Getting Time Matters Case Management Software Working the Way It Should
Most law firms that pick up Time Matters do it because they need something better than Outlook calendars and Excel sheets trying to hold their practice together. The software itself is competent but not particularly intuitive out of the box. It runs on Microsoft SQL Server or the older MSDE engine, which means your data lives in a database that will behave exactly as well as your backup strategy allows. Here is what actually happens when you install it and try to use it for daily operations.
Time Matters Case Management Software Setup and Configuration
Download it from Clevy Systems, the current owner. They have a trial version available, but the full product requires a license and typically a support contract after the initial period. Installation itself is straightforward if you are installing on Windows with SQL Server already in place. If you are running the internal database engine, expect a longer setup process and more points of failure. The real configuration work starts after installation. You need to set up your firm structure, matter types, conflict checking rules, and custom fields. Most firms skip the conflict checking customization and then regret it later when they are tracking a client that shares a name with someone else in your system. I spent three days reworking our conflict rules because the default setup would have missed two related corporate entities that filed against each other. Make sure your conflict parameters account for parent companies, DBAs, and alternate names before you start entering matters. Contact management is where Time Matters actually shines. You can link multiple contacts to a single matter, assign responsibilities, and track communications in one place. The contact card layout is rigid but functional. I found that creating custom field groups for practice-specific data saved me from having to dig through six tabs every time I opened a contact record. Our litigation team needed attorney-of-record fields, witness flags, and deposition scheduling notes. Without custom groups, those ended up scattered across different screens and nobody used them consistently.
Calendar and Billing: Where Things Get Messy
The calendar module syncs with Outlook, but the sync is not always reliable. I had a situation where a hearing date changed in court and the update made it into Time Matters but did not push through to Outlook. I discovered the discrepancy three hours before the appearance. The workaround is to check the internal calendar against external court systems on a regular schedule, not just rely on the Outlook integration. A weekly manual cross-reference took about twenty minutes and caught most issues before they became problems. Billing is where Time Matters shows its age. The time entry interface is clunky. You log time, attach it to a matter, and then run invoices. The software does support daily billing rates per user and can handle periodic and milestone billing, but generating custom invoices that meet specific client requirements usually requires exporting to Excel and doing formatting work outside the program. We ended up writing a small VBScript macro that pulled our standard billing entries and formatted them for our most common client invoice template. It cut our monthly close time from about two hours to roughly twenty minutes, but building that macro took a full afternoon. Here is something most people miss about Time Matters billing: the software tracks time and expenses separately, and merging them into a single statement requires either multiple export runs or careful setup of your billing templates upfront. If you do not configure your expense categories to align with your time entry categories early on, you will spend hours every month reconciling them manually. I learned this the hard way during our first billing cycle.
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Document Management and Reporting Limitations
Document management in Time Matters is basic. You can attach files to matters and contacts, and there is a built-in viewer for common formats. But it is not a true document management system. There is no version control, no check-in/check-out workflow, and no full-text search across attachments. If your firm needs those capabilities, you will need a separate DMS integrated with Time Matters, and the integration options are limited to whatever API pathways Clevy provides at the time. Reporting is another area that feels dated. The built-in report builder works for standard queries, but creating custom reports that answer specific questions about your practice requires comfortable navigation of the report wizard and some patience. I once needed a report showing all matters opened in a given month with outstanding invoices over three thousand dollars. The query took four attempts and three hours because the filter logic does not allow combining date ranges with dollar amount thresholds in a single step without using workarounds involving subqueries. The final report was correct, but the process was not something you want to repeat regularly.
When Time Matters Is Not the Right Call
This software works well for small to mid-size law firms with straightforward practice areas. It breaks down if you are running a large firm with specialized billing requirements, heavy document-centric workflows, or a need for real-time collaboration across multiple offices. In those cases, you are better off looking at dedicated practice management platforms built more recently with cloud infrastructure in mind. Time Matters also lacks native mobile access. There is no official app, and while you can access some features through a browser-based interface depending on your deployment, it is not designed for on-the-go use. If your attorneys need to check calendars or log time from courtrooms or client sites, you will need a supplementary solution. The biggest practical issue I encountered involved data recovery. We had a corrupted database after a power failure during a scheduled backup window. Restoring from our nightly backups worked, but we lost approximately four hours of matter updates and client communications that had not been synced to the secondary server. The fix was implementing a dual backup strategy with hourly snapshots in addition to the nightly full backup. That configuration change took about an hour to set up and has prevented any similar data loss since then.
If you are evaluating Time Matters, download the trial and spend at least two weeks testing it with your actual practice data before committing. The onboarding is manageable, but the configuration decisions you make in the first few weeks will determine whether the software saves you time or becomes just another system you spend time working around.
