Your practice management system will never be good enough.
Clio stinks in some respects. Rocket Matter isn’t what you’d dreamed it would be. MyCase doesn’t do everything you’d hoped.
I hear these complaints all the time.
And if it’s you complaining, then you’re right. These products aren’t everything you’d like to have in your practice management system.
But they’re a lot better than they used to be. And they get better every week—literally, every week. They’re improving constantly in response to the demands of the lawyers using the systems.
You know what else sucks? My brand new iPhone. The minute I get a new iPhone, I immediately see what’s missing. Why can’t it do this or that? I rarely think, “This is awesome.” Instead, I think about what it’s missing rather than what it already has. The new features impress me for about 30 seconds before I start complaining.
Is a Custom Solution the Answer?
Maybe you’d like to build your own system? Customize it so it does things your way? Build the perfect system?
Some lawyers—those who enjoy the technology—see the deficiencies in their practice management systems and decide to strike out and custom-build their systems on a platform like Salesforce. That’s what we did. It’s awesome. You can tweak it endlessly. You can make it do exactly what you’d like it to do.
I built my first practice management system on Lotus Notes in the early 1990s. We customized it piece by piece to get it to do what we wanted. We continued to customize it until around six years ago, when we switched over to Salesforce. We’ve been tweaking that system every day since.
Does Salesforce do everything we want? No. Will it ever? No, because, like with the iPhone, we see the deficiencies as soon as we solve the latest problem. There’s always something more we’d like it to do.
If you’re the adventurous type and are thinking of building your own practice management system, then go for it. But be aware that building a practice management system, even on an existing platform like Salesforce, comes at a cost: A HUGE, GIGANTIC, VERY EXPENSIVE, BIG cost.
If you’re complaining about what you’re paying for Clio, then you’ll be really unhappy with what you spend on building your own practice management system.
What It Costs to Build Your Own Practice Management System
Here are some elements of the cost:
1. Thinking
You’ll spend countless hours dreaming up what the system should look like and how it should work. Doing this right will take you months. And, if you skimp on the time up front, it’ll cost you even more when you make changes later. I learned this in the most expensive, hardest possible way.
2. Software
If you think Rocket Matter is expensive, wait until you step up into the big leagues of Salesforce and others. These guys know how to charge, and they aren’t screwing around with law firms as their customers. They have customers in business that make real money, so they charge like they’re serving customers who are winning (because they are). Back in the day, you could ask for and get a discount (yet it was still more than any of the aforementioned legal market providers are charging) and you’d get it. Now, they laugh at you and then tell you they no longer accept credit cards (no more points for me). They’re crushing it, and they know it.
3. Developers
There is an abundance of developers for these systems (150,000 of them show up in San Francisco at DreamForce each year), yet the good developers still command a premium rate. You’ll likely pay an hourly rate of more than you charge your clients. And it’ll add up quickly. Expect to spend between $20,000 and $100,000 in your first year of development. Then, expect to pay for a developer to keep tweaking the system. The ability to customize is awesome, but it’s not cheap.
4. More Software
You’ll end up buying add-ons to your primary software. You’ll likely employ a separate e-mail service provider for e-mail marketing, a document management repository (like ShareFile or NetDocuments), and a document assembly system. All of this will cost more—substantially more.
5. Project Management
Project management is expensive and likely requires skills you lack. You’ll spend hundreds of hours managing the project in the first year. You’re trading management time for technical time. Just because you hire a developer doesn’t mean your vision of the product will be implemented without your involvement. You’ll be in the trenches, drawing screens and providing feedback, every step of the way. One of my lawyers spent nearly six months of daily work communicating with our first Salesforce developer, and it still didn’t work out particularly well.
6. Ongoing Development
The development of a practice management system is never finished. The punch list gets longer, not shorter. The more you build, the more you realize you need to build. Then the pieces break down. Fixes cause other issues. Then improvements in the underlying product break pieces of your custom code. Then the integrations fail. You can safely assume that someone in your firm (whom you’ll be paying) will spend more than five hours a week managing the developers (whom you’ll be paying) forever. This will never end: that’s what I mean by “forever.” I really mean it. Forever.
Think About Your Priorities
I get it. Your practice management system isn’t good enough. It forces you to work their way instead of your way. You’re right to complain. But you’ll want to carefully consider your course of action before striking out on your own. There’s a reason these practice management software providers aren’t able to do everything you want in exactly the way you want it. It’s hard, it’s complicated, and it’s expensive.
You’ll want to decide carefully whether you want to become a software developer or whether you want to leave that to the folks at Clio, Rocket Matter, and MyCase. They truly are getting better every week. Will they ever be as good as you’d like? Probably not. But will the system you build ever be as good as you’d like? Probably not.
Maybe it’s not them. Maybe it’s us? Maybe we’re eternally dissatisfied?
[ While I have you here, I wanted to remind you that you can get the latest articles delivered to your inbox a week before they go up on the web. Just one email per week. Sign up here. ]
I wish I’d understood everything I understand now before I set out to build our own systems. I might still have done it, but I’d have fully appreciated the magnitude of my decision. I’d have started with an understanding of the cost and the likelihood of achieving my desired outcome.
If you’re like me, your practice management system will never be good enough. Be careful, however, about what you do about your frustration. You might want to keep complaining to your provider and let it take on the burden of getting it right.
