CosmoLex in New Jersey offers their legal practice management application which supports all business administration needs, as well as accounting and billing internally, without needing to integrate with accounting software.
$99
per month per user
Rocket Matter
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
Rocket Matter, now from ProfitSolv is legal practice management and time and billing software on the web, with apps for iPhone and Android. Rocket Matter integrates to email, and also includes document management and calendar features.
Because it is cloud based, CosmoLex is well suited for a lawyer starting up a practice as there is no need for a server. It is also very easy to use from home as it doesn't require a remote session to login, but can be used from any device. It is not well suited for a practice that requires a very fast pace for accounting as it takes a bit of time for each transaction to load, frustrating the user and causing them to lose momentum. On the other hand, if time is taken to set things up, there are a few tools that make importing expenses much quicker, and time can be made up by just taking some time to set things up.
Rocket Matter offers many features useful to a law office of any size. Users can be added to the same subscription so that attorneys and paralegals can record their own billable and non-billable hours, costs, case notes, and tasks. I wish my current firm used Rocket Matter for the billing features alone. Generating invoices and creating a record of trust retainer transactions was easy and efficient. All payment and billing records were stored in one central system, which allowed me to look up a client's payment history, billing status and retainer balance in under 5 minutes.
Time capture - both via a timer and manual entry, makes sure you can get all the time entered on a regular basis in a quick and easy manner.
Decent mobile integration. iPhone and iPad app typically work well and allow you to input time and expenses away from the office.
Generating invoices and reminder statements is a snap, as are generating reports on income received and outstanding receivables as well as time worked.
While the Notes feature was immensely useful for keeping track of the last work completed on a matter or to keep a record of discussions with clients or relevant legal research, it could have been far more user-friendly. There is no way to export Notes saved to a .doc, .pdf, or any other format. To print or download Notes, I would have to painstakingly click on each entry and copy it into a word document, then go back to the previous page to click on the next entry to repeat the process as many times as there were notes. If printed directly from the website, the formatting spills off of the page.
I am pleased with the amount which can be customized in invoice templates in Rocket Matter. However, to create your own template you need to use fields recognized by the program. Rocket Matter provides a guide and a list of available fields, however, it is a fairly complex undertaking for anyone unfamiliar with using fields in Word documents or using other code, such as HTML. It would be more intuitive for users if Rocket Matter employed a template customizing feature similar to that of QuickBooks, where text boxes and fields can be inserted and manually dragged to the desire area of the template.
Rocket Matter can run very slowly and can slow down your computer quite a bit while it is running. I upgraded to a newer laptop with higher RAM after my first year of using Rocket Matter, and there was a noticeable difference in the speed and ease of use.
There is far too much reliance on symbols versus words, and it is sometimes difficult to navigate to the function you need. CosmoLex offers great support, knowledge base, and training, but sometimes you just don't have an hour to spend learning how to do a basic function that you have forgotten, and you just need it to WORK. It would be great to have the option of having word labels instead of picture symbols. It would also be great to have full functionality in the smartphone app. It just is not good. Not good. Pretty much everything keeping me tied to CosmoLex is on the money management side.
I think that CosmoLex actually relies so much on its stellar support infrastructure that it forgets we don't actually want to have to use it. Just make the darn thing easier to navigate and understand, and you won't need all that client-facing support. You can choose chat, email, phone, knowledge base, embedded training videos within the different pages, but darn it all, I just want it to be more intuitive instead.
I used CosmoLex over PC Law mostly because it was cloud-based, and I used it over Clio because the accounting for Clio required the use of both Clio and QuickBooks which made for very inefficient data entry. CosmoLex is slower than PCLaw when inputting entries, but I believe that in the long run, it will be better as CosmoLex is better situated to move forward with new technology.
Generally, Rocket Matter is more efficient for invoicing than Quickbooks, and does much better reports and invoices. Rocket Matter is much more attuned to legal business needs, and is superior to Quickbooks for a lawyers' billing and time/project management needs in just about every way.
Rocket Matter has streamlined tracking billable time, tracking funds earned from trust retainers, invoicing, and maintaining a detailed transaction record for IOLTA trust accounting. As long as I regularly entered payment and billing information to keep the data current, I could quickly complete non-billable accounting and invoicing tasks. I know it can consume huge amounts of time trying to recreate payment and billing histories, so using Rocket Matter to centralize these records greatly increased the amount of time I had for billable work.
Using Rocket Matter to record upcoming tasks, deadlines and events provided a secondary system for calendar management. Using Rocket Matter with Google Calendar allowed me to easily keep track of how I should spend my time and reduced the possibility of missing a deadline.
All of the data recorded in Rocket Matter can be used to generate reports for accounting and for analyzing how time is spent. Reports made it easy and fast to identify clients who were far behind in payments or who had funds available to invoice, without needing to manually check each matter.
