Firm Central

RATING:

3.6

(66)

About Firm Central

Firm Central by Thomson Reuters is a cloud-based legal management solution. It features matter management, time and billing, scheduling and document assembly. All Firm Central packages offer client, matter, document and task management. Users have access to centralized case files and client databases. The matter management module helps users organize contact information, tasks, notes, documents, communications with clients and calendar events. Firm Central’s Essential package includes all that, plus Time and Billing module. Users can log billable hours into the system and apply fees to specific matters. Premier also includes a scheduling module, deadline assistant, which uses Westlaw legal calendaring rules (or users’ own templates) to sync firms’ calendars. ...

Awards and Recognition

FrontRunner 2020
Software Advice's FrontRunners report ranks top products based on user reviews, which helps businesses find the right software.

Firm Central Pricing

CORE: $40 per user per month ESSENTIAL: $65 per user per month, with Time & Billing PREMIER: $105 per user per month, with Time & Billing and Deadline Assistant

Starting price: 

$40.00 per month

Free trial: 

Available

Free version: 

Not Available

Home screen

Firm Central Reviews

Overall Rating

3.6

Ratings Breakdown

Secondary Ratings

Ease-of-use

3.5

Customer Support

4

Value for money

3.5

Functionality

3.5

Most Helpful Reviews for Firm Central

1 - 5 of 65 Reviews

User Profile

Michael

Verified reviewer

Used daily for less than 6 months

Review Source: Capterra
This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered

OVERALL RATING:

5

EASE OF USE

5

VALUE FOR MONEY

5

CUSTOMER SUPPORT

5

FUNCTIONALITY

5

Reviewed May 2018

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.

Vendor Response

Hello Michael, Thank you very much for for the positive review of Firm Central. We are thrilled to hear that you've had such a positive customer experience! Please utilize the many resources we have available as you continue to use the product and don't hesitate to reach out with questions. Thank you for your business!

Replied June 2018

Nate

Legal Services, 11-50 employees

Used daily for more than 2 years

Review Source: Capterra
This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered

OVERALL RATING:

5

EASE OF USE

5

VALUE FOR MONEY

3

CUSTOMER SUPPORT

3

FUNCTIONALITY

5

Reviewed August 2019

Excellent Case Management Software if integrated with Westlaw & Custom Forms etc.

Overall, our firm has had a great experience with Firm Central, but that is largely because of the additional add on products we integrated with Firm Central (Custom Form Builder, Company Investigator, Westlaw). If it was not for those seamlessly integrating with each matter it would not be worth the price.

PROS

This is a great Case Management system if your willing to invest the money to purchase the add on's like Custom Forms, Westlaw, Company investigator and etc. It can get extremely expensive however, our Firm saw the financial benefits in several ways once we committed to using all its features. The biggest benefit was the ability to automate the Custom Form Builder from data out of Firm Central.

CONS

The Firm Central Plug in for Outlook was terrible and unreliable. Firm Central should have put more focus on that aspect of the software because Lawyers and law firms live out of their email.

Reason for choosing Firm Central

Because of the products we integrated with Firm Central (Custom Form Builder, Company Investigator, Westlaw).

Reasons for switching to Firm Central

We switched because of growth in company.

Joseph

Legal Services, 2-10 employees

Used daily for less than 2 years

Review Source: Capterra

OVERALL RATING:

2

EASE OF USE

2

VALUE FOR MONEY

1

CUSTOMER SUPPORT

2

FUNCTIONALITY

2

Reviewed June 2016

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.

Vendor Response

We are sorry for your disappointment, we value your feedback and will take your comments into consideration. An account representative will be reaching out to you to discuss your experience.

Replied June 2016

User Profile

Bryce Edward

Verified reviewer

Used daily for less than 6 months

Review Source: Capterra
This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered

OVERALL RATING:

4

EASE OF USE

3

CUSTOMER SUPPORT

5

FUNCTIONALITY

3

Reviewed May 2018

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.

Vendor Response

Dear Mr. Edward, We appreciate you taking the time to write a product review for Firm Central. We are happy to hear that most of the functionality is working very well for you. We will pass along your comments to the product development team as we prioritize enhancements based on our users feedback. Thank you very much for being a valued customer of Firm Central!

Replied May 2018

Mark

Legal Services, 2-10 employees

Used daily for more than 2 years

Review Source: Capterra

OVERALL RATING:

4

EASE OF USE

3

VALUE FOR MONEY

4

CUSTOMER SUPPORT

5

FUNCTIONALITY

5

Reviewed August 2016

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.