What it is
LawPay is the payments processor most US law firms already know: card, eCheck and Apple Pay payments that keep earned fees and unearned client money apart, so a card fee or chargeback never touches the IOLTA trust account. It is sold by 8am, the company that called itself AffiniPay until August 2025 and also owns MyCase, CasePeer and Docketwise. LawPay says it is available through all 50 state bars and is used by over 120,000 lawyers.
In 2026 it stopped being only a processor. On February 12, 2026, 8am added invoicing, time and expense capture, matter-level trust tracking, cash-flow dashboards and Smart Spend, an 8am Visa business card whose purchases attach to client invoices. On April 28 it began guaranteeing next-business-day deposits on all payments at no extra cost. In September it showed 8am Capital, revenue-based loans inside LawPay funded by Fundbox and its bank partner, Lead Bank.
Why it shows up in Legal Ops stacks
- Trust compliance is the product, not a setting. Operating and trust deposits route to separate accounts, and fees always come out of operating. Small firms buy LawPay so that one bad card swipe cannot become a bar complaint.
- Clio just walked away from it. Clio ended its LawPay integration on August 31, 2026, when the contract expired. Clio Manage firms now choose between moving to Clio Payments and running LawPay outside their practice management system. That choice is why this page exists.
- It is the default rail for 8am’s own products. Inside MyCase, LawPay is a $0-per-month add-on. Payments land on the matter and the trust ledger without a third-party sync.
Pricing reality
The standalone plan is $19 per month, with no contract and unlimited users. Processing is 2.99% + $0.30 for Visa, Mastercard and Discover, 3.90% + $0.30 for American Express, and 1% for eCheck. Pay Later, the client financing option, costs the firm 5.95%.
The headline rate is not the whole bill. LawPay passes card-network fees through without markup: a monthly allocation it currently puts at $7.99, plus 1.75% on foreign cards and per-transaction network fees. Clio Payments, by comparison, advertises 2.95% on standard cards with no per-transaction fee and no network pass-through. On a firm collecting $40,000 a month by card at an $800 average invoice, LawPay costs about $1,196 + $15 in per-transaction fees + $27 in monthly fees, roughly $1,238 before per-transaction network fees. The same volume costs about $1,180 on Clio Payments. The gap is real but small. Integration fit matters more than rate.
Best for
Managing partners and firm administrators at solo-to-50-lawyer US firms that run MyCase or CasePeer, or a practice management system with no native payments, and want trust-safe card and ACH collection with next-day deposits. It also fits firms that just want invoicing and payments without buying a full practice management suite.
Versus the alternatives
Clio Payments is the other half of the market. Pick it if you run Clio Manage: it is Clio’s native processor, LawPay no longer plugs into Clio Manage, and its flat card rate undercuts LawPay’s effective rate. Pick LawPay if you are on MyCase, CasePeer or Smokeball, or if you want payments that survive a later move between practice management systems.
PantherPayments inside PracticePanther follows the same logic: use the native processor of the system you live in, unless you need LawPay’s lending or card programs.
Confido Legal is the newer entrant to watch. It is a Seattle spinout of Gravity Payments with $9 million raised, and it sells payments that other legal software embeds. Pick it when your billing tool already offers Confido inside its own screens. LeanLaw is one example.
If none fit, you are usually outside the US. LawPay is US-only, so firms elsewhere use their practice management system’s local processor or Stripe with a separate trust workflow.
Watch-outs
- The pass-through fees make quotes hard to compare. Guard: ask for 3 months of statements from a peer firm, or a written all-in effective rate at your average ticket size, before comparing against Clio Payments or Confido.
- Clio firms that keep LawPay lose the automatic sync. Payments no longer post to Clio invoices or the Clio trust ledger. Guard: if you stay on LawPay outside Clio, assign one person to a weekly three-way reconciliation of the bank, LawPay and the Clio trust ledger. Otherwise migrate to Clio Payments and re-collect stored cards and recurring authorizations before you switch.
- The new billing and lending features are 8am’s, and they deepen lock-in. LawPay invoicing duplicates billing you may already have, and 8am Capital repayments flex with your LawPay revenue. Guard: keep one system of record for invoices, and read the Fundbox loan terms on fees, repayment share and what happens if you leave LawPay before you draw any funds.
- There is no AI or MCP layer worth buying for. The 2026 releases are finance features, not AI. Guard: evaluate LawPay on rates, trust controls and integrations alone. Put legal AI spend on research or drafting tools.