Like Rocket Matter before it, Clio is a promising online practice management solution. Clio gave me a tour last Friday, so I have seen it in action and had the opportunity to ask the developers all kinds of questions.

For lawyers currently wrestling with Time Matters, Amicus, Abacus, and other clumsy practice management packages, Clio would be a breath of fresh air, and well worth the $49 per month for attorneys and $25 per month for staff. For lawyers like me whose practice management software is based on disparate webapps like Google’s online applications, Freshbooks, and Remember the Milk, Clio has no real advantage.

I like everything about Clio except the price. For me, Clio just does not pass the cost/benefit barrier.

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The world is going the way of open standards. Even Microsoft, long a proponent of closed, proprietary standards, just got finished pushing and shoving its flawed OOXML document standard (hint: what you use if you use Office 2007) through ISO certification.

What about the legal industry? Nope, nary an open standard to be seen in use. There is an open standard, however. LEDES is an XML-based standard for client, matter, and billing information. It does not seem to be certified by the ISO just yet, however.

Why open standards? Well, right now, if you start using Time Matters, you are more or less stuck with it. Even though I have not used Time Matters in two years, I need to keep it on my system for another five years or so, because I have important data from closed cases stored in Time Matters, with no way to read that data except by using Time Matters. This is a big pain.

If Time Matters used an open standard, I could migrate that data to any software using the open standard (see why some companies don’t want it?). They operate on a “trap the customer” model, not a “please the customer” model.

[via Rocket Matter blog]

Rocket Matter is a fairly new online practice management solution. From the demo, it looks very smooth. If you are in the market for an alternative to the bloated, crashy practice management software offerings out there, Rocket Matter might be a good option.

A couple of caveats.

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