AbacusLaw by CARET vs. SimpleLegal

My understanding is AbacusLaw was bought out by CARET and now pushing their cloud based CMS. Support has always sucked with AbacusLaw. Again, our latest 10+ issues has been going on since 2/13/2023 and it is now 5/18/2023. Abacus STILL does not know how to fix our issues!!! For $60/month per user, you think they would have better support. I have in the process of canceling our contract for breach of contract due to support and the issues for the last 3 months and going with a new CMS. However, the partners of the firm want to stick with a self-hosted (stand alone) CMS, and they are few and far between anymore.

SimpleLegal is easy to use and easy to understand for everyone in the legal department. Their customer service is typically quick to respond and solve any issues that may arise on the customer side as well as the vendor side (CounselGo). There has been a bit of customer dissatisfaction since being acquired by Onit but the enhancements and roadmap continue to look promising.

Incentivized

• Security
• Organization
• Easy to use

Incentivized

• SimpleLegal does a great job tracking expenses.
• SimpleLegal does a great job at creating, tracking and analyzing matters.
• SimpleLegal does a good job with reporting and analytics.

Incentivized

• SUPPORT STINKS - As of today we have been having issues for OVER 3 MONTHS, but Abacus now only has ONE Tier II tech, and ONE Tier III tech and neither one have figured out our problem or fixed it!
• Having a lot of issues since day one
• We have a self-hosted version and are not on the cloud and the updates usually bring other issues. They don't know the term "if its not broke don't fix it."

• Budget tracking.
• Admin independence (being able to make system improvements/enhancements/changes without needing a SL rep).

Incentivized

The support is generally good and relatively quick BUT when there is a new product or something they want you to buy, I have felt a bit harassed at that point by sales but when I have an issue I don't feel like support jumps on it as quick.

Incentivized

I did not evaluate MyCase when we selected AbacusLaw. I did not select AbacusLaw and was not involved at that time in the decision. I am evaluating MyCase NOW to REPLACE AbacusLaw.

SimpleLegal was much easier to use and train users on than Time Matters. SimpleLegal had all of the functionality but not as many customizable features as Time Matters.

Incentivized

• We have been using Abacus (and previously Amicus) for so long it is hard to tell.

Incentivized

• Able to track in real-time legal spend against budgets to hold outside counsel responsible while meeting our fiscal demands--rather than wait on Finance report monthly/quarterly/etc.

Incentivized