While 2021 offered its fair share of twists and turns, the team at CosmoLex was hard at work, making improvements, streamlining features, and beefing up security to enhance the CosmoLex experience for the law firms our technology supports.

Check it out—here are some major features we improved or enhanced in 2021.

CosmoLexPay made its debut

Accepting credit cards makes it easier for clients to pay—and pay on time. They appreciate the convenience and the time saved, especially when compared to mailing a check. But law firms need to use legal-specific merchants to avoid possible ethics violations with trust accounts.

Enter, CosmoLexPay! It’s our built-in payment processing. Now you can offer your clients convenient online payment options without the hassle of integrations or the worry of an ethics violation.

And since CosmoLex is always looking for ways to improve, we’ve already made some updates to CosmoLexPay, such as offering ACH processing and saved payment methods. As a result, not only do clients not have to re-enter their payment information, but you can now accept eChecks for trust deposits and invoice statements, too.

User announcements panel

To bring you updates that don’t get lost in your already overloaded inbox, we’ve created a CosmoLex announcements panel.

It can easily be accessed from the avatar at the bottom left of your screen—just click to see announcements, releases, upcoming webinars, and more from directly within CosmoLex. Never miss an update again!

Client intake forms

Filling out intake forms is one of a client’s first impressions of your office. So it’s a great opportunity to start off with a positive experience by asking them to fill out the forms from the convenience of home, at their leisure.

Not only will filling out forms via email or on our secure client portal mean that they don’t have to write their name on five different pieces of paper, but now your firm can create customized intake templates. Simply send the forms to your contacts for completion!

You can also use submitted forms to populate contact or matter fields for efficient and accurate data entry.

Reporting queue

You no longer have to wait while CosmoLex generates reports. From grid exports to conflict checks to financial reporting, you can now continue to use CosmoLex while reports generate in the background, or you can even sign out altogether.

Known as asynchronous reporting, this type of reports generation means that large reports can be left to generate on their own and retrieved from the job list later on—an especially helpful feature if you’re working with large amounts of data.

CosmoLex achieved SOC2 Type 1 security compliance

Along with the big jump in the number of people working from home over the last two years, there’s also been an increase in cyber theft. At CosmoLex, we understand that keeping sensitive client information secure is a top priority for all the law firms we work with, so we wanted to make our security even more robust in response to these changes.

In a truly collaborative internal process, we planned and achieved Service Organization Control (SOC2) Type 1 attestation. SOC2 is an auditing process that helps cloud companies better assess data privacy and security standards.

User security enhancements

And while we were improving security on our end, we recognized that security compliance also falls in the hands of the end-user, so we provided tools to help the firm enforce better security policies. We’ve made the CosmoLex user experience more secure than ever before.

New user security features include:

• Streamlined user onboarding
• Enforced secure passwords
• A password expiration policy
• Two-factor authentication through the Microsoft authenticator app

These guardrails will help keep your team’s user accounts secure—and give everyone a little more peace of mind.

Billing contact enhancements

To save you time and streamline your workflow, we’ve improved how you can manage billing contacts. For instance, you can now view the billing contact information on the matter details summary page, making it even easier to stay organized.

You can also add an unlimited number of email addresses as billing contacts on a matter.

Accounts receivable balance breakdown

For an easier and more intuitive understanding of what your accounts receivable (AR) look like across different categories, we’ve added an option to include a balance breakdown when viewing your Accounts Receivable report.

You can now see unpaid balances as broken down by:

• Fees
• Hard costs disbursements
• Soft costs
• Overhead
• Finances charges
• Late fees
• Taxes

This feature lets you get a more detailed understanding of these balances.

Enhanced Excel downloads for reporting

Last but not least, our latest major feature update comes around Excel downloads for reporting. A highly requested upgrade, our enhancements to Excel formatting mean that when you’re downloading reports, you’ll have more flexibility than ever to analyze data as needed.

Going strong into 2022

That’s a wrap on 2021, but we’re not taking a break as 2022 arrives. Instead, we already have a few CosmoLexPay improvements in the works, including surcharges, bulk payments, and recurring billing.

We also have some improvements for multi-matter hard costs and split billing coming over the next few months, so stay tuned and happy holidays from CosmoLex!