CARET Legal review

CARET Legal is not available within Canada and is for US customers only. For options available to our readers in Canada, you can try other practice management software, such as:

• AbacusLaw
• Aderant Expert
• Clio
• PCLaw|Time Matters
• PracticePanther

You can also check other software reviews in our Legal Technology page. If, however, you’re a Canadian law firm looking to expand into the US, or an American friend finding our Canadian website, please do read on!

In the past, it was important that law firms had the right tools and resources to help them in managing their legal practice. This includes organizing their paperwork, having a large calendar with employees’ schedules and tasks, or setting up an efficient system of sending and receiving mail.

While it’s still the same today, all of these are now combined into just one program, such as CARET Legal. This modernizes the effective ways of handling cases by law firms in the past and even improves these processes.

What is CARET Legal?

CARET Legal (visually spelled C^RET Legal) is a cloud-based legal practice management software (PMS) that integrates the different aspects of your law firm into one program. From client intake to case management and accounting, CARET Legal strives to be the perfect solution for all your law firm’s needs.

This software can be used by firms of different practice areas, such as:

• civil litigation
• personal injury
• estate planning
• family law
• employment law
• insurance defense

CARET Legal may also be used by firms of any size. Smaller firms (with around 30 staff) can take advantage of its all-inclusive features, removing the need for other software or programs, which are just additional costs to the firm.

CARET Legal also helps larger firms (more than 30 workers) by improving collaboration among teammates, whatever their position and wherever they are. Complicated tasks are simplified, and time-consuming redundant tasks are automated. The result — lawyers and firms who have more time to focus on more important aspects of the case.

What are the key features of CARET Legal?

CARET Legal has these key features that you can use:

1. case management
2. billing, accounting, and payments
3. document solutions
4. client communications
5. contact management

Each of these features are further explained below, including more of its tools and functions for your firm.

1. Case management

CARET Legal organizes your data and files in a single place, making it accessible and secure from being lost or misfiled. Everything you need for each case can now be easily found within the software; you won’t have to buy any other programs or applications for your case management.

Matter management

With the use of CARET Legal, you can easily check all things related to the case, all in one program. This includes the case’s:

• status
• responsible and originating attorney
• docket number
• open and close date

It can also help you assign tasks to any teammate or firm staff regarding a specific case.  Deadlines may also be automatically set for each task assigned and sync such tasks and deadlines with your calendar and your teammate’s. With this, progress can be easily tracked per task and deadline.

The matter management feature of CARET Legal may also be customized according to your needs. Some of the things that you can customize are:

• dashboard: can be customized based on details or fields you want to see (e.g., matter status, responsible attorney, open date, etc.)
• restrictions: you can choose which team member or staff can access a particular matter (e.g., roles and privileges)
• practice area: can be created for each practice area for easier client intake forms and automation of documents
• billing: you may set different billing options according to the nature of the case (e.g., billing attorney, billing group, notes, billing type, increment)

Workflow automation for law firms

Instead of doing tasks manually every time a case of a previous similar nature comes, you can automate your workflow through CARET Legal. Each step until the case can be resolved may be automated, such as by adding tasks and calendar appointments for a specific case.

Here’s a sample automated workflow for a personal injury law firm:

For more resources on improving a law firm’s operations and management, head over to our Practice Management page.

Intelligent built-in email

One innovation of CARET Legal is its built-in “intelligent” emails, which have features to enhance your legal-specific communications. Here, you can now convert emails to tasks and calendar events and connect them to a specific case or matter.

The emails sent in or out of CARET Legal are synced in two ways: they both show up in your email client and your provider’s email platform. This will help you monitor and prevent them from being lost when sending confidential and important emails. Some examples where CARET Legal may be synced with are:

• Google
• Office365
• IMAP

To also help in your billing, the intelligent email will automatically start a time tracker the very moment you’re composing an email. An entry will then be saved when the email is sent.

Other features of CARET Legal’s intelligent email allow you to:

• associate inbound emails automatically to matter-related contacts
• send encrypted emails with court-admissible proof of delivery and e-signatures
• find case-related contacts using the Smart Suggest feature to prevent misaddressing of confidential emails
• automatically file emails for each respective case
• when receiving a new email, automatically create a new contact, tasks, or calendar event based on the email’s details

Legal calendaring software

CARET Legal helps firms stay organized with a synced and integrated calendar that shows all the events and tasks of every user. You may schedule appointments and court dates within this legal calendar, and even share your availability for others to see. Once these details are recorded in the legal calendar, reminders and alerts may then be set for the lawyer concerned.

This legal calendar may also be integrated with third-party calendars or programs. For instance, through integration with LawToolBox, deadlines may be manually calculated when you’re setting appointments in the calendar. Its calculations are based on court rules (e.g., exclude weekends and federal holidays), so that you’re confident that you’re not missing any court hearing or limitation periods. These calculations may also be saved as templates for later use, such as for recurring types of cases.

As an improved version of your usual calendar, the layout of CARET Legal’s calendar has the following additional functions:

• categories in the calendar are color-coded and may be customized
• allows events to be designated as needed (e.g., private events, recurring events)
• has the option of adding event invites via Smart Suggest system
• automatic creation of time entries within the legal calendar
• associating events with specific matters or cases

Task management

Delegating tasks among your firm workers, or within a specific team, is now made easier through their legal task management software. To-do lists and tasks may be sorted based on urgency and importance, which are also visible to everyone. Along with the deadlines and tasks set in your CARET Legal calendar, reminders of deadlines may also be set per scheduled task. This is helpful when dealing with various deadlines.

Complementing the billing features of CARET Legal, the task management system allows you to track the amount of time spent on each task. This tracked time may then be associated with a specific case or matter.

CARET Legal’s task management system has more functions, such as:

• templates: aside from workflows, templates for tasks can be stored using Task Templates, such as your pre-defined procedures
• subtasks: main tasks can be divided into subtasks, which can also be sorted and filtered; documents may also be attached to a certain task
• reminders: when tasks are completed or overdue, reminders can be set to alert you or your teammates
• customizations: tasks may be tagged, commented, marked (e.g., recurring), color-coded, and assigned to specific matters

2. Billing, accounting, and payments

Handling financial matters is an important aspect of a firm, since these will keep the business running. As such, CARET Legal offers solutions to complete bills, accounting tools, and ways to improve receiving payments.

Reporting and analytics

Based on the information that the system has, CARET Legal can help you come up with data and reports to measure your metrics and other KPIs. This is to help you make decisions regarding the business side of your firm.

Through this feature, you can:

• regularly check the reporting and analytics dashboard that shows data according to your set metrics
• use its reporting system that has pre-built reports, which can also be customized and auto sent
• check the financial aspect of your firm, such as your clients’ trust accounts, or generate financial statements
• review performance of each staff by referring to data-driven reports based on timekeeper productivity and financial insights

Legal accounting and billing

Legal accounting and billing are different areas of specialization that require proper attention. For lawyers, it’s important to comply with the laws and regulations on legal ethics, such as those about the clients’ money. For this, CARET Legal can provide you with a system which combines matter-centric billing with legal accounting.

Client payment processing

Getting paid can be a struggle for some lawyers, especially for those who haven’t adjusted yet to the modern ways of getting paid. Through CARET Legal’s processing system, receiving payment is now faster, as it simplifies the overall client payment process.

Check out this demo on how to send retainer payment requests using CARET Legal:

Check out our Legal Technology page for more articles on how practice management solutions like CARET Legal can improve your firm’s day-to-day operations.

Time tracking

A billing and accounting system for lawyers and law firms is not complete without a time tracking tool. As billable hours must be exact and accurate as it can be, CARET Legal’s time tracker software is built right into its legal PMS to track everything that you do within the system.

3. Document solutions

With CARET Legal’s document solutions, you can easily create, manage, store, and share documents within your team and even with your clients. These solutions include:

• document automation: powered by HotDocs, you can automatically create legal documents (e.g., contracts or wills) and save these templates for later use
• document management: create folders per matter or case, edit files and track changes made by your team, and looks for files through the in-document search
• integrations: CARET Legal may be integrated with NetDocuments, OneDrive, and Microsoft Word for better documentation

4. Client communications

To improve and integrate the different ways to communicate with your client, CARET Legal provides you with a client portal. Here, you can:

• share important legal documents
• process payments through a system operated by APX

Aside from the client portal, CARET Legal also has two-way SMS messaging, which is separate from your personal phone number.

5. Prospect and contact management

Accepting clients in a smooth way will also impact your clients’ perception of your law firm. To boost these processes, CARET Legal offers its cloud-based client intake and customer relationship management (CRM) software.

With the legal CRM software, you can share intake forms with leads, organize data collected from them via contact management, and automatically convert leads into matters with ease.

What are the subscription plans of CARET Legal?

CARET Legal has three subscription plans that you can choose from:

Each Plan varies, with Enterprise plan having the most basic features, and upscaling these features with Enterprise Plus and Advance:

What customer support and training does CARET Legal provide?

Whatever your chosen subscription plan is, CARET Legal offers the following support services:

• onboarding support: an Onboarding Project Manager will be assigned to you, who will help you set up your account, migrate your data, and train your team
• staff training: free 6 hours of training to be given by a training specialist; additional hours are subject to $250/hour additional fee
• customer service: you can contact the support team through the dashboard or via phone, which offers a callback feature
• FAQs resources and online courses: you can login to your Customer Account Portal for additional resources and support

Premium support for Enterprise and Enterprise Plus

As an add-on for Enterprise and Enterprise Plus plan holders, premium support provides 24/7 access to CARET Legal’s team. It starts at $25/month/user, for a minimum of 10 users and a minimum term length.

Data migration packages

CARET Legal offers the following data migration packages to help you transition to this new system:

• Lite
• Extended
• Extended Plus

This will be subject to the scope of work according to each package, where more data can be migrated from Lite to Extended Plus.

CARET Legal: an all-in-one solution for firms

CARET Legal is just one of many legal practice management software available. If you are shopping around for other options, check out these reviews:

Having reliable software such as CARET Legal for all your needs is important. You can save time and energy to focus on the more important tasks and be present with clients who need you the most. Consider this a good investment for your peace of mind when it comes to your firm’s operations, staff management, and client services.

CARET Legal is one of the best cloud-based legal practice management software that can help transform how you manage your law firm.

Do you think CARET Legal might be a good fit for your law firm? Let us know in the comments.