CosmoLex vs. Rocket Matter

CosmoLex is very well suited for the solo or small practice where you just need a little more backup to keep you organized, or where you still intend to do your own taxes or like to have a lot of control over your activity and your output. It may also be well suited for a larger practice where the task management pieces would be more useful but, a lot of those pieces get in the way in a solo practice. It is also great for anyone who wants a strong trust accounting program built into their daily activities.

Incentivized

Rocket Matter is excellent for billing and invoicing for hourly, flat rate, or contingency matters. It does a great job of ensuring time is captured and then invoicing. Trust accounting is vital and works very well indeed, which is always important from an ethical and business standpoint. The mobile app is still not quite where it should be, but the web-based version is excellent in office.

Incentivized

• Cloud-based - accessible from anywhere.
• Very easy to get started.
• Intuitive user interface (for the most part).
• No need for separate accounting software.
• Check printing is very easy and smooth, especially when printing multiple checks.
• Flexibility to integrate with other software to import billing.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Sometimes difficult to find what you want on the clunky interface.
• Would be beneficial to offer a pared down version for solo practitioners
• Accounts payable function is weak.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

I currently use e-ImmigrationAir by Cengrade. I feel it is a better software for immigration law firms, as it can auto-populate USCIS and ICE forms with client data, saving time and reducing repetitive tasks. However, I feel that Rocket Matter stands out for the many billing and invoicing features offered.

Incentivized

• Time is the greatest factor when it comes to managing and creating documents and client accounts.
• Tracking client data.

• 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.

Incentivized