PCLaw is offered as an all-in-one billing, legal accounting, and matter management solution, from PCLaw | Time Matters, a joint venture spun out of LexisNexis in collaboration with LEAP in 2019.
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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.
PCLaw is well suited for small to medium sized law firms with minimal accounting and bookkeeping needs. The software provides basic case management functions, and I've encountered issues with viewing or organizing new documents. The software crashes and freezes often, especially when multiple users are trying to access it at the same time. The user interface is a bit outdated but still very easy to navigate. You have to pay more for the cloud-based version of the software and it does not allow software integrations or workflow automations. I would recommend using this software only for billing/accounting purposes and subsidizing case management with more modernized products
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.
Like I said in my pros, it can hold a lot of matters. But, if your firm is very large, PCLaw may not be the best option. My old firm grew to the point where they had to switch because they had too many matters for the system to hold.
The software is definitely dated, and I have some issues with crashing and other weird/buggy behavior. I have to set the default printer every time I log on in order to avoid multiple pop-ups when trying to print a document/report (which definitely doesn't take much time, but it can get annoying).
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 software may not be pretty, but it works. It could use a facelift but the functionality is still there. Personally, I would like to see an investment to make it prettier, but again, function over fashion. It is not a client-facing application, so internal use does not need to be razzle-dazzle.
Tech support for LexisNexis PCLaw has been seamless as far as I know. Those issues have been dealt with by others at my organization and I do not have personal experience.
PCLaw is still the only product that provides both front office (practice management/calendaring) and back office (accounting) solutions for a law firm in one product
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.
