User Experience
Matter Templates & Budgets
New templates for setting up matters and managing project budgets to help firms stay organized and monitor financials.
Webcal Integration for Calendars
This feature allows seamless calendar syncing across devices, enhancing scheduling and task management
Workflows
Using CosmoLex’s Workflows feature, you can add a series of tasks that are triggered by the completion of the previous task or another time frame you set. Importantly, you can store these workflows as templates for later use.
Client Portal & Communication
Client Portal
CosmoLex offers a secure client portal so you can communicate with your clients without worrying about your attorney-client privilege. This portal allows you to share documents, limit specific permissions your client users have, and send and receive payments on client billing.
Email
With the in-app email features, you can automatically match a communication with a particular matter and get an alert only if a match cannot be found. Additionally, as you categorize emails, you can keep track of your billing of each of these communications.
Billing & Accounting
Auto Timecard Creation
This feature lets CosmoLex automatically create timecards when adding billable tasks or notes, streamlining time-tracking for billing purposes.
Bank Feed Reconciliation & Desktop Time Tracker
These tools simplify account management and make tracking billable hours easier, even offline/
Recurring Payments & Integrated Payments
Enhanced billing with recurring payments and CosmoLexPay, support faster transactions and more options for clients, including surcharging capabilities for credit card fees.
Time & Expense Tracking
In addition to Trust & Law Firm Accounting, CosmoLex includes thorough legal billing components, including a mobile app to help you track your time and expenses on-the-go. You can also email invoices to your clients, and easily track retainer expenses.
Include Your Accountant
If you intend to do your accounting in CosmoLex, it’s a good idea to get your bookkeeper and accountant on board before you switch. They shouldn’t have any objection—trust accounting in particular, will be much easier in CosmoLex—but they will need to work with it, too. So, have them review CosmoLex’s features before you jump in.
CosmoLex Customer Support
Migration
CosmoLex can help you migrate data from your existing law practice management and accounting software. Plan ahead, though; data migration takes longer than simply signing up for an account. For non-financial data (i.e., contacts, matters, and associated information), you will have to work with their software technicians. Depending on the complexity of the data migration job, it could even take
CosmoLex provides instructions for migrating financial data yourself, but you do have to wait until your non-financial data has been migrated. CosmoLex technicians or certified partners can also take care of migrating your financial data for a fee, or a minimum-term commitment.
User Experience
Matter Templates & Budgets
New templates for setting up matters and managing project budgets to help firms stay organized and monitor financials.
Webcal Integration for Calendars
This feature allows seamless calendar syncing across devices, enhancing scheduling and task management
Workflows
Using CosmoLex’s Workflows feature, you can add a series of tasks that are triggered by the completion of the previous task or another time frame you set. Importantly, you can store these workflows as templates for later use.
Client Portal & Communication
Client Portal
CosmoLex offers a secure client portal so you can communicate with your clients without worrying about your attorney-client privilege. This portal allows you to share documents, limit specific permissions your client users have, and send and receive payments on client billing.
Email
With the in-app email features, you can automatically match a communication with a particular matter and get an alert only if a match cannot be found. Additionally, as you categorize emails, you can keep track of your billing of each of these communications.
Billing & Accounting
Auto Timecard Creation
This feature lets CosmoLex automatically create timecards when adding billable tasks or notes, streamlining time-tracking for billing purposes.
Bank Feed Reconciliation & Desktop Time Tracker
These tools simplify account management and make tracking billable hours easier, even offline/
Recurring Payments & Integrated Payments
Enhanced billing with recurring payments and CosmoLexPay, support faster transactions and more options for clients, including surcharging capabilities for credit card fees.
Time & Expense Tracking
In addition to Trust & Law Firm Accounting, CosmoLex includes thorough legal billing components, including a mobile app to help you track your time and expenses on-the-go. You can also email invoices to your clients, and easily track retainer expenses.
Include Your Accountant
If you intend to do your accounting in CosmoLex, it’s a good idea to get your bookkeeper and accountant on board before you switch. They shouldn’t have any objection—trust accounting in particular, will be much easier in CosmoLex—but they will need to work with it, too. So, have them review CosmoLex’s features before you jump in.
CosmoLex Customer Support
Migration
CosmoLex can help you migrate data from your existing law practice management and accounting software. Plan ahead, though; data migration takes longer than simply signing up for an account. For non-financial data (i.e., contacts, matters, and associated information), you will have to work with their software technicians. Depending on the complexity of the data migration job, it could even take
CosmoLex provides instructions for migrating financial data yourself, but you do have to wait until your non-financial data has been migrated. CosmoLex technicians or certified partners can also take care of migrating your financial data for a fee, or a minimum-term commitment.
Just left CosmoLex
CosmoLex has a great idea to integrate the GL and MMS, but the execution is flawed and clunky. There are too many pulldowns and checkboxes and eccentricities that hinder the great features. For example, email capture is great, and you could review the billable time from inside of the captured email. Still, it was impossible to go the other way and look at an invoice online and then get to the email for which you have billed from the billable time. We ended up inventing an elaborate description to include the date/time stamp of the email so we could trace it back.
Also, customer service was not impressive. The service reps always seemed to take a very ambivalent approach, so much so that we just gave up calling. I think they were probably happy to get rid of us, which is a valuable lesson for me in picking a vendor. Find that level of service that you need; don’t settle for less.
We switched to MyCase plus a cloud accounting system where it’s still a challenge to get things done, but it’s half the price, and MyCase doesn’t promise things it can’t deliver. I’m using the features of MyCase more than I ever did on Clio or CosmoLex, too, like tasks and client intake. My clients avoided the client interface on CosmoLex, but they use the MyCase interface daily.
We tried to make CosmoLex work, but in the end, it felt like we were feeding a giant machine that never gave us useful business data back and cost us a ton of time in lost productivity.
4.7 Rating - Great to have accounting and case mgmt combined
The main reason I like Cosmolex over Clio is that it handles my accounting too. I can link expenses to a matter to be reimbursed by the client. That way, the money I receive from the client is properly separated into reimbursements v. income. It integrates with Law Pay so that once I send the invoice, I don’t need to check back to see if the client has paid – it will automatically update as such once the client does so. I like having the accounting and case mgmt all together in one platform so I don’t have to purchase a separate software system for accounting.
The one downside is that if you want a bookkeeper- you need one who knows how to use Cosmolex. I haven’t started a bookkeeper yet because I want to understand exactly how everything works and comes together for this year’s books before turning it over to someone else. They do, however, have a list of accredited bookkeepers who have completed the necessary training, and I’m sure I’ll engage one of them in the coming year.
For both Clio and Cosmolex, I can always talk to a technician/helper anytime I want. This is big for me because I am really forgetful of how to do software tasks right. Clio also has the chat feature with someone always available and I can always call someone with Cosmolex, so they tie on this measure.
Robust Features