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.
$49
per month per user
Smokeball
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
Smokeball in Chicago offers their flagship cloud-based legal case management application featuring time tracking, file and document management, billing, and legal form generation.
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.
1. Small and medium-sized law firms: Smokeball is specifically designed for small and medium-sized law firms, making it well suited for this type of organization. 2. Firms looking to streamline their workflow: Smokeball's range of features, including document management, time tracking, email management, calendar management, and task management, make it well suited for firms looking to streamline their operations and increase efficiency. 3. Firms looking to improve collaboration: Smokeball's centralized document repository and task management system make it easy for teams to collaborate and access information, making it well suited for firms looking to improve collaboration among team members.
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.
Document Management: Smokeball provides a centralized document repository where users can store and organize all their case-related documents. This helps to improve document accessibility and collaboration among team members.
Time Tracking: Smokeball automatically tracks time spent on a case, eliminating the need for manual time tracking. This results in improved billing accuracy and helps the firm to accurately bill clients for the time spent on their cases.
Email Management: Smokeball integrates with a user's email account and automatically categorizes emails as they come in. This helps users to quickly find and access important emails, reducing the amount of time spent searching for information.
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.
User Interface: Some users have reported that the user interface could be improved to make it more user-friendly and intuitive.
Customer Support: Some users have reported long response times and inconsistent quality of customer support, which could be improved to provide better service to users
Mobile Accessibility: Currently, Smokeball does not have a mobile app, which limits accessibility for users who are frequently on the go.
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.
