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Law Practice Management
Software Market

by James G. Barr

Copyright 2019, Faulkner Information Services. All Rights Reserved.

Docid: 00021350

Publication Date: 1912

Report Type: MARKET

Preview

As the term implies, law practice management software provides lawyers and
other legal professionals with administrative tools for managing
law offices. Common elements include: case management – managing
information relevant to specific legal cases and clients; contact management
– managing phone calls, e-mails, and other electronic and non-electronic
communications and correspondence; document management – managing client
and court papers, including draft documents; calendaring and docketing
– managing tasks, appointments, meetings, and deadlines; and, of course, billing
and invoicing – managing the generation of client invoices based on employee
billable hours and other expenses.

Report Contents:

• Executive Summary
• Market Dynamics
• Market Leaders
• Market Trends
• Strategic Planning Implications
• Web Links

Executive Summary

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As the term implies, "law practice management" software provides lawyers and
other legal professionals with the administrative tools required to manage their
law offices. Common elements include:

• Case Management – managing information relevant to specific legal
  cases and clients.
• Contact Management – managing phone calls, e-mails, and other
  electronic – and non-electronic – communications and correspondence.
• Document Management – managing client and court papers, including
  draft documents.
• Calendaring and Docketing – managing tasks, appointments,
  meetings, and deadlines.
• Billing and Invoicing – managing the generation of client
  invoices based on employee billable hours and other expenses.

According to Capterra’s "Law Practice Management Buyers Guide," law practice
management software:

• "Reduces lawyer time and effort to search case history
  – Law practice management software records all case-related
  information along with critical deadlines and client communication.
• "[Facilitates] coordination between lawyers and paralegals
  – The software helps practitioners to improve task
  collaboration and coordination amongst themselves and their
  paralegal team.
• "[Tracks] work completed and
  [bills] clients accurately
  – The system keeps track of the work done by each staff
  member (attorneys, paralegals, assistants) on an individual basis."

With literally dozens of prominent products and solutions in place,
law practice management software is available as an installed (or on-premise)
product, or via the cloud as an SaaS (software-as-a-service) or cloud practice
management (CPM) application.

Market Dynamics

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The Law Practice Management Market Is Booming

According to a study conducted by Market Study Report, the global legal
practice management software market, valued at $1.05 billion in 2018, is expected to reach
$2.33 billion by the end of 2024,
growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 14.3 percent between 2019 and 2024.

"Cloud-Based Software Is a Game-Changer"

Lawyer and market analyst Nicole Black declares that while law practice
management software has been around for decades, "today’s cloud-based software
is a game-changer, since it provides lawyers with 24/7 access to their law
firm’s data from any location using an internet-enabled device. It offers
lawyers the convenience of mobile, flexible access to case-related information
at an affordable, cost-effective price.

"As is the case with other types of legal software, cloud-based tools are your
best – and increasingly only – option if you’re in the market for law practice
management software. This is because many companies are phasing out their
premise-based solutions."¹

Product Pricing Is Flexible to Accommodate Law Firms of All Sizes

Capterra reports that most law practice management software products are priced on a
per user, per month basis. adding that "[higher-priced] enterprise or premium
software may include some additional features such as custom security roles,
automated payment reminders, and advanced calendar rules."²

Despite Technological Advances (or Because of Them) Software Concerns Persist

Relative to law practice management software, the legal community is concerned about:

• The proliferation of products, which
  complicates selection and procurement.
• The perceived learning curve in which a firm might conclude,
  perversely, that there’s no time to invest in process improvement.
• The SaaS versus on-premise conundrum in which a firm understands the
  usability benefit of pursuing a cloud-based law practice management solution,
  but fears the possible fallout from lost, stolen, or misappropriated client
  data residing on third-party servers and networks.

Market Leaders

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While the law practice management software market encompasses literally
dozens of highly-regarded products, certain solutions have captured the mind share of major
market analysts. Among the most commonly cited are:

• PracticePanther
• Clio
• MyCase

Table 1 offers the perspective of several leading product evaluators.

Market Trends

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Artificial Intelligence Is Transforming Legal Research and Law Practice
Management Software

As Capterra reminds us, "Junior lawyers and paralegals are often
burdened with copious amounts of audit and case research. They have
a high probability of making mistakes or missing out on critical
information while sifting through large volumes of paper contracts,
case reports, investigation files, etc., any of which can disrupt or
slow down case proceedings. To assist in avoiding such situations,
vendors have started adding AI and machine learning capabilities to
their law practice management software. AI-enabled tools look
through a large group of unstructured reports and contracts to
extract relevant and specific case-related information, thus saving
paralegals a large amount of time and effort."⁶

Law Firms Must Exercise Due Diligence In the Acquisition of Cloud-Based Law
Practice Management Software

The use of SaaS products
presents a dilemma for lawyers who, as the North Carolina State Bar has
observed, "have duties to safeguard confidential client information, including
protecting that information from unauthorized disclosure, and to protect client
property from destruction, degradation, or loss (whether from system failure,
natural disaster, or dissolution of a vendor’s business). Lawyers also
have a continuing need to retrieve client data in a form that is usable outside
of a vendor’s product."

Given these obligations, the
North Carolina State Bar has expressed their opinion relative to two pressing
questions:

Question 1: May a law firm use SaaS?

Answer: "Yes, provided steps are taken to minimize the risk of inadvertent
or unauthorized disclosure of confidential client information, and to protect
client property, including the information in a client’s file, from risk of
loss.

Question 2: Are there measures
that a lawyer or law firm should consider when assessing an SaaS vendor, or
seeking to minimize the security risks of SaaS?

Answer: "Some recommended security measures are:

• "Inclusion in the SaaS
  vendor’s Terms of Service or Service Level Agreement, or in a separate
  agreement between the SaaS vendor and the lawyer or law firm, … an
  agreement on how the vendor will handle confidential client information in
  keeping with the lawyer’s professional responsibilities.
• "If the lawyer terminates
  use of the SaaS product, the SaaS vendor goes out of business, or the
  service otherwise has a break in continuity, the law firm will have a method
  for retrieving the data, the data will be available in a non-proprietary
  format that the law firm can access, or the firm will have access to the
  vendor’s software or source code. The SaaS vendor is contractually required
  to return or destroy the hosted data promptly at the request of the law
  firm.
• "Careful review of the terms
  of the law firm’s user or license agreement with the SaaS vendor including
  the security policy.
• "Evaluation of the SaaS
  vendor’s (or any third party data hosting company’s) measures for
  safeguarding the security and confidentiality of stored data including, but
  not limited to, firewalls, encryption techniques, socket security features,
  and intrusion-detection systems.
• "Evaluation of the extent to
  which the SaaS vendor backs up hosted data."

As Much As Law Firms, Enterprise Legal Departments Need Law Practice
Management Software

While law practice management software aids private attorneys in the conduct of
their business, it may be even more essential to large enterprise legal
departments. According to consulting firm Gartner, today’s more complex
regulatory compliance risks require a new level of sophistication in managing
operations. "As more legal work shifts from law firms to in-house counsel,
leveraging spreadsheets or homegrown solutions is no longer a viable solution as
they cannot meet the needs of enterprise legal management for compliance and
risk obligations."⁷

Law Practice Management Software Will Increasingly Feature Analytics

For law practice management and other legal applications, analyst Dean Leung
predicts the continuing rise of analytics. "There is a staggering amount of data
and metadata within a law firm or corporate law department. The amount of
relevant data for a client or matter only grows the longer a case or client
relationship continues. Add to that the enormous amount of data in court
records, research services, and eDiscovery platforms and the ability to manually
search or govern these data sets becomes impossible. The advent of analytic
search engines help bring order to the data from an Information Governance and
search relevance perspective."⁸

Strategic Planning Implications

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Communication & Collaboration

Lawyer and market analyst Nicole Black asserts that "all practice management software should include secure communication
and collaboration features. These features are all the more important in light
of Formal Opinion 477, an ethics opinion issued by the ABA Standing Committee
on Ethics and Professional Responsibility in 2017, wherein the committee
concluded that unencrypted e-mail may not always be sufficient for client
communication and advised lawyers to assess the sensitivity of information on a
case-by-case basis and then choose the most appropriate and sufficiently secure
method of communicating and collaborating with clients. One such alternative to
e-mail that is inherently more secure is using the communication portals built
into law practice management software."⁹

Compatibility & Availability

According to the ABA, in implementing a law practice management system, firm officials should ensure
the selected software is compatible with the firm’s existing IT infrastructure. Relevant questions include:

• How does the practice management software
  interface with the firm’s other office productivity tools (e.g., Microsoft
  Word, Excel, and PowerPoint)?
• How will the practice management software be accessed? Security and mobility considerations
  are the driving factors in the design of enterprise software environments. In the case of mobility,
  if the practice management software is Web-based (i.e., an SaaS application),
  then anyone with a Web browser – operating from home, the office, a client
  site, or a courtroom – can gain practice management software access – from a desktop, laptop, tablet,
  or smartphone. If the practice management software is installed on-premise, firm officials must
  determine how the system will be accessed, and what technologies, such as
  virtual private network (VPN), will be needed to affect the desired
  availability.¹⁰

User Training

Lawyers earn the proverbial "big bucks" by
practicing law, not by mastering the complexities of a law practice management
system. Law practice management software should be easy to use, and the vendor should offer a
range of "user" training options, from purpose-driven online tutorials to
classroom training. Importantly, even the best law practice management
software will not be used if
lawyers, law clerks, paralegals, and other firm personnel find its operation
onerous.

Try Before You Buy

Before commencing any large-scale law practice
management software
implementation, firm officials should conduct a small-scale pilot, in which firm
volunteers sample a prospective product (or products) and determine whether such
offerings conform to the firm’s legal and business requirements, and, just as
importantly, the firm’s
culture.¹¹

The Ultimate Checklist

According to legal analyst Susan L. Traylor,
ultimately, the best law practice management software is the one that:

• Gets used
• Is used effectively by everyone in the firm
• Accomplishes the requisite tasks
• Works nicely with the firm’s other software and devices
• Stays competitive with technological developments
• Gives the firm a return on their investment
• Is there when the firm needs it¹²

References

¹ Nicole Black. "The Ins and Outs of Law Practice Management
Software."
American Bar Association. January 11, 2019.

² "Law Practice Management Buyers Guide." Capterra Inc. 2019.

³ "Law Practice Management Software." Lawyerist Media, LLC. 2019.

⁴ "Best Legal Practice Management Software for 2020." Uptime
Systems, LLC. 2019.

⁵ Megan Burgess. "The Best Nine Law Practice Management Software
Programs." TheeDigital. March 27, 2019.

⁶ "Law Practice Management Buyers Guide." Capterra Inc. 2019.

⁷ Jie Zhang and Jeffrey Wheatman. "Market Guide for
Enterprise Legal Management Solutions." Gartner. February 4, 2016.

⁸ Dean Leung. "Top Five Trends in Legal Technology." American Bar
Association. August 1, 2016.

⁹ Nicole Black. "The Ins and Outs of Law Practice Management
Software."
American Bar Association. January 11, 2019.

¹⁰ "Implementing a Case Management System."
YourABA.
American Bar Association. March 2012.

¹¹ Jared Correia. "Law Practice Management Software: A Holistic
Remedy." Attorney At Work.
October 31, 2011.

¹² Susan L. Traylor. "Identifying the Best Practice Management Software."
Arizona Attorney (magazine). State Bar of Arizona. October 2011.

Web Links

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• American Bar Association: http://www.americanbar.org/
• Capterra: http://www.capterra.com/
• Clio: http://www.clio.com/
• MyCase: http://www.mycase.com/
• PracticePanther: http://www.practicepanther.com/

About the Author

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James G. Barr is a leading business continuity analyst
and business writer with more than 30 years’ IT experience. A member of
"Who’s Who in Finance and Industry," Mr. Barr has designed,
developed, and deployed business continuity plans for a number of Fortune 500
firms. He is the author of several books, including How to Succeed in
Business BY Really Trying, a member of Faulkner’s Advisory Panel, and a
senior editor for Faulkner’s Security Management Practices. Mr.
Barr can be reached via e-mail at jgbarr@faulkner.com.

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