PracticePanther vs Centerbase
Last Updated:Our analysts compared PracticePanther vs Centerbase based on data from our 400+ point analysis of Legal Software, user reviews and our own crowdsourced data from our free software selection platform.
Product Basics
PracticePanther is a cloud-based platform that helps manage cases, documents, client communications, time tracking and billing for law firms. It acts as a centralized hub for handling client information, cases and documents. Its reporting tools let you track your firm’s financial health and performance.
The platform allows you to create detailed case files, including evergreen retainers, deadlines, billable hours and specific tasks associated with each case. It offers document management tools, enabling attorneys to edit, track changes, eSign and share files with concerned clients and internal departments.
Additionally, you can track time spent on each case, generate detailed invoices and automate trust account management. Practices of all sizes can automate invoicing, time-tracking and payments while remaining compliant with IOLTA, ABA and state bar guidelines.
The software also allows firms to store client contact information, communication history and matter details in one place. It provides tools for client intake and onboarding, including custom intake forms, checklists and client portals. Its intuitive mobile app helps you stay connected with your firm and communicate with staff and clients remotely.
Product Assistance
Product Insights
- Never Miss Billable Hours: PracticePanther excels in time and expense management, with our data showing that it offers 96% of all key requirements out of the box. You can manage retainers and set custom hourly rates, item prices and contingency rates. It supports multiple time clocks and helps you log billable and non-billable hours accurately. You can also add uniform task-based management (UTBM) codes while creating time and expense entries to set benchmarks.
- Improve Client Experiences: Another strong suite is the platform’s client and contact management module, which has received an 89 rating from our analysts. You can design unique client intake funnels to capture all required information. Clients get individual portals to submit documents, track cases and pay invoices. You can use the built-in two-way messaging system or send emails and text messages from the software interface. The platform maintains a communication log and enhances client outreach with email campaigns and lead-tracking tools.
- Stay Connected: Access important case-related information and management tools from any device with an internet connection.
- Accessible KPIs: Improve business decisions with the most current information from firm-wide calendar entries and custom reports.
- Faster Billing: Increase cash flow with a billing module designed to reduce clicks, deduplicate entries and accelerate invoicing.
- Customizability: Use in-house customization tools to appropriately scale the platform according to the firm’s size and maintain relevance in a changing legal landscape.
- Flexible Subscription Charges: The role-based pricing structure provides multiple options for interested parties. Add or subtract any applicable licenses and pay only for the integrations and tools required.
- Case Management: Store detailed user information with ease, along with tags and follow-up updates, making it easy and organized.
- Remote Access: Get quick overviews of all case-related information, including contacts, tasks, calendar entries, documentation and more. Automatically sync firm databases for unobstructed remote access from any device with an internet connection.
- Contacts and Matter Management: Keep legal matters organized and up-to-date by adding relevant contacts, notes and bills. Limit access to sensitive matter information with controlled permissions. Securely collaborate with team members and share and recall data.
- Conflict Search: Link contacts to matters for checking on conflicts of interest and parties represented by the lawyer.
- Document Management: Manage all your documents in one place and set up automation to reduce repetitive tasks.
- Centralized Repository: Store and manage all legal documents and files securely in a single location. Enhance efficiency by electronically sending documents for signatures, auto-populating client information, and creating custom templates to streamline document creation workflows.
- Organized Access: Avoid wasting time searching for documents. Organize files by client and matter for easy retrieval. Use custom tags to categorize and filter your firm's legal documents.
- E-Signatures: Expedite the document approval process by offering electronic signatures via email, text message or the client portal. Create and send multiple documents for eSignature in batches simultaneously.
- Cloud Integration: Connect with leading cloud storage platforms like Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive and Box.com. This eliminates the need to switch between platforms and helps you sync all document changes automatically.
- Customizable Templates: Boost document creation speed by uploading and using pre-defined templates. Automatically populate templates with your firm's information and client data. Track document progress through a dashboard with status indicators (incomplete, completed, in progress, overdue) and assign conditional tasks as needed.
- Legal Billing: Never miss a billable hour with automated time and expense tracking tools.
- Customizable Invoicing: Create professional invoices tailored to your firm's branding. Include client information, activity logs, notes and more. Assign specific billable rates based on user, activity, matter or contact for accurate fee calculations.
- Integrated Payment Processing: Accept payments through various methods, including custom payment links, the client portal, phone or in-person transactions using Panther Payments, the native payment processor.
- Billing Reports: Gain insights into your firm’s performance by generating detailed reports. Analyze billing trends and collections data, identify top-billed practice areas, and filter reports by custom tags, bank accounts, payment methods, contacts or matters.
- Trust Accounting: Manage trust and operating accounts while automating compliance with IOLTA, ABA and all 50 state bar regulations. Stay informed about retainer balances by setting up automatic alerts. Receive notifications when trust account balances fall below pre-defined thresholds and perform daily three-way reconciliations for oversight of your trust account activity.
- Legal CRM: Organize client data, gain a holistic view of cases, automate client onboarding and sync new client data from automated intake forms.
- Custom Tags: Categorize contacts by client type (existing, potential etc.), professional contact or any other relevant category using custom tags. Use these tags to filter data and gain insights into your client base.
- Client Portals: Provide clients with a secure online portal. They can access uploaded documents, communicate with your firm, review invoice balances and make online payments. The platform automatically populates client information from their intake forms to create accurate profiles.
- Workflow Automation: Streamline client follow-up with automated workflows that trigger tasks and events based on pre-defined conditions. Automate appointment scheduling and send automatic reminders to clients, ensuring timely communication.
- Calendaring: Create time entries, confirm client meetings, manage tasks and stay on top of court rule deadlines using a centralized calendar system.
- Visualized Deadlines: Use color-coded tags to visually identify deadlines and events associated with specific contacts, matters and tasks.
- Automated Time Capture: Convert appointments and events into time entries with a single click, ensuring all billable hours are captured and accurately allocated to the appropriate client.
- Court Rule Integration: Connect with LawToolBox to sync pre-set and custom court rule deadlines with your PracticePanther calendar and workflows, keeping you ahead of important legal dates.
- Integrations: Connect to a host of essential applications to improve the firm’s productivity and automation standards. Some popular applications it supports integrations with include Gmail, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Exchange, Box, Dropbox, Outlook, Google Calendar, Apptoto and many more.
- Security: Protect firm data against vulnerabilities with 256-bit military-grade encryption. Limit platform access to authorized IP addresses and enable two-step authentication. Maintain client confidentiality and HIPAA compliance with Box.com’s secure storage capabilities.
- Billing Management: Digitize the firm’s entire billing cycle. Prepare and approve a single bill with a log of all inline markups.
- Client Service: Allow clients to pay bills, view invoices and track payment history via the billing portal. Create an audit trail with .txt eBilling files email multiple invoices at once.
- Simple Payments: Provide clients with a single, integrated payment method to settle current charges and/or fill the retainer at the same time. Control payment options and payment methods on a matter-to-matter basis.
- Billing Support: Access support for hourly billing, flat fee billing, expense-only billing, project billing, consolidated billing and more. Prepare electronic invoices with the help of UTBMS codes.
- Legal Accounting: Set up all firm accounts under a single infrastructure and organize them based on location, matter or practice area. Link checks directly to expense accounts and provide free platform access to the firm CPA.
- Vendor Management: Set up automated vendor bills for recurring payments. Enter vendor checks and invoices into the system database and automatically track due dates.
- Online Payment: Accept credit card payments securely with the accounting module. Link payments directly to transactions and track client expenses. Eliminate manual data entry and human error.
- Trust Accounting: Create and operate multiple trust and IOLTA accounts. Automatically approve payments from invoices and log all trust fund expenses.
- Trust Reporting: Run reports to trace the flow of money going in and out of trust and IOLTA accounts. Keep a detailed record of all transactions, receivables and matter expenses.
- Time and Expense Tracking: Never miss out on a single minute of billable time with round-the-clock time tracking. Automatically log time spent on client calls and messages as billable hours.
- Simple Time Tracking: Track time directly from in-platform applications or external integrations like Microsoft Word or Microsoft Outlook. Enter time while on the move from mobile devices.
- Time Entries: Update, edit and sanction time entries at the end of the month. Hold or approve billing based on the case status and merge multiple associated time entries into a single entry.
- Rate Tables: Prepare tailored rate tables with built-in date ranges effective all year round. Exempt specific matters and clients from the rate table under special circumstances.
- Budgets: Create and track timekeeper budgets for client work. Benchmark staff productivity against firm averages.
- Firm Reporting: Generate reports in real time with accounting, billing, productivity, budgeting and compensation data. Group associated reports together and safeguard sensitive information with permission-based access.
- Insights: Get detailed insights into aging receivables, profitable clients, staff compensation and productivity, annual budgets, valuable practice areas and more.
- Custom Reporting: Run custom reports to highlight specific firm strengths and requirements. Increase stakeholder engagement with detailed spreadsheets and data visualization.
- Matter Management: Organize and manage all legal matters from a single dashboard. Track contacts, client information, documents, meetings, deadlines, notes and tasks associated with relevant matters.
- Matter Dashboard: Access the matter dashboard for a quick overview of trust balances, WIP, client payment history, ledger, credits, outstanding receivables and more. Prepare matter budgets for individual clients and run reports on fees, expenses and staff productivity.
- Matter Layouts: Create matter layouts with customized data fields. Organize matters on the basis of relevant case information.
- Matter Automation: Design and integrate matter-specific workflows directly into the platform. Automatically assign tasks and execute the next step in the workflow. Update the firm database, team members and clients with new information.
- Calendar Management: Create and track calendar entries in real time with a legal calendar. Toggle between firm-wide and personal views, color code entries and print calendar reports as physical reminders.
- Calendar Sync: Design automated calendar entries for recurring meetings and notifications for upcoming events. Connect to the Outlook 365 application for real-time synchronization of calendar entries.
- Deadline Management: Steer clear of malpractice claims with the LawToolBox portal. Automatically add jurisdiction-based deadlines and time-based triggers to legal matters.
- Client Services: Improve the overall client experience with an efficient intake process, communications module and client portal.
- Client Portal: Share messages, calendar entries, documentation and invoices with clients securely via the client portal.
- Direct Communication: Communicate with clients via dedicated private lines. Control client access to sensitive information and keep track of their communications with the firm.
- Client Intake: Streamline the firm’s client intake process with self-populating contact forms, automated emails and documentation. Schedule tasks and perform conflict checks against client databases.
- Reporting: Run reports to track marketing ROI, profitable practice areas and referrals.
- Document Management: Manage documents directly from associated matters or from integrated web browsers or applications like Microsoft Word. Access and share legal documentation securely from any device with an internet connection.
- Email Management: Store emails to associated matter files in its native .MSG format. Search for specific emails based on subject, content and date sent/received. Integrate with Microsoft Outlook and automatically log any time spent reviewing, sending or editing emails.
- Document Tracking: Search for individual documents using multiple data fields. Track changes made across different versions of the same file.
- Integrations: Open, edit and save documents with the built-in Centerbase Drive inclusion. Integrate with NetDocuments to seamlessly consolidate documents into workspaces.
Product Ranking
#14
among all
Legal Software
#60
among all
Legal Software
Analyst Rating Summary
Analyst Ratings for Functional Requirements Customize This Data Customize This Data
Analyst Ratings for Technical Requirements Customize This Data Customize This Data
User Sentiment Summary
613 reviews
60 reviews
PracticePanther has a 'excellent' User Satisfaction Rating of 92% when considering 613 user reviews from 3 recognized software review sites.
Centerbase has a 'excellent' User Satisfaction Rating of 92% when considering 60 user reviews from 3 recognized software review sites.
Awards
PracticePanther stands above the rest by achieving an ‘Excellent’ rating as a User Favorite.
Centerbase stands above the rest by achieving an ‘Excellent’ rating as a User Favorite.
Synopsis of User Ratings and Reviews
During testing, I found PracticePanther relatively straightforward to set up. Customizing the platform with my firm’s logo and name was a breeze. Creating matters, assigning tasks and syncing calendars felt intuitive. Even integrating Panther Payments for online payments was smooth sailing. While the interface could use a design refresh, it’s functional and easy to navigate.One standout feature is the matter creation process. The ability to categorize matters with tags and custom fields is beneficial. PracticePanther’s flexibility in handling different billing structures, including flat rates, hourly rates and retainers, is a major plus. The platform's automatic alerts for depleted retainer funds are a time-saver.I'm also impressed with its document management capabilities. The integration with cloud storage and the version history feature is invaluable for maintaining document control. Creating custom templates for different document types is a convenient touch.While PracticePanther offers a solid foundation for legal practice management, it presents some notable limitations. The billing process is particularly cumbersome. The absence of a streamlined review function, forcing users to open each invoice individually, significantly hampers efficiency. This contrasts sharply with other platforms that offer more intuitive billing and reviewing navigation.Additionally, the lack of advanced features, such as integrated legal research tools, is a drawback for firms that rely heavily on online research. Although the software can track time, the absence of connections with research websites and tools means manual timekeeping, which can be error-prone and time-consuming.Despite these shortcomings, PracticePanther is well-suited for solo practitioners and small law firms with relatively straightforward caseloads. Its ease of use and core features, such as matter management and document handling, make it a viable option for firms that prioritize these functions. However, for larger firms with complex caseloads or those that require advanced features like robust reporting and analytics, PracticePanther may fall short.
Is Centerbase the center of attention when it comes to legal software, or does it strike out? User reviews from the past year reveal a mixed bag. While many users praise Centerbase for its robust customization options, powerful features like automated time capture, and seamless accounting integration, some express concerns about customer service and initial setup complexity. For instance, one user raved about how Centerbase's customizability allowed them to tailor workflows and improve efficiency in identifying and managing projects. Conversely, another user found the customer service, which relies on third-party partners charging $200/hour, to be a significant drawback. What truly sets Centerbase apart is its comprehensive approach to law firm management, encompassing everything from matter management and billing to document automation and workflow customization. This makes it a one-stop shop for firms looking to streamline operations and boost productivity. However, this strength can also be a weakness, as the sheer breadth of features can be overwhelming for smaller firms or solo practitioners who may not need such an extensive suite of tools. In a nutshell, Centerbase is like a Swiss Army knife for law firms – incredibly versatile and powerful, but potentially daunting to use effectively without proper guidance. It's best suited for mid-to-large-sized firms with 5 or more lawyers who can fully utilize its extensive feature set and afford the potentially high support costs. Smaller firms or those seeking a simpler solution might find Centerbase to be overkill.
Screenshots
Top Alternatives in Legal Software
AbacusLaw
Amicus Attorney
Bill4Time
CARET Legal
CaseFleet
CASEpeer
Clio
CosmoLex
Filevine
Law Ruler
Lawcus
MyCase
Rocket Matter
Smokeball
Tabs3
Related Categories
Head-to-Head Comparison
WE DISTILL IT INTO REAL REQUIREMENTS, COMPARISON REPORTS, PRICE GUIDES and more...
