Clio vs. Bilr vs. Timeslips
Legal billing software ensures lawyers and law firms collect payment for their time and effort. Such billing structures are developed for the legal profession and include features such as time tracking, invoicing, and some accounting capabilities.
I have personally used most of the main legal billing software available on the market, and through my testing I have shortlisted three of them, Clio, Bilr, and Timeslips. They have some similar features but there is variance that’s worth digging into. Each has both positives and considerations, however, one of the three stood out as my personal favorite. In this article, I’ll provide a comparison of the three solutions by highlighting the key features and the drawbacks of each.
Clio is well suited to law firm practice management, but it only makes sense if one can afford it. It is a costly choice and not every law firm can afford that outlay, more so now considering the repercussions of COVID-19. Overall, I’d say this solution is a comprehensive best of suite option, but I didn’t need the bells and whistles. Clio needs to focus more attention to user feedback and it’s growing to a point where it feels like the users’ voice is not heard (at least not loudly). The interface is a little clunky, but overall it’s a decent practice management option. (Timekeeping: 7/10 | Practice Management: 8/10)
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Bilr stood out as a point solution for timekeeping and legal billing. I didn’t need a lot of bells and whistles in a practice management solution, so I connected Bilr with Filevine, a case management solution and QuickBooks, both of which Bilr managed for me. Timeslips is also decent at timekeeping, but it’s too expensive for what it is, and the design could use a new lick of paint. Bilr’s voice functions and invoice “cleaning” features come in handy, but I don’t tend to use the voice aspects all that much. As a final note, Bilr’s price was decent, at ~$30/month per user. (Timekeeping: 9/10 | Practice Management: 7/10)
Finally, diving into Timeslips in more detail, I found the platform good for reports, billing, record keeping, etc. It was easy to enter time and you can create nicknames or shortcuts so you don’t have to reenter the same info over and over. It could be a bit more “user-friendly” by having tips or help area to click on and it’s a bit costly given the standard rate doesn’t even include upgrades. The extraction of data to load into another database is not as easy as one would like and requires quite a bit of setup. Overall though, a well thought out platform, just needs some tweaks and consideration about price. Not all that surprising to see it’s owned by Sage, so the price increases likely come from them, a ~$2.4B USD revenue company. (Timekeeping: 8/10 | Practice Management: 7/10)
Verdict
Bilr stands out as favorite as a legal billing, timekeeping and practice management tool when you take into account cost, integrations and overall features. Clio wins as a standalone practice management tool and Timeslips is a very robust standalone timekeeping tool. Furthermore, Clio does a good job at allowing time entry — it’s particularly easy to enter time into Clio, but at the same time the billing screen is a touch unwieldy. It is hard to get your bills to look the way that you want in many cases. Bilr suffers from a bit of this, but if you reach out to them, they’ve been decent at customizing my invoices and making that a template option. Timeslips provides a good ability to track time easily across the firm, but they’re ruined by their price. There are a few issues with importing slips from the cloud-based system into the physical system to generate bills, but overall a decent platform, feature wise.
Hope this was helpful, happy to answer any questions in the comments. If anyone from Timeslips, Bilr or Clio wants to chat, happy to, leave a comment.
