Speaker 1: Hey everyone, it's Lindsay from Lawyerist.com. Lawyerist is a community for small firm lawyers to learn from each other, support each other, and have fun while building successful, client-centered law firms. Today, I'm going to review Cosmolex, a practice management software for your law firm. Cosmolex is a cloud-based practice management software with a robust feature set that includes a full law firm accounting package. Cosmolex's accounting features mean you don't have to deal with migrating information to and from a general purpose accounting software package like QuickBooks or Xero. When you first log in, you'll see a snapshot of your firm's upcoming tasks and reminders, a timekeeper for your matters, an overview of your balances, a money finder, a billing summary, and your top five clients. You can toggle over to me to view your upcoming events, pending tasks, and more. Toggle over to the recent activities to see a list overview of your entire firm's activities. The left side of the page holds the main navigation menu for Cosmolex, which includes everything you need to create contacts and tasks, manage matters and accounting, view reports, and manage your Cosmolex account. To get started, let's walk through some of the basics. To create a new contact, click the Contact button on the navigation bar. Fill out all relevant information about the contact and hit Save. Cosmolex also lets you add custom fields to personalize your contacts and help you search for them when working on a matter. Once you have created a new contact, you can create a new matter by navigating to the Matters button and then clicking Add. Fill out all relevant information and hit Save. To create a task associated with a contact or matter, navigate to the Activities button and you'll see a list of elements, including your invoices, calendar, and timesheet, all placed on one page to help you navigate your workflow easier. To create a new task, click Add and fill out all relevant information. Assign that task to a matter. Now let's go over how to track time and generate a bill. You can track time by adding it manually on the Activities page, or you can simply start and stop the timer at the top of your page when working on a matter. Click Edit to fill out any information before you stop the timer and navigate back to the Matters page to create an invoice. Select the matter and click Details or double-click the matter to create an invoice. Select Billing, then Invoice, and then Create an Invoice. Select the time or expense cards you would like to include and hit Generate. For a more in-depth overview on how to manage Cosmolex's full accounting, bookkeeping, and trust accounting features, you can check out help videos directly through the software or through Cosmolex's website. Some other things you might want to know about Cosmolex. 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. Email integration. Cosmolex does not integrate with Gmail or Outlook. Instead, you can set up any email client to automatically forward emails to Cosmolex. When Cosmolex receives an email from you, it will attempt to automatically tag the email with the appropriate contact and matter. If it can't figure out what matter to tag your email with, it will hold it in an untagged folder for you to tag manually. You can also resolve emails that match more than one client or matter under the Multi-Match folder. Cosmolex protects all data traveling between your computer and Cosmolex's servers using 256-bit SSL encryption, which is often referred to as bank-grade security. All Cosmolex servers are located in the United States and Cosmolex notes are subject to U.S. jurisdiction. This may be a plus or minus, depending on your viewpoint. To its credit, Cosmolex is quite transparent about its security features. Cosmolex backs up your data every four hours and keeps multiple redundant encrypted backups in several locations. There is no way to download a copy of your data, however. Cosmolex has apps for iOS and Android that have the features you are most likely to need while working from your phone, but it does not have the full functionality of the web app. Fortunately, the web app is responsive, so you can use Cosmolex from your phone or tablet as long as you have internet access. Some features are not going to be very easy to use on a phone screen. Cosmolex 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 a Cosmolex account. For non-financial data, you will have to work with Cosmolex technicians. Depending on the complexity of the data migration job, it could take days or even weeks to complete. 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. In general, unlike with Clio, for example, Cosmolex favors built-in features over integrating with third-party software and services, but there are exceptions. Cosmolex integrates with Dropbox, Box, OneDrive, Google Calendar, and Office 365 Calendar, plus LawPay for credit card processing and CaseMaker for legal research. Workflows. Using Cosmolex's workflow features, you can create a series of tasks that are triggered by the completion of the previous task or another time frame you set. Let's look at some of the highlights, features, and pricing of Cosmolex. Cosmolex has full law firm accounting. Meeting your professional accounting requirements can be a challenge if you use QuickBooks or Xero, but Cosmolex will generate all the necessary reports in addition to the usual billing, check writing, and bank feed features you would expect from accounting software. Cosmolex now has basic document assembly for creating documents from your client and matter records. The software includes credit card processing. That means Cosmolex includes LawPay for no additional monthly fee, which makes it easy to accept credit cards from clients while meeting your trust accounting requirements. Lastly, Cosmolex is a single-page application. Speed matters, especially when it comes to browser-based software. Cosmolex feels fast and responsive because the page doesn't reload every time you click a link or button. Most of the time, it feels just as fast as desktop software. Cosmolex pricing starts at $49 a month per user if billed annually and $59 a month per user if billed monthly. It also offers a 14-day free trial. This is in the same range as other well-established cloud-based law practice management software options, which tend to start from $39 to $59 per user per month. Cosmolex is priced higher than my case and roughly comparable to Clio's mid-tier plan. Some of Cosmolex's features include calendar, client contact management, case matter management, You can find the full list of features on the Cosmolex review page at lawyerist.com. In summary, Cosmolex is an excellent choice for firms that want robust accounting included with full-featured, cloud-based practice management software. On the other hand, Cosmolex probably is not a great fit for firms that need to link to a number of software and services together, unless they are included in the list of third-party apps Cosmolex already supports. Thanks for watching Lawyerist.com's Cosmolex review. To learn more, download our Law Practice Management Software Feature Comparison Chart and check out other Law Practice Management Software reviews from lawyerist.com.