A Clio alternative that keeps a firm’s files on its own computer

For a firm of several fee earners working in the same matters at once, taking card payments, giving clients a portal or connecting a dozen other products, Clio or LEAP is the right tool, and Practice is not. For a sole practitioner or a small firm where each person keeps their own work, Practice does the conflict check, time, pre-bills and invoices, client ledgers that cannot go below zero, the three-way reconciliation, key dates and workflows, documents and signing on the device, and the undertakings register, on your own computer, encrypted, as part of OBSCURA Pro. No third party holds your clients’ files.

What Clio and LEAP are

Clio is cloud-based legal practice management, sold by subscription. On its UK pages Clio describes client accounting built for UK firms, with separate ledgers for client and office money, reconciliation, and workflows meant to help a firm keep to the SRA Accounts Rules. Clio Payments takes payment online from a link on a bill, and Clio for Clients is a secure portal for messages and shared documents. Its App Directory lists the products that connect to it, among them Xero and QuickBooks Online for the firm’s own accounts.

LEAP describes itself as practice management for UK solicitors in one cloud platform: matter management, document automation with templates for the main areas of UK law, time recording, billing, and legal accounting with client and office ledgers and bank reconciliation, with Xero and QuickBooks Online for the nominal ledger.

Both keep the firm’s data on the provider’s servers. That is what lets every fee earner, a cashier and a supervising partner work in the same matters from anywhere, and, with Clio’s portal, lets a client log in. Both are established products, and nothing here says otherwise.

Side by side

Clio and LEAP as they describe themselves on their own UK pages, checked on 6 October 2026, and Practice as it is. Their prices change, so none are given here; each provider’s own pricing page is the place to check.

What Practice does

• Clients and matters. People and organisations, their contacts and each identity check, with copies of what was seen kept encrypted. Matters numbered by client, by year or with one running number, with the other side and their solicitors, related parties, scope and how the matter is billed.
• The conflict check. Before a matter opens, every name in it is compared with every name the practice holds, after accents, titles and company endings are set aside and Cyrillic and Greek are written in Latin. A hit says why it matched, and the decision, who made it and when stay on the matter.
• Time and bills. Several timers, one running at a time, with the running one in the bar on every screen; six-minute units rounded up unless you choose otherwise; rates by matter, person or activity; a week shown by matter and day against the target. A pre-bill gathers unbilled time and disbursements to bill, leave or write down; an issued invoice is never changed, and a credit note puts a mistake right. Invoices and credit notes go out as LEDES 1998B or 98BI with UTBMS codes, and a client’s statement of account as PDF or CSV.
• Client money. A payment can use only cleared money held for that matter, so a ledger never goes below zero; one that would is refused, with the reason logged. The client account statement (CSV, OFX or QIF) is matched to the cash book, and the bank, the cash book and the ledgers are compared to the penny and signed off as a PDF. The office account is reconciled against the payments and disbursements Practice records.
• Key dates. Hearings, tasks and limitation dates for each matter, with reminders while Practice is open, and the diary saved as an .ics file for your own calendar. Workflows for a house purchase, probate, an employment claim and a court claim put their steps in the diary from the matter’s key dates and move them when a date moves. The limitation helper covers four common periods in England and Wales and quotes the section of the Limitation Act 1980.
• Documents and letters. Files and .eml or Outlook .msg emails kept on the matter, encrypted, in folders and versions, the emails in threads; letters assembled to Word or PDF from your own templates, with sections for some matters only and paragraphs from a precedent bank, and a field that has nothing to fill it marked, never left blank. A letter can be signed on the device, drawn or typed, with a signing record that shows any later change; it is an electronic signature, not a qualified one.
• Risk. The undertakings register, given and received, with anything overdue on the first screen, and a file-review checklist ticked with who and when.
• Intake and reports. An intake form saved as one HTML file for the firm to send or host itself, whose answers come back encrypted to the practice and open with the conflict check already run. Reports on realisation, matter profitability, lockup, utilisation month by month, origination and VAT on sales.

Practice’s own page shows it at work on its demo, an invented two-partner firm.

When Clio or LEAP is the better choice

• Several people work in the same matters. Practice belongs to one person on one device at a time. Merging each fee earner’s time works for two or three people; it is not a shared database, and a cashier cannot post to the ledgers while a fee earner bills.
• You want compliance help from the provider. Practice refuses an overdrawn client ledger and reconciles the account, but it does not make a firm compliant with the SRA Accounts Rules or any other regulator’s. The firm remains responsible for its client money and records, as it is with any software.
• You take payments online or give clients a portal. Practice takes no card payments, does not email invoices and has no portal.
• You want other software connected. Practice connects to nothing outside the browser, a bank included: the client account statement comes in as a CSV file from your bank.
• You practise outside England and Wales. VAT is United Kingdom VAT, the limitation helper knows four periods in England and Wales, and the letters are written for solicitors there. The VAT rate and the templates can be changed.
• You want the provider to hold the backups. With Practice the data is on your computer. Clearing the site’s data in the browser removes it, so the practice file has to be kept somewhere safe, as any desktop program’s file would be.

Why keeping it on your own computer matters

A firm owes its clients confidentiality, and with a cloud service their affairs sit with another company, under its security and its terms. With Practice the whole practice, every document and every backup is encrypted in the browser before it is written anywhere. The key comes from your passphrase through Argon2id, and OBSCURA has no copy of the practice, the passphrase or the key: there is nothing on our side to be breached or demanded, and nothing from which a forgotten passphrase could be recovered.

That cuts both ways. While the practice is open it is decrypted in the tab’s memory, so it is only as safe as the computer; Practice locks itself after ten minutes without use, or the time you set.

What it costs

Practice on its own is US$2 a month or US$19 a year; all of OBSCURA Pro is US$5 a month or US$48 a year. Each comes with 7 days free first. In a firm of several people, each person needs a plan of their own: a key is for one person, on every browser they use. Pro also covers Case for disclosure, PDF Studio and the site’s other paid applications. There is no free version of Practice with features held back: without Pro, its page shows what it does and asks for a plan.

See it before you pay. Practice’s page shows it at work on its demo firm and lists, before you subscribe, what it cannot do.