Actionstep in Richmond offers their flagship legal practice management software as an end-to-end solution, containing both matter management tools and business administration automation, with an internal billing and accounting system.
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Filevine
Score 5.9 out of 10
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Filevine is a project management and workflow automation platform for law firms from the company of the same name in Utah.
I have worked with a lot of software. Each one has a different focus. ActionStep is better at workflow and task automation that the items above, in my opinion. However, having gone through many different deployments, what really matters is identifying your key requirements and …
Filevine is much easier to learn and use, the user interface is more appealing (with bigger fonts and easy-to-understand icons), and its customization feature is easier to use and understand.
I’ve tried Clio, MyCase, and PracticePanther. Clio is super user-friendly with lots of integrations, MyCase is great for billing and communication but more limited on automation, and PracticePanther is easy to use but not as strong on reporting. Compared to them, Filevine feels …
Filevine is so much more detailed and extensive in terms of keeping all the information for each case in one place. I can even edit docs within filevine and combine docs and create emails and faxes right from within. I feel Filevine is an all in one stop and helps keep …
File Vine is an excellent product due to its ease of use and organizational capabilities. Have used another product, but it's not as vast as File Vine.
I have used Zelous. It is a smaller known case management software. I was a public defender. it was created for public defenders by public defenders. I have also used Defender Data. Filevine blows both of these products out of the water.
much more customizable. We have a niche practice - ERISA - not a personal injury practice. Clio does not fit what we do and Filevine can be customized to fit.
Night and day difference between FV and Practice Panther. PP was easy to start but has massive limitations. FV can be built for anything. It's the Salesforce of this segment.
ActionStep is a powerful CRM and matter management tool. It provides many other good benefits too. For example powerful accounting and billing, time tracking and document management. Only in highly specific areas, like multiple many to many contact relations has it fallen short. But even in this highly specialized area, so many other benefits are provided that it hardly matters.
File Vine is well-suited because I believe it was invented to assist Law Firms with document organization for the legal cases collected in a Law Firm. It is easy to navigate and find your documents with a click of a button.
we are able to duplicate our file types from Sharepoint in Filevine giving us a unified look at our files
We are able to create subfolders in Filevine to help give each project a more clean look and feel when we access documents
We are able to integrate our medial records requests with Filevine
We are able to integrate Outlook with Filevine and we are able to email /forward emails into projects.
Project Hub in Filevine is a God-send! We are able to see a snap shot of our projects and can filter our view of our projects and which team may be handling each project!!
ActionStep is difficult to setup. I suggest working with a consultant which increases cost.
Needs mobile app.
One of our practice areas, Property Law, request we have a many to many contact relation. ActionStep cannot accommodate this. However, no other software I have reviewed can do this either. ActionStep is the most robust that I have seen and comes closest to making this work.
I dock a few points because of the setup it requires. If someone in-house can handle that then the score goes up. It really depends on the firm and their personnel. Once it is setup though, I think anyone can get in and do what they need to do
I have worked with a lot of software. Each one has a different focus. ActionStep is better at workflow and task automation that the items above, in my opinion. However, having gone through many different deployments, what really matters is identifying your key requirements and needs. Then evaluation software against those. Once you have your requirements and software, focus on using that software to fix issues in existing workflow. This, when compared with ongoing training, is what it means to invest in software. Simply purchasing ActionStep or any software without identifying needs, problems in workflow or an investment in training is not a good plan. Neither is comparing the vendors to one another without knowing all of your specific needs.
I’ve tried Clio, MyCase, and PracticePanther. Clio is super user-friendly with lots of integrations, MyCase is great for billing and communication but more limited on automation, and PracticePanther is easy to use but not as strong on reporting. Compared to them, Filevine feels more customizable and workflow-focused, though it does take more time to learn.
I love the workflows that can be deployed for practice areas to ensure consistency. This has reduced new employee onboarding time and increased the speed at which we can complete matters.
Since ActionStep lives in the cloud, and we have O365 our firm is very mobile without spending lots of money in TS or other such infrastructure.
Creating the workflows is a bit complex, so this increases the overall cost and makes an ROI take longer. I suggest spending a bit more initially to get everything setup and working with a consultant to learn how to do this on your own during that initial setup.
