Every price in this article was read off the vendor's own pricing page in August 2026. Where a vendor does not publish a rate, it is called quote only rather than filled in from an aggregator, because those numbers are almost always somebody's negotiated contract rather than a list price.
Where PCLaw, Time Matters and Amicus Attorney stand now
PCLaw and Time Matters are operated by PCLaw | Time Matters LLC, a joint venture between LexisNexis and LEAP Legal Software that closed on 5 June 2019. The joint venture's own stated purpose includes support for the on-premise products and a migration path to LEAP's cloud platform. Amicus Attorney is now sold as Amicus Attorney by CARET, under the company formerly known as AbacusNext.
Read that arrangement plainly: in each case, the company that supports the server product you are on also sells the cloud product it would like you to move to. That is not a scandal, and the in-house migration path is genuinely the lowest friction option for a lot of firms. It does mean the incumbent's quote should not be the only quote you get. A firm that has been paying maintenance on the same system since 2011 has more negotiating leverage during a migration than at any other point in the relationship, and spending it on a single-vendor conversation wastes it.
What is the best cloud based legal software for a firm leaving a server?
There is no single answer, because the deciding variable is your back office rather than your practice area. Firms that hold client funds and carry years of billing history need full trust accounting and a migration that brings the financial ledger across. Firms whose server product was really just a contact database and a document folder can move to almost anything. The table below sorts the realistic destinations by that split.
| Destination | Published US price | Fits the firm that |
|---|---|---|
| LEAP | Quote only | Wants the shortest migration path, since the joint venture exists partly to provide it, and does a lot of forms driven work |
| CARET Legal | $79 / $99 / $119 per user per month billed annually, plus one time implementation | Carries real back office accounting and wants it inside the same system rather than bolted on |
| Clio Manage | Published from $49 per user per month; higher tiers no longer public | Needs the widest integration catalog, or expects to add headcount and tools over the next few years |
| MyCase | $50 / $100 / $130 per user per month billed annually | Is small, wants the client portal and payments included, and values a short setup over configurability |
| PracticePanther | $49 / $69 / $89 / $114 per user per month billed annually | Has unusual fee arrangements or repeatable workflows worth automating, and wants the lowest published entry price |
| Smokeball | Quote only, across four named plans | Came from Time Matters for its document assembly and wants automatic time capture in Word |
| Hosted desktop | Roughly $70 to $150 per user per month depending on the host | Cannot migrate yet, usually because of a custom integration, and needs remote access this quarter |
That last row deserves a warning. Putting your existing server product on somebody else's hosted desktop gets you remote access without a migration, and firms reach for it when a deadline forces the issue. It is a bridge, not a destination. You keep paying for the old licenses, you add a hosting fee on top, and you have not actually moved. If you take it, put a date on the wall for the real migration. The full category comparison lives on our page for cloud based legal practice management software.
How much does it cost to move a law firm to the cloud?
Budget three numbers, not one. The subscription runs about $49 to $130 per user per month on the platforms that publish rates. Migration and implementation is a separate one time fee, charged by CARET Legal explicitly and quoted by most others, and it commonly lands in the low thousands for a firm with years of financial history. The third number is the one nobody invoices you for: the billable hours your staff lose during the changeover.
That third number is usually the largest. A five attorney firm that loses even half an hour of billable time per person per day for three weeks has given up roughly 37 hours, which at $250 an hour is over $9,000, comfortably more than the migration fee and the first year of subscriptions for one seat. It is also the number you have the most control over, because it is a function of training rather than software. Our breakdown of what legal case management software actually costs works through the rest of the arithmetic.
The five things that actually break in a legacy migration
Contacts and matters move cleanly. These five are where firms lose weekends, and all five come from the accounting side of a server product rather than the case side.
- Trust ledgers. Reconcile every trust account to the penny in the old system and print the client ledger before the move, then reconcile again after. That printout is your control total. A discrepancy discovered three months later is a bar problem, not an IT problem.
- Work in progress and unbilled time. Time entered but not yet invoiced is the single most commonly dropped record in a migration, because it does not belong to an invoice the importer can anchor to. Check it explicitly on a sample of matters.
- Partially paid invoices. An invoice with a payment against it can import as either the gross or the net figure depending on how the mapping was configured. Both are defensible; only one is right. Verify against your aged receivables report.
- Timekeeper rate history. Old matters were billed at old rates. If the importer applies today's rate card retroactively, every historical invoice you regenerate will be wrong, which matters most on the files where a fee application or an audit is still possible.
- Calendar rules. Server-era docketing often relied on custom rules somebody wrote a decade ago and nobody has read since. Do not assume they came across, and do not assume they were right. Verify a few computed dates by hand, or against our free court deadline calculator, before you trust the new calendar with a limitations date.
If you hold client funds, three way reconciliation between the bank balance, the book balance and the client ledger is a hard requirement rather than a feature to compare. Our page on law firm accounting software covers what that report has to do, and our walkthrough of how to switch legal case management software covers the vendor conversations around it.
What to ask before you sign the cloud contract
A server gave you physical custody of the data. A subscription gives you contractual custody, so the contract has to do work the locked closet used to do. Ask who owns the data in writing, how you export matters, documents, time entries and the full financial ledger, how long you keep access after cancellation, whether data is encrypted at rest as well as in transit, who the subprocessors are, and whether any client data is used to train an AI model.
Ask for the vendor's current SOC 2 Type II report rather than a page that mentions SOC 2, and read the exceptions section rather than the cover letter. If your firm does work for corporate or institutional clients, you already know this drill from the other side, since those clients increasingly send the same questionnaire to you and expect your own controls mapped to a recognized framework before they will share a file. Applying your clients' standard to your own vendors is a reasonable place to set the bar.
Then negotiate the renewal escalator and the seat minimum. Migration year is the only year you have leverage, and an uncapped annual increase on a per seat contract compounds quietly for as long as you stay.
Do I have to leave PCLaw or Time Matters?
No. Nothing forces a working server product off your network, and firms with an unusual integration or a client-imposed hosting restriction have real reasons to stay. What changes the math is the hardware refresh. When the server needs replacing, you are making a five year capital decision on a platform whose vendor is openly building the cloud path, and that is the natural moment to run the evaluation rather than to buy another box.
Is cloud based legal software safe for client data?
It can be safer than a server in a locked closet, because the vendor patches, encrypts and backs up continuously rather than when someone remembers. Confidentiality and security remain the top cloud concern for about 55% of attorneys in the 2024 ABA Legal Technology Survey, and roughly 20% report using no security precautions at all. The ethics rules do not ban the cloud; they require reasonable efforts and vendor diligence, which is a checklist rather than a verdict on the category.
How long does a law firm cloud migration take?
Plan six weeks end to end, with the cutover itself on a single weekend. Weeks one and two are reconciliation and field mapping, weeks three and four are a test import you audit against the old system, week five is training, and the cutover lands on a Friday evening so you can reconcile on Saturday. Firms that compress this to a fortnight usually spend the difference cleaning up data for the next quarter.
Where an AI layer fits, and where it does not
Whichever platform you pick becomes your system of record: the client list, the trust ledger, the invoices, the retention obligations. That is a real job and you should buy it deliberately. It is also not the job that eats your week. A practice management system stores the 900 page record set; it does not read it. It stores the complaint; it does not tell you which affirmative defenses the answer left on the table.
Caseagent works on that second layer, inside the case file, alongside whatever system of record you land on, with every citation flagged for attorney verification before it reaches a filing. If you are still choosing the system of record itself, start with our overview of legal practice management software or the side by side legal case management software comparison. If you have one already, the demo above is the faster answer.
The short version
Get at least two quotes, one of which is not your incumbent. Reconcile trust to the penny before and after. Budget the lost billable hours, because they cost more than the migration fee. Cap the renewal escalator while you still have leverage. And test the data export in month one, not in year three.