Practice Panther has been in discussion in the legal industry lately – and not for good reason. Recent reviews of Practice Panther have revealed a pattern in customer service that is rather concerning to potential buyers of the legal software.

Ronald K Review On Practice Panther

“At the time, PP was marketing an easy sync with Jublilee–one of the three or four major petition preparing software packages on the market. In fact it has a canned webinar on its site about the “exciting news” that it integrates with Jublilee. If you watch the webinar closely (after the fact I did several times) you can actually see where the sync doesn’t seem to work and the PP guy tries to excuse the lack of a result as “it sometimes takes a few moments.”

The truth is, the sync doesn’t work AND PP doesn’t give a ****. I tried to get it to work for four months. IT NEVER FULLY WORKED. Moreover, if you contact PP support, their response was: “talk to Jublilee.” (BTW, I was generally pleased with Jublilee’s efforts to try and resolve my sync problem.) When PP wasn’t telling me to “talk to Jublilee” they would refer me to a canned answer in their “Q & A” database that really had nothing to do with my problem.

As to my second requirement that I be able to save emails to a client or matter— if you are using Microsoft Outlook 365, there is an “add-in” that you have to download from Microsoft’s website that allows you to use PP within Outlook.
PP also has a canned webinar that takes you through the steps to add this in. I tried to load this onto my Outlook and it didn’t work. Tried to do it again, didn’t work. Tried a third time, still didn’t work. Send PP a question–what do they do refer me to their canned webinar. Frustrated I contacted Microsoft, as I had “tech service agreement.” They tried to figure out what was wrong, and the initial person who I spoke to also could not figure out why it would not “add-in.” Finally, after several hours and Microsoft bringing in another engineer we were able to get the PP “add-in to work.”

Bottomline: don’t use PP, it doesn’t work and they don’t support their product beyond referring you to their canned webinars. BTW, I stupidly paid a year subscription for PP (I know I should have my head examined). When I asked several days ago if I could have a partial refund, I was put on hold for several minutes, and then the rep, said they would get back to me “very soon.” I am still waiting–maybe they are going to refer me to a “canned webinar.” – Ronald K

Elizabeth I Review On Practice Panther

“I cancelled my subscription to Practice Panther because they took an annual subscription payment from my account without permission. I have been trying to get that amount refunded for months and have been completely ignored. They say they get back to you within a couple of hours, but it’s been a couple of months and nothing. I’ve even threatened to sue them several times and have still be ignored. Stay away!” – Elizabeth I

Amy S Review On Practice Panther

While this software has potential, it has far more negatives than positives at this time. It can’t do simple basic things such as putting a file on hold. And their support is a joke. You can’t get someone in real time, then the answer you get is completely different depending on who you are talking to. The support staff doesn’t even seem to know it’s own system.

Our office did not have a paperless system before, and as I had worked in prior paperless offices I was put in charge of the transition. We’re now 6 months in and still not using the system because things do not port over correctly, nothing works as they promised and we’ve had to do so many workarounds that it practically borders on efficiency.

While I do understand that my firm is not the norm in what we do, there are basic needs that would affect every form (for example putting a file on hold as mentioned above) that the system can’t do.

There were some red flags when we were looking into the system, such as the flat out refusal of the salesman allowing our IT person to speak to their IT staff saying he could answer every question, the fact that he told us what we need to hear to placate us, only to find out what he told us was flat out WRONG when we actually got to the use stage. When it came to transferring our files to this system they did little to nothing and it took me personally 4 weeks of about 60 hours a week doing nothing but fixing what they brought over.

Overall, avoid this system. We’re stuck for now, but honestly, construction paper and crayons works out better than this system does. – Source