Freeboard is not a practice management system
It does not bill, it does not keep a trust ledger, and it does not store your documents. Everything below is what it does instead, and why a firm would run it beside the system it already invoices from rather than in place of it. If you are looking for one system to run the whole firm, this is the wrong page and you should stop here rather than find out in a demo.
Two different purchases
A practice management system is bought to run the business of a law firm. A deadline and file-integrity system is bought because a missed limitation date is not a business problem, it is a claim. The two overlap on a matter list and a calendar, and nowhere else that matters.
What a practice management system is bought for
- Time entry, invoices and accounts receivable
- The trust ledger and its reconciliations
- Document storage, versioning and retention
- A client portal
- A matter list, a contact list and a calendar
Freeboard does none of these, and adding them is not on the roadmap. A firm that removed its billing system for this one would have nothing to invoice from.
What Freeboard is bought for
- Limitation and other critical dates, locked to lawyers and administrators, with every edit recorded
- Conflict screening at intake against every party on every existing file, in both directions, failing closed rather than letting an unscreened matter through
- Confidential matters walled off by the database, so a file nobody may see does not appear at all
- A separate database per firm, rather than a shared table filtered by a customer column
- Deadlines derived from a triggering event and a rule, with the arithmetic kept on the task
Each of these is enforced by the database rather than by a hidden menu item, which means a CSV import or a stale browser tab is caught the same way the form is.
Why not just add the dates to what we have
Most practice management systems will hold a date. The question a firm should ask is what happens when somebody changes one. In a system where a due date is an ordinary field, a limitation date can be edited by anyone who can open the matter, dragged in a synced calendar, or overwritten by an import, and none of those leaves anything behind. That is not a criticism of those systems; holding a date and guaranteeing a date are different jobs, and they were built for the first one.
In Freeboard a critical date is a classification, not a convention. It is locked to lawyers and administrators, every edit is recorded with who made it and when, and the rule lives in the database rather than in the form. A calendar sync will move an ordinary internal date and will refuse to move a limitation date, because a date with a lock and an audit trail on it must not be quietly draggable in a calendar app.
What a firm actually has to change
Less than a migration. The matters and the dates come across; the billing, the trust ledger and the documents do not move at all. Deadlines sync both ways with Google Calendar and Outlook, so people who do not open Freeboard still see the dates. Documents stay in Drive, SharePoint, iManage, NetDocuments or a folder on the server, and a matter carries links to them rather than copies of them, so the firm’s retention policy is unchanged and there is no second copy of a client’s file to secure or produce.
Who should not buy this
A firm looking to consolidate onto one system. A firm whose pressing problem is getting invoices out or reconciling the trust account. A firm that does not carry limitation dates. Freeboard is narrow deliberately, and narrow is the wrong shape for any of those.
Questions this page answers
- Is Freeboard a practice management system?
- No. A practice management system is bought to run the business of a firm: time entry, invoices, the trust ledger, document storage, a client portal. Freeboard does none of those and is not planning to. It holds matters, tasks and dates, and it enforces the rules about dates, conflicts and confidentiality in the database rather than by convention.
- Does Freeboard replace a firm's billing software?
- No, and a firm should not try to make it. Freeboard has no time entry, no invoicing and no trust accounting, so a firm that removed its billing system would have nothing to invoice from. Freeboard is bought to sit beside that system, not instead of it.
- Can Freeboard be used alongside an existing practice management system?
- That is what it is for. The dates a firm carries malpractice risk on move into Freeboard, where a limitation date is locked to lawyers and administrators and every edit is recorded. The billing, the trust ledger and the documents stay where they already are. Deadlines sync both ways with Google Calendar and Outlook, so the rest of the firm sees them without moving.
- Where do the documents live if Freeboard does not store them?
- Wherever they already do. A task or a matter carries links to Drive, SharePoint, iManage, NetDocuments or a folder on the firm's own server, and opens them in place where the host allows it. The firm's document system stays the system of record, its retention policy is unchanged, and there is no second copy of a client's file to secure, back up or produce.
- Who should not buy Freeboard?
- A firm looking for one system to run everything, a firm whose main problem is getting invoices out, and a firm that does not carry limitation dates. Freeboard is narrow on purpose, and a firm that wants breadth will be happier with something that offers it.
See what it does enforce
The full argument, with screenshots of the moments where the database actually refuses, is on the front page. There is also a running demonstration firm with the login published, so you can check the claims above without booking anything.