This means you can track your client trust accounts, including expenses and payments. Full Accounting Some software includes full double-entry accounting features, making additional accounting software unnecessary.

Online Payments Payment processing is increasingly offered either as an included or add-on feature, especially with cloud-based law practice management software. Open API. Compare PracticePanther Similar Products. Select another product to compare:. Filevine CosmoLex. Pros Cloud-based Integrations Customizability.

Read Filevine Review. PracticePanther vs. Filevine Full Report. Read CosmoLex Review. CosmoLex Full Report. Remember this is only my opinion. No one has paid me to do these reviews.

First up is Practice Panther. Practice Panther is a legal software that is a practice management tool. It not only tracks an attorney's time for billing but has a client portal, links to Box. It is cloud-based and connects with QuickBooks. It has multiple price levels so it is a fit for the small law practice to the medium to larger firms.

You can call from the app, access the program via your phone or other device. It is the all in one choice for law firms looking to have a one stop shop. It has a great integration with LawPay. Practice Panther is a simple and effective system focusing on the key features such as document and matter management.

The software has a pleasant user experience and would be a good fit for any small to medium firms that are looking for a basic system. Firms looking for advanced systems and the ability to further develop and customise systems may find Practice Panther restrictive.

Practice Panther Software Review View site. The Software Practice Panther focuses on the basic features of document management and highlights the key fields. Strengths Practice Panther is a simple system and is aimed at the smaller firms or novice users. Weakness Practice Panther does not provide many advance features such as Business Intelligence and its own Legal Accounts.