Hey Everyone!
Today’s video blog will provide a quick overview and comparison of the three best legal practice management software options in Canada: Leap, Clio, and Saluno. We’ll delve into the features, benefits, and potential drawbacks of each, giving you a comprehensive understanding of what each software offers. Whether you are looking for robust financial management, an intuitive user interface, or seamless integration with other tools, this comparison will help you identify the best solution for your practice.
00:00 Hi, I’m Celine from Chops Consulting and I’m going to give you a quick overview of Leap Legal practice management software as well as Clio and Saluno.
00:13 And I’m just gonna close this camera so that you can see the full screen. So this is Leap. When you first open Leap, this is kind of the matter screen.
00:22 I’m not gonna do a, full super in-depth demo because I mean that could take hours. But I’m just gonna give like, you know, at a high level some of the things it can do.
00:33 So it’s got, you know, like notifications here, which pretty much all softwares do. You can also see if you know, people assign you invoices.
00:41 If you have like a bookkeeper or paralegal or someone doing your invoices for you to approve. If clients upload documents to you, if there are comments on documents that you’ve sent to clients or other lawyers.
00:53 So that’s kind of what that looks like. You can see all your matters here. You know, you can search, there’s advanced search, there’s property search.
00:59 If we look at the menu you can see your cards, which are like people, other companies, other lawyers, suppliers, courts, even they’ll be under cards.
01:09 You can search. Those, you can also search any document or email within Leap, not just the title, but like all the content and all the documents of any type as well as any email, all the content.
01:21 So those are just kind of the main things that you can do here. I mean, there’s, there’s a lot, but again, this is, this is high level.
01:29 There’s also your kind of firm, wide accounting stuff, so you can create invoices. In bulk, you can send invoices in bulk, you can record trust in general deposits in bulk.
01:39 You can access your firm, wide, like time sheet, time and fees print checks, et cetera, stuff like that here, as well as access kind of integrations reporting.
01:47 They’ve got pretty robust reporting settings, et cetera. So that’s all, all in there. If you want to go into a matter, You just double click on the matter, and it basically pops up in a new window.
02:01 You can also access Leap. They have a browser-based version as well and an app, but desktop is kind of the main way that you’d use it with the most functionality.
02:10 You’ll notice here Leap’s made some changes to critical dates, so just kind of telling you about, telling you about that, and you can choose to update it or not.
02:18 So, Any information on a matter is going to be on the left-hand side here, and this is customized to the matter type.
02:25 So, for example, if you notice, this is a divorce and separation, so it’s got respondents, it’s got applicant the compliance of the conflict check, identity check, etc.
02:34 You can record that here. The court, marriage, relationship, separation details. So, anything, anything like that means, ,theater, family justice counsel, legal aid.
02:45 You can, you can customize these because there’s just so many different fields that you could have. Like, if there’s a child involved, child, children’s lawyer, claimant you know, parent, medical contact, guardian, all, all sorts of other things that they suggest based on the matter type
03:03 , you’ll notice this is like firm wide. , absolutely any kind of table like a appellant or attorney general or auditor or bank’s lawyer or business lease details or child’s witness.
03:15 Like, you know, if we go through here, pretty much any field you could ever want is, is gonna be in here.
03:22 And just depending on what table type it is, like for example, family justice counselor would be a, what calls a card like,.
03:29 Contact, right? And you can also have them for a person individual or like a company where it’s like the company and then you add staff on it.
03:38 Anyway, that’s that’s under there. You can also see all of the correspondents, what they call correspondents on a matter. So this is both literal emails, like a record of emails that you see.
03:52 And then as well as documents, documents you shared with clients, you can see they’ve had comments, clients commented back on them.
03:58 You can upload photos like word documents. You can also create like a folder structure. So correspondence and then put things in that folder structure, sub folders, et cetera, to organize everything.
04:10 You can also create comments, which are just a way to make like notes on a file or record. You know, notes from like a phone call with a client, you can have any sort of like text formatting links pictures, timestamps, et cetera.
04:24 You can also whenever you like do anything leap, you can create a time entry for the amount of time you spent working on it as you close it.
04:30 You can create new like documents in leap. So whatever type of document just show kind of a letter here. It’s just a Microsoft word integration.
04:47 These are always customized to the clients like the firm’s letterhead, the firm’s branding, et cetera. I’m going to give it a moment.
04:58 Sometimes when I record with with Loom, it slows things down a bit. But you’ll see here it uses document automation and fields to automatically pull in the matter information like the client, the client’s address, the the firm information, today’s date you know, the deer, the realign,
05:15 and then your signature and stuff. And actually you can pretty much insert a field from absolutely any piece of information on your matter.
05:26 Remember I showed you the tables. All the, like any piece of data in those tables and any piece of information on any of the people related to the card or businesses or critical dates or anything like that can be pulled in as merge fields.
05:38 Now if you’re just writing a letter sometimes it’s easier to type it yourself. You can see like this is just all the information on the applicant alone.
05:46 And then it’s got, you know, like if we looked at critical dates you could pull in fields for any of the the critical dates on a letter that you’re just typing it might not be the most useful.
05:56 Where it is useful is in the document automation. So LEAP has basically every court form in Canada I want to say.
06:05 Like there’s so many as well. Like if you look at like the Court Order Enforcement Act I know that’s probably like even they have like ones for like you know all these federal court forms right.
06:18 And if you click on them it will pre-populate. Or similarly let’s go back to the main one here. Divorce and separation.
06:37 We’ve got divorce. We’ve got the FMEP forms. General Provincial Fort Corns, Land Title forms. It’s also got starter documents. So like letter to client, letter to process server.
06:49 I hope you look at divorce mate. It’s got, because this is a divorce matter, it’s all the divorce forms. But you can see they have ones for like business law and criminal law and employment law, etc.
07:00 They’ve templated. It’s like separation agreements as well as like a clause library where you can insert clauses. So that’s kind of the importance of having fields and filling information out here.
07:11 Is it will pre-populate all these court forms within LEAP with all the information in the matter. So you don’t have to.
07:16 So it saves a lot of time. You can see that on here. You can also, it has the divorce mate tool.
07:23 It’s got e-signing. It’s got like title searches, things like that, timesheet. It’s got online payments, all those things. You can access your timesheet from here.
07:34 It’s got calendar and tasks. So both critical dates on a trial that you can like, you know, say like, okay, these are all the important dates.
07:42 As well as you can create your own appointments and meetings. It’s Outlook integration. So it creates an in Outlook and also in here.
07:49 So it’ll be on your Outlook calendar as well as in your internal calendar. So you can create like separate, separate dates for things.
07:58 You can, you know, tasks to-do list. You can have task templates. That’s kind of like the project management component. When you update critical dates, I just want you to save it.
08:08 You can see. Kind of a financial summary. You can print a billing guide, which opens in a browser. Here’s where you can access all of your time and fees.
08:16 Right now it’s just showing billable all, which is things that’ll are to be billed, like work in progress. But if we look at all billing statuses, I’ve created a bunch of time entries, fee entries, et cetera.
08:27 And then it shows you which invoice it was billed on. If we were to look at one obviously fee for drafting an employment agreement is probably not related to a family law matter.
08:40 I was just showing that like different activity codes, but you can see the details here. We were to click new time entry.
08:48 You can either run a time or put how much time you spend on it. Let’s just say we spend an hour on it.
08:57 Oops, there we go. You can choose what your billing rate for, for this type of thing is what your, what your tax code is, and then it’ll show you the amount or total.
09:08 If your rate is including tax, it’ll actually reverse calculate the tax and the subtotal. You can put in a billing description memo.
09:14 You can choose from a list of activity codes, which you can also customize. . . . . . . . . . like meeting with, research, attend, etc.
09:21 If it’s billable or not billable, you can also create fee entries. So time entries, if you are billing hourly and oh, you know what?
09:32 It didn’t save it because LEAP makes you have a billing description in order to save it, which makes sense because you can’t bill your clients for things you can’t tell them what you billed them for.
09:39 I’m pretty sure that’s just a lot society. I know I’m talking really fast, but it’s because there’s so many things and I don’t want this to be a 45 minute video.
09:48 So this is a fee entry. It’s like a time entry, but you know, for things that you have flat fee, like initial consultation or preparing a power of attorney, preparing a well, these are also completely customizable.
09:56 And it’s like quantity in each. So like one at $500 or a 2000 or whatever it is, you know, tax code billing description.
10:02 That’s all the same. You have a time sheet here, which kind of opens like your firm wide, like spreadsheet of your time where you can do your time entries in bulk.
10:11 General accounting is where you can see any like invoices, payments receivables, see, you know, your total total balance, what was paid, total receivables any information like that.
10:23 You can have your disbursements under here. They kind of work like time or fee entries. Trust funds. So this is where you will manage your trust accounts and your trust accounting.
10:34 Any payments received, any trust payments, trusted general transfers, you can see there’s like a trusted general transfer button here. If you have like retained or interest bearing accounts or staying power returning accounts, you can record those here.
10:47 And then finally you can record safe custody. So any documents that you’re physically holding whether they’ve been removed, whether you currently have them, where they’re stored, you can record that here.
10:59 So that is a very, very, very, very quick version of LEAP because I don’t want it to be all day.
11:06 But basically does all of the financial stuff in here as well as the like practice management. And it does the.
11:13 Trust bank reconciliation in LEAP, which is nice. As well as it syncs with QuickBooks or Xero, so it will export all of your financial information for your general bookkeeping.
11:26 Okay. Moving along to to Saluno. You can see here when you open Saluno, this is kind of its main. In a main field you can see your firm, your users, your contact and case file thing, you know, information there, your, any sort of templates you have in here.
11:56 If you want to create a new matter or a new fee entry. Or anything like that, you just hit the plus button, time and fees, expenses, operating money in, operating money out, payable.
12:09 You know, you can print checks, you can do your bank reconciliation here. You can request invoices and create invoices here.
12:19 Here’s kind of your like, accounting bookkeeping. Banking stuff. Your general ledger, your balance sheet. So you can see that it does, like all of the kind of bookkeeping and trust accounting within it.
12:36 You’ll also notice you can do quick entry for time for your expense entry here. It’s kind of, and then your timer of course, it’s kind of clunky.
12:44 It’s you can see your calendar. It, bookkeepers love it because it’s the easiest to do the bookkeeping in, the time keeping and the billing in.
12:55 With, and it doesn’t have a lot of errors or issues. You will also notice though that it is not the prettiest.
13:04 It also doesn’t really do any practice management. And lastly, I just wanted to show you. What like a file looks like in saluno.
13:13 So you can see here that it’s got you know, your balances, your like trust amount. You can see your staff on the file, your billing settings, splitting billing, electronic billing.
13:30 If you need like notes on here, data template. It’s, it’s it’s not, it’s not pretty, but it is simple and it is less glitchy than other alternatives.
13:45 The last one I will show you is Clio, which I feel like is probably maybe one of the prettier of them.
13:52 It’s the most, probably the most glitchiest of them. It has like a few big. Kind of downsides. Doesn’t do as much practice management as leap, but it’s fairly simple and straightforward.
14:03 So here you can see your dashboard. You can see your draft bills, unpaid bills, total and unpaid. You can see your calendar.
14:11 So this will sync with your outlook. Not as well as leap and sense that it’s not directly with outlook. You’ll basically create the events in Clio.
14:21 And then it will sync them like a sync to outlook. It has some basic task management that you can do.
14:29 You can see all of your matters here. If we were to click into one, you can see your, your dashboard, your, your timeline, like your activity on it, related contacts matter details.
14:44 Your figure, you know, all the finances on the matter. You can create custom fields. You can have activities. You know, again, it’s like the activity log of what’s, what’s happened, right?
14:56 On here, you can see your, your events. You can create new events. Any kind of correspondence you can log, like text messages.
15:06 You can log emails. It doesn’t really I guess it kind of integrates. It’s okay. You can, if you create any notes on the file, you can create notes here.
15:17 You can create documents. You can record time for documents. You can you can look at them. One thing I do not recommend is there’s one big glitch with the Clio document storage system.
15:31 And that is if you don’t open or edit a file in 12 months, it disappears, which is terrible. If you have matters, it can go on for years and need, or you need to reference things in the past and you can no longer access them.
15:44 I asked Clio the developers once I said, so it just deletes the files. And they said, no, it’s not deleted.
15:50 You just can’t access them or see them. And I said, well, how do you act like, can anyone access them?
15:53 And I said, no. So for all intents and purposes, it’s deleted. So do not use. Is this as your file storage?
16:02 The other main issue with Clio is if you, there’s a glitch where if you write off invoices it doesn’t write off the tax on your reports.
16:09 So what happens is we found a whole bunch of firms were overpaying their tax for invoices they’ve written off, but it still showed up on their tax report.
16:16 So you’d have to track that separately and manually deduct any tax for written off invoices. Yeah. You can see your tasks here any kind of like bills, invoices, etc.
16:29 Transactions, also Clio for co-council, which is kind of like a co-integration that you can share these files with other Clio users contacts, activities, billing.
16:37 These are basically taking you know, these, these tabs here and then having them just kind of across all your matters for and wide.
16:47 You can create time entries, expenses, etc. Again, you know, you can do your billing in here. We’ve got your invoices, you can send them, etc.
16:58 You can also set up online payments, which is nice. 2.95%, I think is pretty standard. Leap uses fee-wise, which is 2.9%.
17:09 Saluno uses law pay. I don’t know off the top of my head what the law pay percentage is, but they’re, they’re all very similar.
17:21 All three can take online payments, like credit card payments and stuff. You can see it like your different bank accounts that you have.
17:30 You know, again, like the firm wide document portal, firm wide communications, you, can see your reports app integrations. Clio now has a feature where you can do the trust reconciliation within Clio.
17:43 We have had some issues with glitches with it. They’ve updated some of the problems. It’s kind of in its testing phases.
17:50 So I will say a lot of law firms who are aware of the glitches and work around them, like using Clio, they find it simple and easy to use.
18:00 Saluno, I feel like it’s fine because all you do in Saluno is create like time and fee entries and, you know, send invoices and stuff.
18:12 And it’s, it’s ugly, but once you get used to it, it’s not hard to use. It just doesn’t do a lot.
18:17 It’s very much like just for that financial management portion. Clio is like for light projects. Project or practice management and then Leap kind of does that.
18:26 Plus it’s just got the document automation portion as well. And yeah, it, it really depends on what you’re looking for, what your needs are.
18:37 Clio also has a a CRM called Clio Grow. It’s not directly the same software, what it does, you pay for two separate subscriptions and then it integrates.
18:47 So when you close a file in Clio Grow, it automatically creates a matter in Clio Manage. Neither Leap nor Solino have any sort of CRM capabilities.
18:57 So that’s also just a one thing to note. There are, there are like legal CRM’s like lawmatics or you can use a general CRM.
19:04 I’m glad I kept this to other under 20 minutes. Thank you so much for watching it. If you have any questions, of course, you can reach out.
19:11 Who asked for a more detailed and thorough demo of any of all of these softwares?
In Conclusion: Comparing The Best Legal Practice Management Software Options
As we have explored and compared the best legal practice management software options, you have come to understand that each software has its strengths. Your choice depends on your specific needs. If you have any questions or need a more detailed demo, feel free to reach out or check out the blogs for more resources.
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