CARET Legal vs. Time Matters

Well-suited to a small to midsized law firm setting. Would also recommend for management seek easy ways to keep track of a large volume of business and to track which staff are doing what. The software isn't the best suited for running a lot of complex reports--we can obtain simple information in the reports, but sometimes we find ourselves pulling certain data from Zola and working with it in other software environments instead.

Incentivized

The legal world- you need this program. There are plenty of other options out there, but TM is by far the best that I have used. This program works for an office of 1 to an office of 100. I have no clue how it would work in any other jobs, it is designed for legal work.

Incentivized

• Provide me with instant list of assignments.
• Easily record billable hours.
• Monitor the work of colleagues whom I supervise.

Incentivized

• Tie Matters handles event and to-do notifications well. This ensures that all SOL's and due dates are met.
• Time Matters does case management tasks well, including documenting cases, documenting client and opposing counsel interactions and court orders.
• Time Matters does a good job of syncing all case data to a users Outlook Calendar, to ensure todo and event notifications on a users Outlook/phone.

Incentivized

• The email integration feature has never consistently worked.
• I can't toggle easily between viewing all time and just my time, have to use the filters.
• Pulling reports to capture certain notes/details not perfected yet.

Incentivized

• The software crashes a lot.
• The plugins for Office and Adobe are unstable.
• The whole software package appears to be built for the year 1995.

Incentivized

There is no unpaid support. They insist on a service contract for support, either with the manufacturer, or with a re-seller.

Incentivized

I didn't have the ultimate decision-making power to choose Zola. Clio was more expensive and may have offered a more robust platform, but with some options we didn't need. Westlaw was good for case management, but we would have likely still needed separate software to patch together something like Zola. Zola support isn't that great, but we rarely need it.

Incentivized

So Juris and TM are both LexisNexis products. I dislike Juris greatly and the only thing we use it for is billing because we already had it and it was compatible with TM for billing purposes. Juris doesn't allow you any kind of document storage or management. You can make a "note" but what good does that really do me? In my opinion, Juris is good for billing only (not client management) and there are other options like QuickBooks that really outshine it.

Incentivized

• Collections have been better overall.
• Verifying staff work has been made much easier, potentially leading to more efficiencies.
• The software itself is costly.

Incentivized

• Time Matters has allowed attorneys to focus on research and writing, rather than wondering where a file is.
• Time Matters has allowed for more efficient communication between team members on a case.
• Time Matters has ensured hot documents are tagged and accessible.

Incentivized