MyCaseOnline

Pros

Back in 2016, we moved our firm onto this tool and here we are in 2024 still relying on it every day. It's been clear over the years that the platform has improved a lot. The document management side is one of the parts I value most, more so the full-text search, PDF conversion, built-in electronic signatures, version control and the much better MS Word integration, which now feels smooth. Their trust accounting deserves a lot of credit too.. they were the first system I saw offering true IOLTA accounting and they've continued to improve it over time. Another thing that has worked really well for us is the integration with my virtual receptionist, who can log calls directly into the software without issues.

Cons

Integrations with MS Office and QuickBooks are still best described as messy. They function but there's nothing polished or elegant about them. After removing the internal email client, they still leave me manually linking every email to the correct case, when that should absolutely be automated by now and the Outlook desktop plug-in is frustrating to deal with. They still dont really take advantage of MS365 either. The ToDo lists and docketing tools are more developed than they used to be but they remain inefficient and awkward to use, which has made staff adoption very difficult. It's also still harder than it should be to connect one contact to multiple cases. Overall, MyCase leans too heavily on outside integrations and a lot of those integrations just aren't very useful. One issue that bothers me v much is how the system handles business entity clients. The Bar is clear that the company itself is the client, not the individual owners, yet MyCase still refuses to treat the business as the actual client. That means I still cant run proper conflict checks on my real clients and that is inexcusable given that this is a professional conduct issue in every U.S. jurisdiction. They also still seem unwilling to recognize transactional work properly, although I can tolerate that more than the client issue. More recently, when our firm split, moving from one MyCase instance to another was a terrible process. Support was basically absent. We had to create a full backup, restore it into the new instance and then manually go case by case downloading documents and uploading them again. It was a nightmare. Not all of the case data transferred correctly and every link between individuals, companies and their matters was lost. Even the "Download All" document feature for a case works inconsistently. The fact that I still cant create a true backup of everything, including documents, is a massive problem and when I eventually replace the software, that will likely be the reason.