Practice management is like doing taxes: it’s not something most people take any particular enjoyment in, but you have to stay organized and on top of things. I have high, but I think reasonable, expectations for services. They are:

0. Honesty.
1. Don’t lose data.
2. Make it easy for me to save my own data.
3. Customer support in the form of reasonable response to email and other online queries.

MyCase fails on every item. I suggest not even wasting your time with a free trial. The “full backup” option does not back up documents you upload, which is a major shortcoming. I couldn’t get MyCase to rename the backup feature to a more reasonable name, such as “schema backup”. I also suggested the correct fix, which is simply to make the full backup actually, uh, do a full backup. Imagine that.

I also got the runaround on simple questions, such as whether it was possible to have clients in more than one group. The real kicker though is, after what I thought was an undue amount of patience on my end, that they wouldn’t pro-rata refund my last month of service. The reason? Their “terms and conditions”. Okay, fine, but if it was my business I would think twice about picking a fight with a customer over ~$15, especially given that their customers are lawyers. Now, as a result of this asinine policy, I am telling you exactly why you may not want to use their product. Too bad, because I could just as easily write about features and why you might consider their platform.

I may or may not review other products, such as Clio, depending on whether I stay with a manual system or develop my own. But it’s only fair that I let you know that this system not only doesn’t meet my needs, but the producers are both negligent and not customer-friendly.

So, what could MyCase do to make me happy? There’s nothing they can do to induce me to remove this blog post in its entirety. I would, however, edit this article to reflect at least a pro-rata refund on their part. I might be persuaded to make this article more fair and balanced, rather than a mere gripe, by a full refund. But good grief, what a lousy experience.

UPDATE Sept 24, 2014. MyCase called me. I don’t know why. All they did was parrot back their “terms and conditions” and not offer to change anything. I’m not sure if it’s hubris, ignorance, arrogance, or what, but I’m sure glad I don’t entrust my data to them anymore. What next? A demand letter? That will be most entertaining.

Update Dec 29, 2014- turns out they keep the data read-only for six months.  Not too bad.  The product still gets an F overall, I’m afraid.