On the LawPay breakup, the fee machine behind legal payments, and what I built instead.
On August 31, tens of thousands of attorneys will lose their payment processing integration.
Not because it broke. Not because something better replaced it. Not because a single one of them asked for a change. It ends because the two companies behind it, Clio and LawPay, are owned by rivals now, and their boards stopped finding the arrangement useful.
That’s the whole story of the biggest disruption in legal payments this decade. Two corporate parents got into a fight, and the attorneys who built their practices on the marriage got served the papers.
It is worth understanding how this happened, because it was not an accident. It is the industry working exactly as designed. And if your firm’s ability to get paid depends on that industry, you should know what the design is.
A Brief History of a Marriage of Convenience
For years, Clio and LawPay were the default pairing for cloud-native law firms. Clio ran the practice. LawPay ran the payments. The integration was seamless, heavily co-marketed, and genuinely good. Attorneys were encouraged, loudly and often, to build their entire billing workflow on the combination. Tens of thousands did.
Then the owners changed, and the incentives changed with them.
In 2021, Clio launched Clio Payments, its own payment processor. A competitor to its partner.
In 2022, AffiniPay, LawPay’s parent company, bought MyCase for $193 million. MyCase is a direct competitor to Clio. LawPay’s parent now owned Clio’s rival.
From that moment the divorce was inevitable. The only question was the date. On May 5, 2026, Clio announced it: the LawPay integration dies August 31. Attorneys got just under four months’ notice to rebuild the financial plumbing of their practices.
What’s missing from that timeline? You. No attorney voted for any of these transactions. No attorney sat on any of these boards. The attorneys were not parties to the marriage. They were the dowry.
Every software integration is a bet on a corporate relationship you do not control. Two companies that cooperate today can compete tomorrow, and when they do, the migration deadline lands on your calendar, not theirs.
The Private Equity Playbook
Conglomeration rarely benefits the customer. Consolidation isn’t about making a better product for the user. It’s about making a better company for the investors. Squeezing every penny out of you. Reducing overhead costs at the expense of product design, customer support and user experience.
We’ve seen this play out time and time again. And I honestly can’t think of one single example where it turned out to be a good thing. In the end, companies die, choice vanishes, products and services get worse, and prices go up for everyone. It’s a business model that only rewards the investors. Not the companies that get bought up. Not the people who depended on those companies. And definitely not you or me.
The Fee Machine
With LawPay, the divorce is what made the news. But the change in fees is what should have.
I sell billing software to law firms, which means I spend a lot of time looking at how lawyers get paid, which means I have spent more time on payment processors’ pricing pages than any healthy person should. Let me walk you through what I found on LawPay’s, as of this month. All of it is public. Little of it gets read.
Start with the card rate: 2.99% plus 30 cents. Fine. Standard-ish. That is the number on the billboard.
Now the monthly fee: $20 a month for the Starter plan. Then $70 for Grow. Then $149 for Pro. The tiers arrived quietly over the years, and features migrated upward into them the way furniture migrates into a storage unit.
Now the one you have never noticed. From LawPay’s own pricing page, quoted in full:
“In some cases, we are charged card network fees that are not broken down by customer, transaction count, or card volume, and in those cases we may allocate those card network fees to applicable customers using our reasonable judgment. We may, in our reasonable discretion, change this pass through allocation fee in the future. Our current pass through fee allocation is $7.99 per month.”
A fee, invented by them, sized by their judgment, changeable at their discretion, and already raised once. It was $4.99 not long ago. It is $7.99 now. There is no ceiling in that paragraph. Read it as a lawyer: would you let a counterparty write that clause into anything?
And then there is the eCheck fee, which is my personal favorite, because it is the purest specimen in the collection.
An eCheck is an ACH bank transfer. Moving money between American bank accounts costs a processor almost nothing. Fractions of a percent, capped at a few dollars. It is the cheapest way money moves in this country.
LawPay charges 1% for this. And here is the move: they used to cap that fee at $10. Recently, quietly, they removed the cap. Completely gone.
Sit with the arithmetic. A client pays a $25,000 settlement invoice by eCheck. The underlying cost to process that transfer is about five dollars. LawPay’s fee is $250. Not for taking a risk, not for advancing funds, not for doing anything that scales with the size of the payment. The same bytes move either way. The only thing 1% uncapped scales with is the size of your practice.
Legal payments involve the largest routine transactions of any consumer-facing industry. Retainers, settlements, five-figure invoices. An uncapped percentage on legal eChecks is not a fee. It is a tax on the size of justice, collected by a company whose costs stopped growing at five dollars.
None of this is illegal. None of it is even unusual. That is the point. LawPay is owned by a company called 8am, formerly AffiniPay, which also owns MyCase, CPACharge, CasePeer, and DocketWise. Across town, a private equity holding called ProfitSolv owns Rocket Matter, TimeSolv, CosmoLex, and Tabs3, which are marketed as competitors and owned by the same investors. Clio, valued at $5 billion, is a practice manager, payment processor, research provider, and AI company all at once.
When a market consolidates like this, fees do not go down. They go wherever “reasonable discretion” takes them. Clio’s own 2025 Legal Trends Report, published voluntarily, about its own industry: 71% of lawyers say they have been held hostage by their software vendors. The average cost to escape is $24,861. Those are the winners’ numbers.
What I Built Instead
TimeNet Law has been independently owned for 23 years. No investors, no board, no exit timeline. For most of those years, when firms asked whether it did payments, the answer was no, and the honest reason was that I refused to bolt somebody else’s toll booth onto software you bought outright.
The LawPay divorce changed the math. Firms are about to be forced into a migration anyway. If they have to rebuild their payment workflow, they deserve at least one option that is not run by a fee committee.
So I built Slipstream. It shipped this week in TimeNet Law 6.2.
Slipstream puts two buttons on every invoice you email: Pay by Card and Pay by eCheck. Your client pays by credit card, Apple Pay, or straight from their bank account, on a secure checkout page, and gets a receipt automatically. The payment posts itself to the right invoice on the right matter, and your Mac notifies you that money arrived. Right-click any invoice and copy a payment link for the client on the phone with a card in hand. Setup is one guided form, about ten minutes, once.
The processing runs on Stripe, the infrastructure behind most of the modern internet, and the card numbers and bank accounts never touch TimeNet Law, your Mac, or your files. Your matter data stays where it has always been: on your machine, not in anyone’s cloud, including mine.
And here is the fee schedule. All of it.
- Credit and debit cards: 2.95% plus 30 cents.
- Apple Pay: 2.95% plus 30 cents.
- eCheck: 1%, capped at $50.
- Monthly fee: zero. Setup fee: zero. Pass-through allocation fee: does not exist.
That eCheck cap is the number I want you to hold on to. The industry just finished removing its caps. I put one in, and I printed it inside the app, next to the setup button, where a fee schedule belongs. On that $25,000 settlement payment, the uncapped competition charges $250. Slipstream charges $50, because fifty dollars is the most an eCheck will ever cost you here, on any amount, full stop.
One more thing about that cap. Fees in this industry only ever move in one direction, always upward, always quietly, always “in our reasonable discretion.” So let me put the opposite in writing where it can be held against me: the Slipstream cap will never go up. If enough firms come aboard that the economics allow it, it will go down, and when that happens I will announce it the way other companies announce price increases: quietly, in the fine print, except it will be good news.
Nobody lowers fees in legal payments. Watch me.
The Escape Hatch Is Open
If you are one of the firms staring down August 31, I am sorry. You did nothing wrong. You picked good software with a good integration, and a corporate conflict you never had a say in is taking it away from you on ninety days’ notice. That is not a reflection of how you run your practice. It is a reflection of who runs your vendors.
But since you have to move anyway, it is worth asking where to. You can migrate from one empire’s processor to another empire’s processor and wait for the next divorce. Or you can put your billing on software you own, on your own Mac, with payments that carry the shortest and most honest fee schedule in the industry, run by someone who answers his own phone and has for 23 years.
TimeNet Law 6.2 with Slipstream is out now. The trial is free and does not ask for a credit card, which feels almost quaint in this industry. Setup takes ten minutes. The fee schedule takes ten seconds, because I kept it short enough to read.
TimeNet Law was built because a large legal billing software vendor abandoned Mac users with almost no notice. That story should sound familiar by now.
In 23 years I’ve rejected countless buyout offers. I refuse to let TimeNet Law become another casualty of the PE Consolidation War.
Now legal vendors are dicking their customers around more than ever. And TimeNet Law remains, quite literally, the last independent option left on the planet. So come take a look at what it’s like to use software built for you, the attorney, and not just its own investors.
The water is cold. Come on in.
