PracticePanther to Clio
Moving from PracticePanther to Clio is a step up in ecosystem, reporting and intake, not a change of category. We map your matters, contacts, billing history and trust ledgers into Clio, rebuild the automations you relied on, and get your team working in the first week.
Most firms leave PracticePanther for Clio because they have outgrown the reporting, not because the day to day broke. PracticePanther handles matters, time and invoices well for a small team. Once you have several timekeepers, a referral pipeline and a partner who wants to see origination and collection rates by practice area, you start building spreadsheets alongside the system.
The second driver is intake. PracticePanther intake forms capture a lead and create a matter, but they do not give you a pipeline to manage. Clio Grow treats the lead as its own record with stages, follow-up tasks and source attribution, then converts it into a matter when the client signs. If you spend money on marketing, that attribution alone often justifies the move.
What you give up is simplicity and, in most firms, cost per user. Clio has more surface area, so configuration decisions you never had to make in PracticePanther are now yours: matter numbering, practice area setup, custom field design, bill themes and permissions. Expect a real configuration phase rather than a straight lift and shift.
PracticePanther
A cloud practice management system aimed at solo and small general practice firms that bill for their time.
- Quick to learn and roll out
- Straightforward time entry and invoicing
- Built-in trust and operating ledgers
- Intake forms and integrated payments
- Zapier and a documented API for light automation
- Light on phase-driven litigation workflow
- No native medical treatment tracking
- Reporting is thin for high-volume caseloads
- Document automation is basic
Clio
The broadest general practice management platform in legal, covering matters, billing, trust accounting and a large integration marketplace.
- Largest integration marketplace in legal software
- Mature billing and trust accounting
- Clio Grow for intake and CRM
- Well documented open API
- Deep training, support and consultant network
- Less phase-driven than PI-specific systems
- No native medical records or treatment module
- Matter custom fields are flat rather than sectioned
- Heavy plaintiff reporting usually needs add-ons
What moves, and where it lands
How PracticePanther records map to Clio. Every row is reviewed with your team before anything is imported.
| PracticePanther | Clio | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Matters | →Matters | Agree a Clio matter numbering rule before any records load. |
| Contacts and Companies | →Contacts (people and companies) | Dedupe in the export file, not after loading; Clio merges are slow at volume. |
| Time Entries | →Activities | Historical time lands as activities linked to the matter and the original timekeeper. |
| Expenses | →Activities (expense type) | Map expense categories deliberately or you lose cost reporting in Clio. |
| Invoices | →Bills | Paid history is usually better loaded as PDFs plus an opening balance. |
| Trust Accounts | →Client Funds Accounts | Load per-matter opening balances, then reconcile to the bank before go live. |
| Documents | →Documents | Build the Clio folder structure first, then load files into it. |
| Tasks and Events | →Tasks and Calendar Entries | Only open tasks and future events are usually worth migrating. |
| Notes | →Matter Notes | Notes carry across as text; formatting and inline attachments rarely survive. |
What to watch for
- PracticePanther trust ledgers and Clio client funds accounts both track per-matter balances, but transaction history rarely reconciles line for line. Decide with your bookkeeper whether you are migrating full ledger history or opening balances as of a cutover date.
- Every Zapier automation built on PracticePanther triggers has to be rebuilt against Clio triggers. Inventory all of them before the cutover, including the ones nobody remembers switching on.
- PracticePanther custom fields are flat and matter-level. They map cleanly to Clio custom field sets, but Clio can scope a field set to a matter type, so this is the moment to split one overloaded field list into several.
- Unpaid invoices are the highest-risk data in this migration. Most firms freeze billing for a short window, collect what they can in PracticePanther, then bring only open balances into Clio.
- If you use PracticePanther intake forms, the submitted answers sit on the matter. Clio Grow expects that information on a lead record, so decide whether historical leads go into Grow or stay as archived form PDFs.
- Email filed into PracticePanther matters does not reappear in Clio on its own. Connect Clio email integration first, then decide whether historical filed mail is worth exporting as messages or as PDFs.
For a small firm with a few hundred open matters and reasonably clean data, four to six weeks from kickoff to go live is realistic. The range is driven by document volume, how much billing history you choose to carry, and how many integrations need rebuilding. Firms that fix a cutover date and freeze billing for one weekend finish faster than firms that try to run both systems in parallel.
Questions about this move
Can we keep our existing matter numbers?
Do we have to migrate our full billing history?
What happens to our PracticePanther intake forms?
Will our documents keep their folder structure?
Move from PracticePanther to Clio.
Tell us how many matters, users, and documents are involved. We will come back with a plan, a field map, and a realistic timeline.