Avaliações do Firm Central

Comentários: 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.

Vantagens: 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.

Desvantagens: 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.

Comentários: 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.

Vantagens: 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.

Desvantagens: 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.

Vantagens: The calendaring feature is great! Most of the people we have asked for help with the program have been extremely responsive and helpful.

Desvantagens: There are so many options in the Deadline Assistant, that it is often difficult to find what I am looking for. For events like "Court Holidays" or "Attorney Out of Office" I have to create a fake client matter and calendar it for that just so the entire office can see it. I wish there was a way to make an event, viewable to the entire office, without having to attach a matter to it. Integration has not been as swift as we though it would be. It's laborious and extremely time consuming to move all our clients' documents from our current platform to Firm Central.

Vantagens: I like how it is very user freindly. It is easy to navigate, and customer support is excellent.

Desvantagens: I would recomend that Frim Cen tral/Westlaw allow their customers to have trial access to their addins before commiting to a subcristion agreemnt (or an increase in their subcription agrrement). There are many futures that I think could be benifial to our firm. However, I want to test the product before commiting to it.

Vantagens: I like the ease of use that this software provides.

Desvantagens: I do not like that the billing doesn't put all matters for one client on one invoice. Sending multiple invoices to one client can be confusing to the receiving party.

Vantagens: client portal for access to records so that you did not have to share the documents via email with client they could log in securely to see them

Desvantagens: we purchased the program a few years ago and integrated it with our office, after a very difficult integration the program did not integrate with MS Outlook in the "very near future" as we were told. so we discontinued after contract was up and changed to Clio

Comentários: firm central has proved to be a very helpful and effective tool for my practice. It is the assistant/paralegal that I haven't hired to date.

Vantagens: the outstanding customer service. Both the firm software account personnel and the technical support personnel have been great. Additional, firm central is a very comprehensive management and billing tool that has cut the time required to complete the various administrative tasks required of a solo practitioner running a criminal defense practice.

Desvantagens: the lack of integration between google calendar and the calendar on firm central.

Comentários: I would not recommend it.

Vantagens: The sales presentation was good. The software itself has not performed well.

Desvantagens: It is not fully integrated with outlook - so every update to FC also has to be updated to outlook. Rule updates come late - our state revised its rule and gave 7 months notice of the rule change, FC is still making rule changes 3 months after implementation of the new rules. Service requests are poorly handled and we often get bumped from one person to another who just want to talk about the experience. We still experience mistakes in calendaring (sometimes extra days are added for no apparent reason) and we end up having to double check everything which defeats the purpose of getting this software.

Comentários: Overall I would not recommend this product. Work disappears from the software, and in a lawfirm this is unacceptable. The software needs to be 100% reliable.

Vantagens: I like that it is cloud based, perfect for small firms. It integrates with Outlook to schedule calendar items. You are able to work remotely becuase it is cloud based.

Desvantagens: There are many bugs. The desktop application is often just gone from the explorer menu, things you import disappear or never upload to begin with. I am still waiting for TR to figure out why my documents just disappear.

Comentários: We like the software alot and customer rep. did a great job in training. We got up and running in a hurry!

Vantagens: The intuitiveness of it!

Desvantagens: nothing

Vantagens: The ease of tracking time and generating invoices

Desvantagens: hanging billable hour rates based within a matter is difficult and time consuming.

Comentários: Terrible product! We had so many issues just trying to be trained on the software. They assured us that FirmCentral has 24/7 support, which isn't true. When you call after hours, a tech center who doesn't know anything about the product reads instructions to you, and then creates a ticket for someone to call you back during business hours. We rarely received a call back. The only way I could get the support team to respond is by sending them a message asking where I could leave a review for the product. Of course they never answered that question but it did prompt them to call me.

Desvantagens: This software is clunky and difficult to use. We tried to hang in there for four months; however, the glitches never were fixed. I was blown away that Thomson Reuters would allow such a terrible product to be on the market. My staff spent more time trying the suggested work arounds than actually working. Also, we received our "welcome packet and instructions" two months after we canceled our contract. We now use MyCase and couldn't be happier.

Comentários: Firm Central helped us with all of our business needs very efficiently and very effectively. We are so happy with the services it provides and the product in general. We would certainly recommend that Firm Central be employed as a keystone to all businesses.

Comentários: It was over sold in the selling process.

Vantagens: The fact that it is comprehensive in its approach.

Desvantagens: The features have not reached their potential and need further development.

Vantagens: Customer Service. Ease of entering time and expenses.

Desvantagens: Not specifically suited for the way we do our billing. For instance, as a law office, we bill by "client", not "matters", so extra steps needed to get to where I need to be.