Comprehensive comparison LeanLaw v Clio

Hi there, Linda Artesani from The Accountants Law Lab. This week we're going to compare LeanLaw and Clio. So mind you, these are two software that we use extensively at our firm. This is, Sarah and I kind of call it the great debate because we battle over which one's better. We both have our opinions strongly about each one, but we actually both love them equally. These software are the best in the business for working with law firms. Of course, this is my opinion, but we've seen a lot of different software and a lot of them fall flat when it comes to working with QuickBooks and having the features that we're really used to, used to using and seeing. I'm gonna start with LeanLaw. And that one is my favorite for mid-market firms. So LeanLaw is a billing software. But it's actually built for mid-market. It has the ability to track originating attorney and responsible attorney. It is also— it's got a lot of the bells and whistles in it so that you can calculate compensation through their module and have it actually create the disbursement, which I think is important. I don't think any other software does. It has a 2-way sync. And it also lays out this— the, the liabilities, the sub-liabilities, the client liabilities, the client ledgers, beautifully on the balance sheet for us. So we don't have to go and do a manual push of it or create that same hierarchy ourselves. It is actually part of the software. It has a free user for the accountant, so we don't have to pay to, to play. And it has that same view that QuickBooks does for us as an accountant where you have, you can see all your clients. I really like that it has that ability. It is definitely, it doesn't have practice management. So that's where Clio really is the king when it comes to practice management. It's got this baked-in tool. It costs more, but you've got, you can communicate with your clients, you've got a pretty dashboard, you've got some of the things that you wanna see with almost like an audit. Log in front of you when you log into the matter. You can see what's happening in the, in the case or matter. You can have deadlines, timelines, all of those things that are not in LeanLaw. They do charge for the user. So if an attorney wants to add us to their Clio, they have to pay for it. And a lot of times they don't pay for it, and Clio is very well aware that people share the login. But on a side note, if you are sharing a login, do not make any entries in Clio. 'Cause there's no way to prove who put it in, you or the attorney, and you just don't wanna go down that road. So definitely as a good work practice, if you're doing the work in Clio and you see that something's wrong in Clio, maybe money moved across from the bank level, that's not correct. You want to make sure that you write to the attorney, action item, I need you to correct this, this and this in Clio. It's incorrect. And if they don't like doing that extra work, they can buy a seat for you. That's kind of how we, how we work with our attorneys. So the sync in Clio is a one-way sync where LeanLaw has a two-way sync. So if I make, if we make a change in LeanLaw, we make a change in QuickBooks, it will read itself on either side because it's reading both sides of the, of the program. Clio is a one-way sync. So if something's changed in Clio, what happens is it will make the change and throw that change in a second time. So you'll get a duplicate entry. Inside of the software, and then you'll have to correct that because it won't be— you'll have 2 entries and you need to remove one. So know that you need to really monitor the Undeposited Funds account. That's where I kind of see a lot of the duplications happen. And just keep an eye on it to keep that contained, because if the attorney goes back and changes anything invoice-wise, changes the amount, it's gonna throw another transaction over. Both of them have a limitation on the, the length of the name of the client in the matter. And that limitation comes from QuickBooks and how many characters QuickBooks allows. So it's not really a limitation in either software. I think that's, that's probably the biggest thing. The user price is much less in LeanLaw because you don't get all those other practice management pieces. They do have a way to add some layers of other software to get that same look and feel that you get with Clio with the all-in-one. But I think a lot of people are really looking to go towards that all-in-one. All-in-one software over adding a million pieces and knowing, oh, I have to go over to this, this software to do this. I have to go to this software to do that. Having it all housed in one is really helpful. And I think that that's probably why you'll see some pushback. The attorneys are charged for each seat in both platforms, but with Clio, you get a free seat. For any subcontractor-type attorneys working on a client or matter. They can still work to do the billing side, but they're, they're a free seat. That's probably the most important parts of this that you'll want to really look at when comparing the two software. Both are superb to collect to, to collect to, to connect to QuickBooks. Yeah. So we have really good integration there where a lot of the other softwares really fall short of that. They connect, they stay connected, which is really wonderful. If something does not sync over in Clio, you can go to Clio and look at Clio to see what has not synced over in a sync log. And there's, it'll tell the reason why it didn't push over. LeanLaw doesn't have that. The integration's so good that it doesn't really, things don't not push over. It has been, it has had some bugs lately. Yeah. Small ones that I haven't really run into too many clients, but things you might wanna be aware of, but they're working on making improvements to their product as well. The other thing I think about LeanLaw is the fact that it's got, I mean, Clio has more connections to software 'cause it's been around longer. So there's a lot of outside software, but Clio falls short when it comes to reports. So their answer to a lot of the custom reports that you might wanna see at a law firm is here's how you create it in Excel. And I really think that that is some place that they really need to make improvements on, where Landlaw hands down has a way to be able to create the reports that you need. They're already baked inside the program. There's lots of really great reports in there, quite a few reports in there, especially for mid-market firms to see how they're growing, how the matters are doing, all the metrics you're gonna want to see. Clio does have Clio Grow, which is another software that you pay extra for that will actually track your lead from the beginning all the way through becoming a client. So that's kind of a cool software. Don't see a lot of attorneys paying extra for that, but it is available. The reports in Clio are far and few between. There's a few that I just don't even know why you have it. Software, well, they have a baked-in, it's called Clio Pay that you can pay with a credit card that works directly inside of Clio, but it's very difficult to see and manage. There's a report on it, but you have to wait for the whole month to close before you can see the details on the report as the payments are coming in, which means it can be kind of a pain. LeanLaw has partnered with Gravity Legal and they have a pretty nice workflow there that's baked in where you can do trust requests. And they're expecting more improvements on that even more going down the road. Clio, LeanLaw has reports at month end when you want to do that 3-way reconciliation, you may have to make sure you download that report on the 31st because it's a, it's not a static report, it's an active report. So if you forget to download it, then you're going to have to close your books to reconcile 3 ways on the date you're there looking at it because you can't go back and pull a past date. So that's kind of a, a weird quirky thing with LeanLaw. So we kind of make it a, a job that on the 30th or the 31st of the month, we hop in and download all those CSV files. Because we wanna make sure that the accounts stated under the trust in LeanLaw match the books in QuickBooks and the bank. With Clio, you're able to do that backdating and be able to pull those reports. I think that's about it. I really do love the way LeanLaw works with the two-way synchronization. I think that makes it be superior to Clio in that respect. But then Clio, has so many bells and whistles and there's so many things that it does for the clients. If the client's looking for an all-in-one, a practice management type of tool where they can keep all the documents for the clients and everything else and all the communication right inside one product, then Clio is your software. If you're that mid-market firm and you have other ways of collecting that data or maybe other software that you use for that stuff, And you need a billing software that's gonna track, track your utilization, utilization rates, all of those things, and track your percentages and really fine-tune how your company's growing as you're getting a bigger and bigger firm. LeanLaw is your product. So you can see why we use both at our firm. We both love both of these software. They're great. We're always excited to see what's new and upcoming in, in either one. So I hope this is helpful in helping you understand these 2 software. I probably will talk about other ones as we go forward, some of the ones I don't care for, but these 2 definitely are the cream of the crop, and you can't go wrong. I, I highly recommend learning both. Both of them have ways to grow and manage those things. So on that note, I hope you all have a wonderful week and stay tuned with us. If you wanna subscribe, I'd love to have you follow us on YouTube or even here in the channel, and we'll see you all next week. Bye now. Bye.