There are definitely some downsides to Clio.

The ability to connect to Clio with your own programs can also allow for interesting data analysis. I also wrote a program that automatically closes any matter that hasn't had any activity in the past 5 months. This serves both conflict-checking purposes as well as allowing attorneys to notify me up front about any incorrect information. Example: every time somebody enters new client information into Clio, Zapier will send an email to everyone in the firm listing all the party names, attorney in charge of the case, fee structure, and referral source. If you couple this feature with an automation platform such as Zapier, you can omit many time-consuming tasks often associated with the operational aspects of a law firm. If you have a 'power user' at your firm (I have an IT/Technology background) Clio is absolute MAGIC mainly due to its ability to connect to other programs, or even programs you write yourself. Retainer requests work the same way, and Clio knows that payments go in one bank account and retainers go in an IOLTA. Every month our clients receive an email, and in that email there is a link that will take them directly to a screen where they can pay their bill. For one, it makes it so easy for our clients to pay their bill and pay retainers. We ultimately went with Clio and overall it's great. The partners at my firm just did not like this, but otherwise it was fantastic. I.e., batch-creating the draft bills created a separate bill for each matter, so some clients would have multiple invoices for the same billing period.

Practice Panther was originally our front-runner as it looked super-slick but it unfortunately had one missing feature that was a deal-killer for us - that being the fact that there was no way to batch-create bills for clients that had multiple matters all on one bill for each client. I tried all three of the products you mentioned as well as a few others. I'm the Firm Administrator at our firm and I went through this earlier this year.

Bill4time reviews