Prevail Legal Case Management Software

Prevail is the worst case management/​CRM software solution I have seen in my entire professional career. It has huge issues with case status– you can’t add new status types (ie, awarded but unpaid), and there are many obvious oversights in the software design; for example, it doesn’t update the case status once you complete the task generated when you indicate that an appeal must be filed by such-​and-​such date. As a result, it is almost impossible to get an accurate picture of your case-​load; all case status updates must be done manually.
Perhaps the most irritating feature is the ‘message list.’ There are two options. The first option is that Prevail will steal focus (ie, makes the program ‘pop up’ in front of whatever program you are using at the time– e-​mail, the internet, etc) whenever someone completes a client task you are associated with. The second option is not to receive the messages at all, and not to have any record of the completed tasks that you are associated with. As a supervisor, this would mean you would have no idea when your subordinates complete work. Since that’s unacceptable, I have closed about 20 pop-​up windows while writing this review.
Worst of all, Prevail’s reporting capabilities are abysmal. There is a limited menu of options for types of reports you can use, so you will need to compromise to get the information you want, using a report that isn’t quite what you need and doing more work to account for the software’s shortcomings. To be fair, you can also wait for their people to make custom reports, or try to use their incomprehensible custom report builder (it was designed for their programmers to be able to use). Scandalously, once the program produces a report, it makes a PICTURE. This means that you can’t take any of the information from this program and dump into a real program like Excel to get the information you need (unless you enter each datum manually). This program literally has the potential to cause your business to fold, because it is impossible to evaluate success and change your process accordingly without robust, reliable reporting features.