Firm Central Software

A great system that may one day be magnificent.

Client/Matter management and organization. Document builder. Time/Expense billing and accounting.

Pros

Potentially any firm could be run on Firm Central almost exclusively. It's designed to contain anything and everything a firm could administratively need, and succeeds on most levels in that regard.

Customer service has been exceptional as well. Each member of the team that I have spoken to has been consistently helpful. In situations where they could not help me with my concerns, they took the information I provided back to their team to implement features on my recommendation - they even called me personally and excitedly announced the implementation of those features.

Cons

Some of the features show great potential; however, they remain half-measures and are therefore left underutilized.

For example, the platform offers a cloud drive functionality that automatically creates folders for each client and matter - but then nothing is actually saved in those folders automatically. The document builder only saves user input, not the document itself, and so the document must be downloaded and saved manually - and you're going to want to save them locally anyways, because anything saved in the Firm Central drive cannot be consistently accessed by other applications (e.g. e-filing service websites).

There are many other ambitious features here that will remain underutilized, but I've seen improvements just in the few months that I've been working with the program. Time will tell if these features will be fully implemented and incorporated into Firm Central's functionality.

My 2 1/2 Year Experience With Firm Central

Overall, I have been pleased with the features offered by Firm Central. I like the ease of saving and retrieving files stored in matters, and it is fairly easy to open new client files and matters.

Pros

Creating client files and sub-files. It is pretty intuitive, and I can find just about everything that I have saved. The Technical Support is great, and I usually have a very short wait to get in to talk with them. They have always been helpful.

Cons

I can't rename emails that I have saved in Firm Central, so searching for an email I saved 6 months ago is pretty time consuming and hit or miss. I can rename any Word or Excel file I want, but I can't change a name or date on an Outlook email. That makes no sense to me.

A Good Start

It gave us a strong platform to work from

Pros

I like the look and feel of the program. I like the stability. I love Deadline Assistant and I love the West Support

Cons

I really dislike the program because it has no email integration. Given that this is Firm Central, not having an email integration is not very "CENTRAL". I need a color-coded calendar, I also need an app that I actually can use on my smartphone. The current semi app really is not a good fit.

It sucks you in and won't let go except for a price

We've been using Firm Central for 16 months. The reason I know exactly how long we've been using it is because I had to sign a contract for 3 years. You see, West ties Firm Central to your WestlawNext and Doc & Form Building subscriptions, so each time you want to add a new employee as a user, you are required to renew your contract for all of the products you have from them. Therefore, your contract will never end so long as your firm keeps growing. If that employee leaves and you no longer need them to be a user on the system, they don't then shorten the contract back to its prior term, however.

Pros

Easy to use and intuitive. The link to WestlawNext and Doc & Form Builder is very helpful, but it's not enough to make it worth the price. The Deadline Assistant integration is very helpful as well. But all of these programs can be used separate and apart from Firm Central, so don't feel like you have to buy Firm Central to get access to them.

Cons

Yes, they advertise that it's only $40 per month per user. However, it requires a contractual commitment to get this system. Then, if you have any other West products tied to it, that means that if you ever need to add another user, they will renew your contract for everything tied to that user name and password that you needed for Firm Central. It's a complete racket, and when your bill is almost $1,600 per MONTH for what they provide, every month of extension of the contract is very expensive when your firm has one lawyer and one paralegal.

On the technology: it doesn't work on Outlook running in Terminal Server (RDP), and it's wonky even on the desktop. The add-ins do not work with Outlook for Mac, and there is no way to "pack up" or export a matter onto a thumb drive or into the cloud so that you can take it with you to court. There's no way to export matters so that you can transfer them to an associate who is leaving the firm. You have to down load all of the documents, print out all notes, and otherwise go through a lot of hassle to move an associate from your firm to another one. Also, if you had ProDoc prior to Firm Central, it will import all of your data from all of the files you had previously opened in ProDoc. In my case, that was over 1,500 matters. Now I am finally down to 1,200 "open" matters in Firm Central, but there is no way to mass-close multiple matters at once. So it requires me to spend about 20 seconds per matter to close each one. Do the math.

SAVE YOURSELF THE AGGRAVATION - DO NOT BUY THIS PRODUCT

Firm Central has been a complete disaster for my firm. I have a small (6 attorney) immigration law boutique practice and have been in business for 10 years. When we were considering changing our client database management system, we had a wish list of things we needed a new system to do that would be an improvement over our previous system. When presented multiple times to the sales person Thompson Reuters sent over to us, he assured us repeatedly that it could do what we needed it to. Turns out, after we signed the long term expensive contract, it was mostly lies. We got jobbed big time. After a while of using it, frustration mounting, costs rising, we got the IT guys on the phone to help us figure out what we were doing wrong. The sales person was so convincing, we kept thinking it must have been user error. We tried training, doing things different ways, etc., and nothing worked. When we connected with the IT guys, most of our conversation was met with responses of, "Nope, it can't do that. Never could, never will. What made you guys think it could?" It was crazy. So, realizing it was not going to work for us, and that we had been sold a bill of goods by the sales person, we confronted Thompson Reuters and requested that we be let out of the contract. Fat chance. They told us to shove it, not caring that we were lied to by the sales person. Apparently, that was his responsibility, it's on him and us for being suckers enough to believe what we were told. So here we are, stuck with paying tons of money for a product that is counterproductive to our business. Please don't get suckered like we did. Amusingly, we got a call from someone whose only job is to call people to find out why they are cancelling. The person actually admitted that to us. So many people cancel that they have people employed just to find out why. Don't buy it.

Pros

Actually we had a very good experience, the only one, with the off boarding customer service folks. They were very nice and really helpful. Made it easy to get everything moved over from Firm Central to our new system that actually works.

Cons

Everything about it. The sales people say anything to get the sale, and you will pay whether it works for you as sold or not.

Not user friendly and difficult invoice/billing system.

The cons definitely outweigh the pros here. If you are a person who needs your computer systems to be intuitive and user friendly then do not use Firm Central. Firm Central offers a lot of teaching help, but it was still just too difficult for me to learn a "better" way of working with it. I thought that the frustrations I was feeling when I first started using the product would lessen - you always have a learning curve whatever system you use and Firm Central truly does have a great one-on-one learning system. But as I used the product more and became more used to it, it's only gotten worse. Firm Central has actually kept me from doing a lot of my office work because it is so difficult to use. I'm going to have to purchase another firm management system even though I still have around 5 months left on my Firm Central contract.

Pros

Price is not bad. I was offered a "2 for 1" deal. Also, Firm Central is just generally a good price for a firm management system.
Great support. Firm Central offers a really in-depth one-on-one learning opportunity to help you get to know the system. Firm Central also offers teaching tools like pdfs and videos. They are usually easy to find.
Easy file saving. You could save client files, word docs., etc. onto Firm Central through a desktop app. Very helpful.

Cons

Not user friendly. Just everything about it is not user friendly. All the fonts are small and difficult to read and the website lays out the material really spread apart.
Not easily customizable. Customization is a pain and I usually had to re-do it because it was hard to figure out where the customization was going.
Calendaring. Just use your gmail calendar or outlook calendar. It is great that Firm Central syncs the client/matter calendar with outlook (and I believe gmail) but again, the way the calendaring is set up and how un-customizable the calendar system is makes it easier if you just use a outlook by itself or gmail.
Billing is awful. The input portal is too small and difficult to read. The drop-down/populating system is not very easy to use. The way you actually input your billable time is just time consuming.
Invoicing is awful and frustrating. The way Firm Central does its invoicing (using pre-bills) is again not user friendly. I had to re-do my bills multiple times because I would always not populate the correct matters, time, etc. And this is after getting such good support and one-on-one learning! It just is not intuitive. Furthermore, "paying" the invoice through the client's trust account is not user friendly either.
Not monthly - only yearly subscriptions available.

Excellent sales support and amazing tech training.

Simply being better organized.

Pros

Its intuitiveness, flexibility and ease of use. We used ProLaw some 10+ years ago and I recall that invoicing, pre-billing and matter creation were fairly tough. Firm Central is a breeze to use and even the moderately difficult stuff is easily retained after simps explanations.

Cons

As a very small firm, the predictable grumble is that I would like to prove to be lower. I would love to have e-mail reminders that say "send out your billings, you distracted money-hater". or even better, re-billings that are auto printed for all open time-accrued matters by the Nth day of each month.

Great all in one platform

Pros

The integration with westlaw researching is great. Firm central documents display when conducting westlaw research so you essentially can look on your own system for information while searching westlaw. The customer support is great, but if it's after business hours the 24/7 support is farmed overseas, which is similar to no customer service at all.

Cons

There are several small bugs in the software. You cannot drag and drop files from an email into firm central sometimes. the load time for larger files is unusually long despite a fast internet connection. Displaying the pages and moving from page to page is not instantaneous and takes too long

Project management team has been incredible and made our transition seamless.

Total firm management from one platform and scalable for a big firm with lots of cases. Project management team has been an absolute godsend for us!

Pros

The platform is so intuitive and the customization is superb. The system is quick and we have everything we need at our fingertips to run our firm for the foreseeable future.

I am blown away by how professional, prompt and helpful Project management team assigned to my account has been.I can't say enough good things about the team. they have gone above and beyond what I expected from Firm Central and stepped into the shoes of the tech assigned for my migration since he was away on vacation. Team helped us troubleshoot the migration process and we are up and running already with over 730 active lawsuits! AMAZING CUSTOMER SERVICE!

Cons

I would love a "batch" time entry option for the cases in which one task has been performed/applies to all.

Great product.

As a start up firm, we were looking for one product that would handle everything for us -- document management, time and billing and calendar. After working 25 years at a very large law firm I knew there had to be a program available that would do everything in one package. Firm Central was the only product I found that could do it all, eliminating the need for multiple subscriptions from multiple software companies. The software package was loaded remotely and after viewing a short tutorial, I was able to immediately begin setting up client files and adding documents. I found all facets of the program easy to navigate, the tutorials are great, the ongoing technical support is always one click or one phone call away. I have been very impressed with everything about Firm Central, the software, the tutorials and the knowledge of all the support people I have spoken with by phone or corresponded with by email. I highly recommend Firm Central to anyone looking for one comprehensive software package to handle document management, calendars and time and billing.

Pros

One program does everything we need.

Cons

Would like time entry to have a repeat last client/matter function so that I could enter multiple time entries on same day for same client.

Not entirely user-friendly, but good bang for your buck

Pros

The calendaring feature is great! Most of the people we have asked for help with the program have been extremely responsive and helpful.

Cons

There are so many options in the Deadline Assistant, that it is often difficult to find what I am looking for. For events like "Court Holidays" or "Attorney Out of Office" I have to create a fake client matter and calendar it for that just so the entire office can see it. I wish there was a way to make an event, viewable to the entire office, without having to attach a matter to it. Integration has not been as swift as we though it would be. It's laborious and extremely time consuming to move all our clients' documents from our current platform to Firm Central.

This program is easy to use because it is intuitive

It saves me a lot of time because it is much easier to use than other programs.

Pros

Speaking from the perspective of a small firm, this software is ideal for time keeping and billing. It is easy to open a client and a matter, and to generate invoices. It is easy to access off-site. The ease of use and portability to different devices makes it more likely that you will capture your time because you can just do it on the spot (e.g., in court) I also like that my client information is kept on TR servers rather than in the Cloud.

Cons

I would like more flexibility in terms of layout. For example, I would like to be able to make my calendar bigger on the home page, and I would like to have a bigger field for entering time from a Matter page (as opposed to from a time-sheet) so I do not have to scroll down to complete the entry

Firm Central Case Mangement Review

Pros

I like how it is very user freindly. It is easy to navigate, and customer support is excellent.

Cons

I would recomend that Frim Cen tral/Westlaw allow their customers to have trial access to their addins before commiting to a subcristion agreemnt (or an increase in their subcription agrrement). There are many futures that I think could be benifial to our firm. However, I want to test the product before commiting to it.

Hate this product

Pros

I can do legal research. Of course, I get a free research tool with my bar dues so that really isn't that great of a benefit.

Cons

Trust and billing component not user friendly. No evergreen trust feature, client complain about bills. The program recently started deleting court dates from the calendar and deleting documents. I have contacted the company regarding terminating the contract as they are unable to fix their program. I had to call ten different times and was told that unless the issue occurs while we are on the phone with you, we can't help you. For years, they did not even have a "void bill" feature. If you make a mistake entering a check, you cannot edit it.

Fenton was very helpful and knowledgeable

Pros

Having everything in one place. The matter page for each client is neat, organized and easy to read.

Cons

Having to flip back and forth between screens, not being able to pull lists of data for cases overall or pursuant to specific parameters.

Customer service has been great, very responsive when I have had problem/question.

Pros

I love the fact that the new Time and Billing syncs with QuickBooks. Invoicing is so much easier with Time and Billing.

Cons

We don't use the document management features as they are not easily accessible. The search function in Firm Central takes a long time to return results as well.

Firm Central Review

Pros

I like the ease of use that this software provides.

Cons

I do not like that the billing doesn't put all matters for one client on one invoice. Sending multiple invoices to one client can be confusing to the receiving party.

We have been using since May and like the product quite well.

Efficiency and reasonably easy to use.

Pros

What we like best about the product is the integration of the case management software and the billing software. We previously used Amicus and Timeslips and had to transfer data between each and it tending to be a bit unstable. Also like the appearance of the billing documents. Very clean and professional.

Cons

It has caused auto fill of email addresses on outlook to not work correctly. The other item would be inability to pull up a mater file list by firm file number.

Overall a great program that helps firms stay organized

Deadline Assistant Communication In-house Links to Calendar System

Pros

Deadline Assistant
Communication in House
New Matter Set up
Links to Calendar in Outlook
Customer support has been wonderful

Cons

Multiple steps while using Deadline Assistant
Can be a little overwhelming with all of the functions

The customer service & support that comes with the software is by far the best part. Customer support is A+

It actually protected us from a ransomware attack that annihilated all of our files on our server

Pros

I like the cloud-based technology and the constant updates to improve the software. Additionally, it is very user-friendly and the customer support is great. We love Customer support and she's always there to answer our questions.

Cons

Billing takes a little bit more time than my old software, which allows you to duplicate entries. I also wish that you could edit the "open date" since we uploaded older files, forgot to change the date and then couldn't edit it