NetDocuments is a document management solution from the company of the same name in Lehi, Utah.
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Rocket Matter
Score 9.0 out of 10
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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.
Consultant \ Law Office Practice Management & Accounting Software
Chose NetDocuments
WatchDox and WorldDox both provided what looked like similar features but too much of the technical requirements fall on the customer and they, at the time of my evaluation, were not true cloud products. They were client \ server-based product hosted in the cloud. If you do not …
It is ideal where security is your number one concern or where there is a need to share securely across different physical locations. Speed is less than ideal in certain usage scenarios. It is limited by the speed of the internet and it can be difficult to pull large quantities of documents when researching or answering discovery requests, although, that being said, it can be addressed by maintaining your own secure server to contain a mirror of your online documents. But then the security for a mirror falls back on the organization.
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.
Delay. At times, there is a delay between saving a document into Netdocuments and actually seeing them in the appropriate workspace. Such a delay is caused by the system indexing the newly added file.
Netdocuments' servers slow down at times causing users to receive error messages. This can be quickly remedied, but can become a nuisance.
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.
The product is simple to learn and adheres to well-known web user protocols. The NetDocuments team spends a lot of time talking to customers regarding how to improve their interface, and are pretty quick about implementing good ideas. The system is reliable and repeatable, and similar functions are laid out consistently and in formats that users are used to.
NetDocuments is a performant web app. It is reliable and provides all the functionality of a sophisticated document management system. It also can serve, through its APIs, as a base system for other applications, which enhances its value. Other vendors find the company easy to work with, and it consistently seems to be the first to offer new features and technologies to its customers.
I've never had to contact support, but I won't give it a ten. We've had a few hiccups along the way, but nothing that couldn't be fixed within 24 hours.
We switched to NetDocuments 11 years ago. So, to be fair and accurate... the OpenText product at that time was called PC Docs and the company (that OpenText acquired) was Hummingbird. I can't remember who owned iManage at the time. Anyway, NetDocuments was a superior product at the time, in general, and more specifically because the search and remote access features\functions were superior (and still are).
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.
