Thomson Reuters Is Shutting Down Its Firm Central Law Practice Management Software

Thomson Reuters is shutting down its Firm Central law practice management software and will discontinue support for the product after Sept. 30, 2024.

Thomson Reuters launched Firm Central in 2013 at a media event in its then-headquarters in Eagan, Minn., as its answer to a then-growing crop of cloud-based practice management software such as Clio, which launched in 2008, MyCase, which launched in 2010, and LexisNexis Firm Manager, which LexisNexis launched in 2011 and then shut down in 2017.

At the time of the launch, TR differentiated Firm Central from other products on the market by building in direct integrations with Westlaw and with Microsoft Outlook.

By all accounts, however, Firm Central never gained the market traction of many of its competitors, and TR used it primarily as an add-on benefit to help sell Westlaw to smaller law firms.

In a notice posted this week, TR attributed the shutdown to a crowded and fragmented market:

“Thomson Reuters holds a robust portfolio of strategic products that require funding. The Small Law Practice Management market’s very fragmented with many companies funded by private equity competing in this space. Most of these companies only have 1 product to fund and support. It’s not strategic for Thomson Reuters to allocate capital to compete in this market.”

In the notice, TR says that it has designed Clio as its “preferred transition partner.” It says that Clio is offering promotional pricing to those who switch there.

“While not mandatory, Thomson Reuters chose Clio for their commitment to seamless migrations and your ongoing success, with that in mind, we encourage you to transition to their service,” the notice says.

Customers can extract their own data using Firm Manager’s export functionality before the Sept. 30 sunset date.  TR has created a data extraction user guide to explain the export process. 

Another migration option for law firms is Universal Migrator, the data migration tool for law firms that, coincidentally, I wrote about earlier this week. Tony Valenti, the company’s founder and CEO, said Universal Migrator can do full-scale data and document migrations from Firm Central to a variety of platforms, including Clio, MyCase, NetDocuments, Lawmatics, and others. 

Clio’s website says that it is offering three months free to firms that move there from Firm Central. The site says Clio has migration specialists to help firms transition from Firm Central to Clio.