CosmoLex vs CARET Legal Comparison

Cloud, Legal Documents Generation, Trust Transfers

Fee for the client when creating the account

Cosmolex is by far the best Legal Management Software on the market. The accounting is superior and specific to the legal industry and the client management options are unmatched.

There are sometimes delays as information is being entered. It is relatively minor but something I expect they will improve on.

We didn't find a whole lot to like about CosmoLex. The features were there, but not enough to win us over.

What our firm liked least was that there was no way to track daily billing hours and amount.

Thank you for your honest feedback, Oliver. We take our user experience very seriously and we appreciate the opportunity to hear your comments and use it to help optimize our product and service.

I like the ease of functionality the best.

I think the accounting is more difficult than the legal end of it, but I am not an accountant.

Overall Cosmolex has been a good option and has helped my practice.

I find it difficult to change the formatting on invoices; some of the categories for legal services seem archaic.

I found it to be easy to use and the interface was nice to look at.

I was disappointed that it did not have the features of some of its competitors and it cost more.

I also appreciate how many new features have been added since we started using the program. Being able to access it from anywhere is also a big deal!

I have yet to find any flaw in using the Cosmolex billing software.

It does proper legal trust accounting so I don't have to panic about billing hourly. Previously I didn't bill hourly at all due to fear so this has been great.

I don't believe I can bill for an initial trust deposit/retainer. This would be a good feature since I have to send a letter/email for the retainer instead which doesn't integrate with CosmoLex.

Hi Ida, Thanks so much for your feedback and suggestions. You are correct in that you cannot 'bill' for a trust retainer as bill payments result in income, however we do have a unique feature with our LawPay integration called "Online Trust Retainer Payment" Once your integration is set up you can send an email from CosmoLex requesting a trust retainer payment. They can even click on a link in the email and pay online, which results in your retainer amount updating in our system. If you are interested in learning more about this function,please let us know!

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We simply have not found anything else that integrates true accounting with timekeeping and related legal process workflow. Everything else we've used (I could make a list) fell short in terms of features or else required integration among multiple platforms (at a higher cost).

There is a bug in the reporting of accounts receivable that is causing us problems. We are eager to see that fixed. CosmoLex does not seem to have an internationally focused law practice in mind. We work with clients in 70 countries, in multiple currencies. We struggle a bit to make that work well--there are some hiccups. Most other issues arise because our knowledge of accounting is poor, so we want to do things that should not be done (from an accounting perspective) or we don't know how to do them. Response time on our requests for help is sometimes slow. Our requests for additional features have not happened.

This is a small firm, so I jump back & forth from legal to accounting issues. Therefore, I often need help from Cosmolex agents to fix my errors. I also use the help screens on their website. All agents have been very helpful & David in particular has been patient and responsive.

I would like to see matter numbers on the invoices. I haven't asked if I can do that in settings, but will follow up on it.

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I like that you can handle your everyday office accounting in the same program as your trust accounting. There is no need for a separate program. Our clients love the client portal and they can upload documents directly to the client portal instead of having to bring them into our physical office. Cosmolex keeps each of your client files organized where you can save all of your emails, documents, and share the ones that you need to share with your clients through the client portal.

We would like to be able to make one bulk deposit at one time instead of having to go through by individual dates and make individual deposits.

We liked that it appeared to have a bunch of services wrapped up into one--time-keeping for billing, accounting software similar to Quickbooks with an automatic feed into our accounts, and email archiving/practice management. The time-keeping component works well although you would think it would be easier to do mixed-fee or alternative fee arrangements given that these are the fastest growing in the legal industry.

The accounting system is a joke. The bank-feed regularly just stops syncing with no notification. We have spent so much time reconciling our books this year as a result of issues that Cosmolex refuses to address claiming its the result of their third-party vendor. We recently needed to transfer a file, and in going to export the emails, we learned that we would need to go into each email, print to...

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It does both front and back office capabilities. It is easy to access everything about a client. All time, billing and any other information needing to be entered is in one software application. No need to have Quick Books and some other legal software. Invoicing is easy to facilitate and clients can pay through links on the invoices. This program interacts with Microsoft Office, Outlook, Google, LawPay and many others.

There are some reporting functions that are not yet available. This program still does not have a function for collecting Judgments on behalf of clients.

Web based; Ease of use right from the start; Excellent training tools; Excellent customer service; Most of my clients really appreciate the customer portal - I expect that as my clients are, as a group, more inclined to use technology to manage their legal affairs, they will be using it more. The reconciliation of trust accounts with the option to simply download and compare entries is very simple and helpful.

Some of the more advance functionalities still need work. As an example, we still haven't figured out how to create several template invoices for fixed rate matters (the fixed rate will vary based on the type of matter); there have also been some challenges with the coding of our letterhead (which works fine in a Word document) so we have had to use a work-around.

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Cosmolex is easy to use and to implement. Initially, Customer Support was great, but now not so much. Customer support is still better than any other legal accounting product I have used from Lexis or Westlaw, even Clio. The company is generally pretty good about responding to its customers inquiries; but, you typically have to wait about 4 to 6 hours or the next day or two for a technical support...

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The biggest Con is that there is a clear the lack of usable reports, no way to export client data for analysis and forecasting, third party integrations with Office is a work in progress for 2+ years and Cosmolex should absolutely not be relied on for Case Management in a litigation practice. If you are going to use Cosmolex, I would suggest doing so only for the accounting (w/ trust features) and...

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Ease of use, the simplicity of timecards, layout/design, price, functionality across multiple practice areas, ethical compliance considerations, cyber security protection, and mobility.

Lack of knowledge by customer support, inability of 24/7 customer support access, inadequate and burdensome contact importing process, access to library of forms and templates with incorporated merge fields, failure of bank integration for purposes of deposits, no app available, not synced with lexicata or another CRM service, doc mgmt could use some navigational ease of use improvement, no place for...

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Hi Ana, Thank you for taking the time to detail your thoughts, it is constructive feedback like yours which keeps us grounded. You run a multi-dimensional practice and are a tech enthusiastic, full of ideas. While we currently do not offer 24/7 live customer support as you stated, this is planned for the near future. We also agree that data migration from one system to another can often be very...

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Robust program that covers everything from case management to client lead intake to comprehensive firm accounting. Easy to use and navigate for the most part. Integrated CRM and FULL accounting of all operating and trust accounts with triple reconciliation keeps the entire process streamlined and accessible without having to utilize a dozen different programs and hoping nothing falls through the cracks.

Has minor UI issues that can be annoying, particularly the inability to active a full subscription without going through a multi-step process involving both the sales department and support team at Zola. This should be a "click here, pick your plan, enter your payment method" process with no need to have it "activated" by the company before being able to use it. That being said, there are some additional features that I would love to see Zola add/integrate/improve ASAP (which I am sending to Zola as suggestions for future improvements). If these features were incorporated, ZolaSuite would certainly be a category killer and rapidly take over the entire market, but they are not "dealbreaker" items as far as I'm concerned for overall ratings.