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By: Susan M. Brake

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I used Clio for several months and thought it was a good product with great potential. But, I ended up canceling my subscription because:

(a) The monthly fee is too high.

$50/month seemed reasonable to me at first. But with each passing month, I questioned whether I was really getting sufficient bang for my buck. To me, the beauty of Clio is its streamlined interface to multiple “in the cloud” applications. But, for my purposes at least, I already had the functionality I needed through Google Apps Premier at $50/year.

(b) The client collaboration interface is not user-friendly.

Here’s what I really wanted from Clio: A secure and easy way to collaborate and share documents with clients who can do basic online transactions (e.g., buy something on Amazon), but are in no other sense “tech savvy.”

I think the Clio client portal feature has real potential to achieve that goal — but it’s not there yet. (At least, it wasn’t the last time I attempted to use it, which was several months ago.)

(c) The timekeeping, billing and trust accounting functions are not important to my practice.

I bill fixed fees per task – so tracking time, generating and sending bills, and managing trust accounts are not terribly important to me. But I did have the chance to use these features of Clio (while doing some consulting work) and was very impressed. So, if you bill by the hour, send bills to clients, accept retainers, etc., definitely check out what Clio has to offer.

(d) Clio had limitations that were annoying at times.

A couple of examples:

When you enter a business expense for a matter, there isn’t a way to attach a copy of the expense receipt to the entry.

When entering an individual contact, you are required to enter that individual’s “Company” (and that Company is then added as a separate contact.) My clients are consumers, so I don’t need to keep track of this Company information and I didn’t like the unneeded Company information cluttering up my Contacts.

(Of course, I ran into these issues months ago – so things could have changed.)

(e) No ability to “tap” into the database to generate custom reports, custom functionality, etc.

Clio makes keeping track of clients and matters easy. But installing a gatekeeper (even a benevolent one) between you and your data makes innovating pretty difficult. I don’t believe Clio offers a way to create a real-time link to the data. And I felt that put undesirable constraints on my ability to innovate using the latest technology.

In summary, Clio is a good product and getting better. But it wasn’t right for my practice.


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