Openfront Law Firm vs Outlaw Practice

Openfront Law Firm is an open-source application for coordinating legal-practice operations, from intake and conflict review through matters, billing, trust records, and client collaboration. It brings together matter teams, courts and deadlines, communications, time and expenses, invoicing, and trust ledgers. Firm memberships and roles, matter assignments, ethical walls, and precise portal grants shape access. Append-only history or compensating operations preserve changes to records such as documents, invoices, trust entries, and audit events. Integration controls include encrypted credential records, external links, webhooks, API keys, and OAuth authorization. These documented boundaries do not themselves send real email or texts, store real documents, collect payments, calculate deadlines, file with courts, or obtain signatures. The current source has neither public intake nor a client-facing portal interface. Deployment uses Node.js, Next.js, Keystone, Prisma, and PostgreSQL; production requires public and internal HTTPS origins. Openfront Law Firm is free to self-deploy, but the general paid plans do not specify a price for this product.

Outlaw Practice combines marketing, client intake, case management, billing, trust accounting, payments, and reporting in one platform for solo and small firms with 1–10 attorneys. During intake, it prompts firms to screen clients for conflicts and red flags. Campaigns and referral sources can be tracked through to the cases they produce. Starting a task starts its timer, and captured billable time is associated with the case. Billing supports hourly, flat, contingency, and hybrid arrangements. A secure client portal gives clients access to invoices, documents, and intake forms. Outlaw Payments connects payments to invoices and updates trust ledgers and receivables; operating and trust accounts can be linked through Plaid. Financial permissions can control who views financial information, takes payments, and generates invoices. The app can accept work offline and sync saved changes when a connection returns, but payments and data exports require a live connection. Firm data can be exported as CSV or JSON. The Outlaw Practice plan is $50 a month per user, billed monthly; a free trial is available, but there is no free plan.