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
Time Matters
Score 5.1 out of 10
N/A
Time Matters from PCLaw | Time Matters, a venture spun out from LexisNexis in collaboration with LEAP, is presented as an adaptable case and matter management software that helps foster collaboration on matters, streamline internal processes and increase profitability through attorneys having more available billing hours and increased efficiency.
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.
When we first started with Time Matters, there were very few other options and it fit the bill. But it didn't really progress with the times and there is now a need for synching with IPhones that was not envisioned back then. Additionally, the number of users is limited to what you purchased and it is not simple to just pay to add a user if a company grows. They MANDATE that you have a service contract which is costly and may not be necessary, and if you want to upgrade to a newer version, they insist that you pay for the contract RETROACTIVELY (!!!) without having use of it.
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.
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.
So Juris and TM are both LexisNexis products. I dislike Juris greatly and the only thing we use it for is billing because we already had it and it was compatible with TM for billing purposes. Juris doesn't allow you any kind of document storage or management. You can make a "note" but what good does that really do me? In my opinion, Juris is good for billing only (not client management) and there are other options like QuickBooks that really outshine it.
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.
We had to spend over $100,000 to customize Time Matters to work correctly with our medical malpractice and mass tort teams because the out of the box solution didn't work for both teams. Consultant costs are then required to maintain the customizations with each version upgrade.
I feel that we did not get any ROI on the licensing renewal costs because support is bundled with it and the Lexis Nexus support team wouldn't support of system because we used SQL replication.
Migration Costs to leave Time Matters for a cloud solution were high because of the complexities of the Time Matters software.
