Actionstep vs LegalClaw

Actionstep is legal practice management software that organizes work from client intake through case resolution. Its Practice Management offering includes matter and case management, intake and forms, document management and assembly, a client portal, workflow automation, billing, and trust accounting. Legal Accounting can be purchased separately or added to practice management; it covers general ledger, banking and reconciliation, accounts payable and receivable, payments, trust accounting, and financial reporting, and is available only in North America. Add-on modules include Builder for document templates and matter-data population, Capture for intake forms and document collection, Trace for activity capture and AI-drafted time narratives, and Acumen for dashboards, metrics, and AI-powered questions and explanations. Actionstep connects with Microsoft Office 365 and provides access to integrations. Its mobile app is available for iOS and Android. Security includes AWS, multi-factor authentication, and single sign-on; the company completed a SOC 2 Type 2 examination. Pricing is on request, and no free plan or free tier is stated.

LegalClaw is ERPClaw’s legal vertical for matter management, time billing, trust accounting, and law-firm operations. Its legal feature set lists 69 law-firm-specific actions across trust accounting, billing, documents, and reporting. Billing handles retainer, contingency, hourly, and flat-fee arrangements, with billable hours tracked by matter and attorney. Matter documents include version control and retention policies; reports cover realization, collection, and attorney productivity. The small-firm offering describes conflict screening against client and party history, as well as court-date and statute-of-limitations tracking. Trust tools include individual client subledgers, three-way reconciliation, separation of trust funds, and an immutable ledger with a chain-hashed audit trail. LegalClaw is self-hosted and supports SQLite or PostgreSQL; installation requires Python 3.10 or newer and git. The Self-Hosted plan is free, with every module, unlimited users and companies, and community support via GitHub. Managed hosting is priced at onboarding by request. The listed platform options include API, Linux, macOS, self-hosted, and web.