Practice management solutions handle the entirety of the firm’s business functions — including accounting, reporting and even marketing. Case management systems, on the other hand, focus on the firm’s internal needs regarding the processing and storing of case and client data.
Customer relationship management (CRM) software helps you manage your business relationships effectively and assist with the logistics of handling your client relationships (including automated contact management and progress tracking), allowing you to manage leads and extract data to help you analyze relationships, your sales pipeline, and your success rate with leads and clients.
Shape is designed to manage online marketing and promotions, capture leads from online sources, organize sales pipelines, and connect with customers. Shape offers team collaboration tools that facilitate project information sharing within and across departments. It offers a centralized repository to store all documents, contacts and accounts in one place that is accessible by users according to their roles and permission levels.
Regardless of the type of system you are looking for, you’ll need to do your homework and follow best practices to ensure you get the right system: Define your needs and goals, take the time to research, and then demo a short list of products.