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
TyMetrix 360°
Score 1.0 out of 10
N/A
TyMetrix® 360° is a SaaS-based e-Billing and Legal Matter Management software
solution that allows users to manage all of their matters and legal invoices in one
place. It is designed to be intuitive and simple to learn to help legal staff manage matters with
ease, streamline daily activities, strengthen internal and external collaboration, and improve the management of outside counsel
billing costs. Easy to use reporting gives teams visibility into their department’s performance, while…
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.
This product has no redeeming features that I have found in comparison to the many other eBilling "solutions" I have used. They have no incentive to improve it because they offer law firms a very expensive monthly subscription service to assist them in using the system. So, they are being paid by the insurance companies to force law firms to use TyMetrix and then TyMetrix turns around and collects a second fee from the law firms to do what should be easy to do in the first place.
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.
Let's start with a basic one: When you click on the "My Matters" tab, you should get to see your matters. Instead, you have to click on "all matters" and then search for your matters. The "My Matters" tab is useless.
The help section is abysmal. It has improved slightly over the past three years, but they don't seem to understand the areas where users need help.
It should be easy to submit invoices in an eBilling program. The program already has all of the matter data (client ID, Matter ID, tax ID, billing rates for each attorney etc.) associated with the matter. That should not need to be included in the LEDES file submission. You should be able to submit an invoice that has only the time duration, attorney initials, Phase and Task Codes, expense or time identification, and description of work for each line item with the program then assigning the rest of the info: billing rate (based upon attorney initials) , timeslip total (duration times billing rate), total for invoice, attorney tax id , client ID, matter ID, etc.
The program only works with Internet Explorer or Chrome. Both are major security risks for a law firm and should not be used for submission of confidential information. The program needs to be updated to work with other browsers.
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.
In addition to ASCENT and TyMetrix, I've used LegalExchange, BottomLine, Advocator, CounselLink and Allegient. TyMetrix is, by far, the worst of the bunch. Although none of them are great, the others are far more user friendly than TyMetrix.
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.
The impact of this program on my law firm is entirely negative. I spend inordinate amounts of otherwise valuable billable time submitting my invoices. (I refuse to pay the exorbitant monthly subscription that will theoretically eliminate the user-unfriendly-ness of the product.
If you ae with an insurance company that is thinking of using this product, remember that we lawyers are your partners in defending your insureds. We don't object to you reviewing our bills and making sure that you are getting charged appropriately; but there are other eBilling solutions out there that won't be major headaches for the law firms on your panels. Get some lawyers to evaluate the eBilling programs you are considering and choose one that meets your needs without frustrating your law firms.
