Looking at Clio alternatives for a two-attorney firm

If you are searching for alternatives to Clio — or to MyCase, PracticePanther or Smokeball — you have almost certainly already decided the incumbent works. Nobody shops for an alternative to software that is failing; they shop for an alternative to software that is fine and expensive.

So the useful question is not “what else is there”. It is “what am I actually using, and what am I paying for it”. Answer that properly and the shortlist writes itself. Here is how to do it in about half an hour, before you let anybody demo anything at you.

Step one: write down what you used last month

Not what you might use. What you opened.

The full practice-management suites are genuinely broad: matters, documents, a client portal, time, billing and invoicing, trust accounting and three-way reconciliation, calendaring and court rules, intake forms, reporting, and a marketplace of integrations. They are good products and the breadth is real.

Most two-person firms use a slice of it. The slice is usually: matters, documents, the client portal, e-signature, and time. Billing is often done somewhere else because the bookkeeper prefers it. Trust accounting may be in the suite or may be in the accounting package. Court rules and calendaring are used heavily by litigators and barely by anyone else.

Go through last month and mark each module used, used occasionally, or never opened. The “never opened” column is the whole exercise.

Step two: do the seat multiplication

Every major suite in this market prices per user, per month. That is not a criticism — it is the standard model, and for a growing firm it is predictable. But it has a consequence that is easy to miss when you look at a pricing page, because the page shows the per-seat number and your bill shows the product.

Take your plan’s per-seat price, multiply by everyone who needs an account — and be honest about that list. It is not just attorneys. It is the paralegal, the legal assistant, the bookkeeper who needs to see invoices, and the part-time person you bring in when things are busy.

Then divide the annual total by the number of modules you marked as used.

That number is the real question. We are not going to print the suites’ current prices here, because they change, they vary by region, and several of the higher tiers are quote-only — a comparison table with stale numbers in it is worse than no table. Open their pricing pages and do your own multiplication. It takes five minutes and the number is yours rather than ours.

Step three: notice what the seat count is doing to your decisions

This is the part firms rarely say out loud.

When software is priced per seat, adding a person has a cost, so you start making staffing decisions to avoid billing decisions. The seasonal paralegal does not get an account and works through somebody else’s. The bookkeeper is sent PDFs instead of being given access. A new assistant waits a month.

None of those is a disaster. All of them are the pricing model reaching into how the firm is run. If you recognise any of them, that is worth naming as a requirement rather than a grumble.

Step four: sort the alternatives by shape, not by feature count

Alternatives in this market come in three shapes, and the feature tables obscure which is which.

Another full suite. You are swapping one broad per-seat product for another. Sensible if your complaint is the interface, the support or a specific missing feature, and you genuinely use most of the breadth. Not sensible if your complaint is the bill, because you will land somewhere similar.

A narrower product priced per firm. You keep what you already use for the parts you did not mark — the accounting package for the regulated client account, a court-rules calendar if you are in court — and buy the matter, the file and the bill that comes off it. Cheaper, and the seat count stops mattering. The trade is real: you now have two systems rather than one, and nothing reconciles between them.

Assembling it yourself. Drive plus e-signature tool plus spreadsheet. Cheapest, and fine at a genuinely small scale. It falls over on the things a drive cannot do — mainly revoking a client’s access and knowing the state of anything.

Where we sit, so you can discount it: Pertavo is the second shape. It does matters, documents, templates, messaging, conflict checks, ethical walls, time, dates, e-signature and, since October 2026, invoices drawn off the matter and the money a client pays before there is one — at a flat price for the whole firm regardless of headcount. It does not do trust accounting in the regulated sense, docketing against court rules, or integrations with anything, and nobody can pay you inside it. If you marked those as used, a suite is the right answer and we will tell you so on the call. The side-by-side against Clio is written under the same rule as this article: their strengths first, and no claim about what they do not do.

The two questions to ask on any demo

Whoever you end up talking to, these two separate the products quickly.

“What does this not do?” A vendor who cannot answer in under thirty seconds either does not know their product or does not want you to. The answer is also where you find out whether their scope matches the slice you actually use.

“What happens to my files if I leave?” Ask specifically: can you export every document, with the folder structure, without asking support. For a law firm this is not a convenience question — holding and returning the client file is an obligation, and it should not depend on a vendor’s goodwill. Get the answer before you migrate, not after.

If you only do one thing

Do step two. Take your per-seat price, multiply by your real headcount, annualise it, and put the number next to the list of modules you never opened.

Most firms who do that arithmetic do not switch. They renegotiate, or drop a tier, or decide the breadth is worth it after all — and all three are better outcomes than drifting into another year without having looked.

If the number makes you want to see the narrower shape, get in touch. We set the firm up; you put a couple of real matters into it yourself, and then you are comparing against your own files rather than against a sample.