Speaker 1: I have a story to tell you about Carrot Legal. So this is a software that was formerly known as the Zola Suite. So we are going to do a review. We are going to look at the whole software, the ins and outs, the pros and cons, everything. So here's the introduction I really want you to pay attention to. So when you think about Carrot Legal, again, formerly known as Zola Suite, you basically are looking at a cloud-based legal practice management application with built-in email management and complete legal and trust accounting. so this is really good and some of some of its core features include document management you have matter management you have customer relationship management the crm functionality and you also have task management so this is kind of cool and what we love about the carrot legal is that you have a software suite that is totally scalable not a problem and also in terms of pricing it is very affordable so i speak about pricing let alone and you can schedule actually as a matter of fact you can schedule a personal product demo or sign up for a free 10 days in some cases they actually can extend extend the free trial to 14 days for you okay so bottom line is carrot legal is another end-to-end law office management software and so if you really want to if you're looking for let's say a comprehensive cloud-based solution that provides seamless remote access you basically will love carrot legal and so and i want to talk to you about some some other capabilities you can find within the software they have settlement management tools you have built-in email management you also have a configurable calendaring solution and you have business accounting so in addition to trust accounting you also have business accounting so when we talk about business accounting we're speaking about general accounting in other words u.s gap and uh what we have found we have found found some of our clients who actually use a carrot legal and they love it because uh the you have the functionality with ifrs so this is international financial reporting centers so this is actually applicable for law firms that have outside operations like let's say international operations so this is really good so when you think about when you think about carrot legal think about an all-in-one suite an all-in-one law practice management software that does a lot of things okay and we love the fact that you have integrations with the LawPay, QuickBooks, and Dropbox. So this is really cool. So overall, fantastic application. By the way, boss, welcome back to the show. It's really a pleasure to have you here. And we're having a quick review of Carrot Legal. Speaking of review, let's quickly go through the pros and cons of carrot legal let's really uh have a you know an in-depth review if you will so what are the what are the pros here well you do have a constellation of pros but the most important ones for us are you have a full featured accounting solution but more affordable than other similar software you have a carrot legal has built-in general accounting features trust accounting features also so there is no need to use an external booking software tool For instance, QuickBooks, Zoho Books, FreshBooks, or what have you. And Carrot Legal includes email management and document management. You also have matter management. It really features a CRM module and a client portal. And the dashboard can be customized to your preference. So this is really good. If you have a large team, a small team, it doesn't really matter. You know, anybody, any user can customize the dashboard to suit his or her preference. This is fantastic. What about accounts here? you do not have access to uh there is no free access for your external accountant okay the calendar management uh toolbox requires a subscription to law toolbox and some users have complained about the fact that invoicing requires several steps so the process there is not really straightforward so this is something that uh carrot legal needs to work on so overall when you think about the target audience of carrot legal you are speaking about lawyers who need intake forms small firms looking for comprehensive accounting software lawyers who want templates to draft similar documents for multiple matters okay the cool thing is within carrot lego you can create new documents and forms instantly out of matter related data entered into the program and when we talk about that you also you can also create intake forms to share with prospects making carrot legal in our view one of the best one of the best law firm accounting software for small firms requiring help with lead generation okay and if you're looking for speaking about comprehensive accounting software you can get all the accounting features you need with carry legal's entry-level plan and other law practice management software needs to be integrated with third-party accounting software to process bookkeeping tasks like bank reconciliation so this is really wonderful here by the way boss i want to quickly remind you of today's topic we're having a review of carrot legal law practice management software this software used to be called zola suite let me quickly acquaint you with some of the features the top features you would encounter in carrot legal okay so first of all you have uh the dashboard one thing for sure Carrot Legal comes with a comprehensive list of features to help you tackle the different aspects of your legal business. So you have the dashboard. So Carrot Legal has two types of dashboard. You have the default view and the admin dashboard. So from the default view, you can see the most commonly used features, including the calendar and email. Meanwhile, the admin dashboard displays essential metrics about your information, such as income and expense trains for a certain period open invoices and overdue receivables and one thing we like about carry the way that we love about carry legos dashboard is that you can customize it based on your preference i've said this before this is really important because to be able to have a bespoke dashboard is really wonderful especially for for for lawyers in the you know lawyers higher up in the hierarchy i'm talking about your partners your associates you know this is really quote you can control what it looks like and what menus or features it shows okay so to customize your dashboard click the customize button on your main dashboard and the customized dashboard screen will show up from there you can drag a menu on the left hand section to the window and choose which part of the dashboard it appears in you have a time and expense tracking so this is a another capability that is available within cara legal you have a invoicing so there are two ways to create and send invoices in cara legal you can send an invoice straight from your unbuilt activities or create a new one from scratch to build clients directly from your unbuilt time entries just open the bill and you you will see select the invoice on build on build activities drop down menu and you can just get things done from there you can mark the checkbox next to the time entry you wish to bill and you can you can just say click or generate invoice you also have legal billing and accounting capabilities here and we also love the fact that you have a comprehensive of matter management. So if you don't want to miss deadlines and want detailed tracking for a particular matter, the matter management module comes in very handy. All matter-related information is stored in a single dashboard that you, your team, and your clients can access. So this is really good. you also have crm with client intake forms okay so carrot legos built-in crm tool provides a single platform where you can create and manage tasks notes and emails pertinent to your prospects so when we talk about you trying to cultivate a better relationship with your leads with your clients with your partners and what have you this crm capability is a plus it is a it is a bonus here so we love we love that and so you basically can add leads you can actually create forms you can create intake forms to share with your leads manage lead information submitted through this forms and convert new lead information into a matter so this is a noble this is a notable feature in our view especially for law firms looking for a little help with their with their marketing needs okay you have contact management also another important criterion to really pay attention to within carrot lego you have client portal there is a client portal i've talked about the client portal before so the integrated client portal called caseway allows you to review and edit documents uploaded by your clients and then assign them to their design matters and what the cool thing is that you can also use it to send invoices to your clients and accept payments with carrot legals mobile scanning technology so this is kind of cool okay your clients the cool thing even cooler your your clients only need to take a photo of the credit card that they wish to use to pay off their invoice and then the program automatically recurs records that information from the card and processes the payments done automatically so you have nothing to do you have integration so carrot legals actually integrates with a constellation of programs including google drive gmail microsoft outlook you have low pay you have i manage you have microsoft onedrive quickbooks online you have net documents and law toolbox and uh you have you have a mobile app of course so carrot legal has a very sophisticated mobile app that lets you manage appointments contacts matters emails and time entries on the go and it also includes a built-in business card scanner that enables you to snap a photo of a business card and upload it to the program and what happened here is that the the app will automatically generate digital information from the uploaded image so this is really good you also have reporting within carrot legal so you have a a mishmash of a very advanced uh reporting uh capabilities here into and we love that we love the granularity that you can achieve through the reporting here fantastic let's talk about the value added here so when we talk about uh carrot legal what is the value that carrot legal really adds to your operations to your law firm's operation again i want to assist on the fact that the size of your law firm doesn't matter okay if you're a small firm large firm mid-size firm or anything in between care legal can actually be a great solution for you and basically you can manage your practice and create space for what matters including delighting clients and maximizing billable time right this this should be uh the the revenue generation activity you want to focus on maximizing billable time so from client intake to matter management to back office reporting carrot legal helps you save time increase team collaboration increase accuracy scale your business and collect revenue faster than ever before so firms using carol ego reports that they recoup their investments faster than than firms that actually using uh and we you know than using the other software and we can actually we can actually uh attest to that because we have seen our own business clients actually be very thrilled after using the carol ego of course the tool is not 100 perfect okay no tool is anyway but uh it does have a a great bunch of uh positive uh positive uh benefits i mean positive that's tautology positive aspects of it so when you think about uh current legal i want you to think about the fact that you have a tool that adds value because it comes with it comes it it comes with built-in accounting features because see the thing is you don't need sometimes i mean when you actually use uh i would say alternative uh software you want you might need to integrate quickbooks freshbooks zoho books zorro or wave or any other but with carat legal you don't have to do this you don't have to use a separate accounting software tool okay and you will love the crm that's another way where carat legal adds value the crm solution that helps you better manage your customers and leads so you're able to actually uh control the whole value chain around client intake forms so you can share this with your new or potential clients and cara legal enables you to directly convert a time entry to an invoice or create one from scratch okay and as a matter of fact you have customer support that's available 24 7 for your phone email online ticket okay so this is really good so you also have blogs and webinars and videos fantastic by the way boss i want to quickly remind you of today's topic we are having a conversation about carrot legal so this is a carrot legal formerly known as zola suite law practice management software review let's quickly jump on the cost here i want you to look on the screen right now and you can see actually that right now you have a three you have a three tiers of uh pricing for carrot legal you have the enterprise the enterprise plus and the enterprise advance okay and so what i to say here is that those those prices are what you see on the screen right now this is per user per month when billed monthly you also have uh you can build it annually so when you have 79 this is per user per month when built annually but if you were to build and if you were to build it monthly instead of 79 for enterprise you'll be around 89. for for enterprise plus instead of 89 you'll be around 99 if you were to accept monthly billing for the enterprise advance you'll be around 149 so you're always saving about 15 to 25 so this is really good this is really good and the thing is you can try carrot legal for free for 10 days or request a personalized demo before a buy as matter of fact we know business clients right now who actually have been able to extend the 10 days to 14 days and sometimes even to a one full month where they have a they have the try the software for free so you know what i'm trying to say here is that carrot legal is really flexible because they know their software is good so they they're cool they were able to let you test it and see if you like it well if you were to go with uh like if you are on the enterprise plane you don't you do not have custom user permission advanced documents management department-based accounting hot docs integration and 24 7 customer support you don't have that but if you were to go to the enterprise plus tier you have everything except hot docs integration and 24 7 customer support the uh the end the enterprise advanced tier is the one where you get everything you get everything you get everything from per user monthly pricing legal billing email management client portal document storage crm and client intake management okay you have task management custom user permissions you have advanced documents management department-based accounting hot integration and 24 7 customer support so you get the whole nine yards fantastic let me quickly talk to you to you about the alternatives you might want to think about if for some reason carol legal is not the right legal practice management software for you so you have uh you have players such as uh quickbooks online this is if you were to compare carol legal to the uh like if you were to look at carol legal's accounting capabilities and you wanted to see which other software has similar or better or even worse accounting capabilities so you know you have quickbooks online you have cosmo lex now cosmo lex is uh it's full suite accounting full suite law practice management software you have pc law which is another uh law legal solution you have zero zero is an accounting software tool so what i want to say here is that when you think about zero for zero for instance you can use zero if you want to but then you will need to have time solve integration okay so the the time solve integration time solve is a crm and but uh with zero you're not going to have client intake forms and zero does have of course built-in accounting but it does require as i said time solve integration and when you think about pc law vc law is actually uh is uh has everything except crm and uh client portal for cosmolex you have everything everything the and so for crm it can basically integrate with cosmolex own crm and if you were to go with quick boost you have uh everything except a crm you also don't have client intake forms and you don't have a client portal because quick boost is not is not an accounting uh how do i call it it is not a a law firm practice management software tool it is an accounting tool okay so don't actually get it twisted here and if you were to go with now carol legal carol legal if you were to go for like let's see uh like the tool is pretty good but as i said before now the price is a little high now for some law firms especially the smaller ones. $79, $89 for a month per user could be a little too much, especially if the activities are not really, like if there's no boom, if there's no uptick in growth, I mean, if there's no uptick in revenue, this could be a little problem. But overall, what we love about Kara Legal is that when you compare actually Kara Legal to the alternatives, you see that Kara Legal actually comes out on top, especially because of the two things that I mentioned, accounting and marketing the crm and the accounting capabilities just make carol ego a superior tool in our view for instance compared to cosmo lex okay or other tools out there so what is the verdict here well the thing here is that when you think about carol ego is it a go or no go well we we would recommend care legal anytime the tool is very sophisticated it is easy to use with we believe that uh the fact that it caters to all kinds of law firms makes it a superior tool in other words if you are a small firm and you listen to me right now if you go with carrot lego this you you are safe in terms of scalability because if you were to grow at some point you just need to switch from one pricing tier to another you can start with enterprise and then go with the enterprise like go to the next to the next plan enterprise plus for instance so this is really good so you're really safe and so carrot legal is legit it used to be called zola suite but they actually did a rebranding recently so the bottom line here is you have a solid software from a solid corporation and that you know it is legit you actually have security not a problem so you have encryption you have two-factor authentication and other sophisticated types of military grade encryption and data security so this is really good and the fact that and the fact that carrot lego integrates with third-party accounting software is really great you know it integrates with quick post online and other of and other software so overall if you need a legal accounting solution with built-in crm features and client intake forms for let's say managing customers and leads then carol ego is for you its lowest pricing tier already has a lot to offer but if you need additional benefits such as let's say unlimited document storage and department-based accounting you'll get your money's worth with its enterprise plus plan okay so this is kind of cool and again you can always sign up for carol ego's 10-day free trial to see whether you like or not the tool so you do have you do have options okay and so we love the fact that CareLegal for us is great for lawyers in the following practice areas. Personal injury, civil litigation, family law, criminal law, estate planning, immigration law, employment law, intellectual property, and insurance defense. So, you do have a wide constellation of practice areas here. So, pretty good. wonderful wonderful let's quickly do a recap here so into this conversation i spoke to you about carrot legal this was a carrot legal formerly known as zola suite law practice management software review so we actually spoke about i gave you the introduction the review itself the pros and cons the features the value added the cost of course i spoke a little bit about the alternatives and the verdict thank you god bless you i'll speak to you another time but Until then, remember, stay marvelous.