Blog

May 25th, 2011 by Gwynne Monahan

Whitepaper: Comparing Total Cost of Ownership

We have published a new whitepaper, “Comparing the Costs: Analyzing the total cost of ownership of Clio vs. traditional desktop practice management solutions,” that provides in-depth analysis on the true cost of ownership of Clio, a cloud computing application, v. traditional desktop applications, namely Time Matters, PC Law and Amicus Attorney.

Some take-aways:

• Total Cost of Ownership for legal practice management software has 3 primary costs: Acquisition, Initialization and Operating.
• Acquisition costs include software and hardware.
• Initialization costs include installation, configuration, training and even data migration, or moving information from an old system to the new one.
• Operating costs include support, maintenance, upgrades, energy consumption (power), downtime (crashes) and data backup.

Over time, the costs for desktop applications go up as lawyers have to purchase additional user licenses, renew the software license and perhaps other licenses, such as a mobile license. Not to mention server licenses. A dedicated server license, and a Microsoft license since most law practice management desktop applications run only on Windows machines.

One of the biggest up-front costs with traditional desktop software is the initial up-front licensing costs. Taking a typical two attorney / two support staff firm as a reference point, we find Amicus Attorney results in $6,637 in direct software-, hardware- and training-related costs. Clio, meanwhile, only costs $1,776 over the first year.

Some argue that cloud computing costs more over the long term than traditional desktop-based solutions, but our analysis found the opposite. Aggregating costs for the same reference firm above over the course of three years results in costs of $9,917 for Amicus Attorney, whereas for Clio the cost is only $5,328 over three years.

Still on the fence? Give the whitepaper (PDF) a read, do the math and see if a cloud computing application like Clio can help your firm save on practice management software costs.