I have been involved with Time Matters for about 10 years, 7 of those as a CIC (Certified Independent Consultant). Many people are aware that I was unceremoniously excommunicated from the CIC program by the late unlamented Charlie Rogers just days before the CIC conference in 2007 for criticisms of LexisNexis.
I had drafted an article on the state of LexisNexis in February of that year (2007) and finally published it my blog in February of 2008 as “Acquire, Merge, Destroy.” I published a followup a year later, and numerous articles since then
Sad to say, most of the analysis in those articles has been borne out, and many of the predictions have come about.
Since that time, I have continued to recommend Time Matters as one of the best products on the market. More recently, to the increasing number of people who have asked me about switching, I have advised them to sit tight for a year or two. Their existing software (assuming it is reasonably up to date with a version that supports Windows 7) will perform well for that amount of time, and by then other options may be available, SaaS programs such as Clio or Rocket Matter will have matured and it may be easier to switch (Amicus, for example, recently released a Time Matters conversion option).
However, with the brain drain of Time Matters programmers, including with some programming apparently now being outsourced, with senior Quality Control people having left, I now believe that LexisNexis is no longer capable of maintaining the original quality of Time Matters. The latest fiasco with Service Release 3 for TM 10 was the final nail in the coffin. This is an objective assessment, independent of the more subjective issue of whether the current leadership is adequate to the task or even has the desire to maintain Time Matters at the quality level it was under Bob Butler. Given the number of Time Matters consultants who have more or less surreptitiously been looking around for other options, I believe this assessment is widely shared, if not expressed.
A number of third party vendors have solutions that will make Time Matters work decently, but then you are looking at a significant additional cost on top of the program and maintenance.
I recently received an invoice to renew my Annual Maintenance Plan and was also contacted by email to the same end. Over the past several years, Time Matters’ pricing has become increasingly predatory in an effort to churn additional money out of existing customers who may not be in a position to do anything about it. However, since I do not depend on TM for my daily work, I am not in that position.
In fairness to LexisNexis, predatory pricing seems to be the way the industry is going. Amicus seems to have started down that path as well, and of course if you purchase Word 2010 there is no upgrade pricing from previous versions – the first time this has happened. And don’t forget, Microsoft has about an 80% profit margin on Word and Windows.
I have therefore decided not to renew my maintenance and not to upgrade to TM 11 when it comes out. Sayonara Time Matters.
As a consultant, where do I go from here? For me, that decision is colored by the fact that within the next couple of years I expect to substantially reduce my business, focusing mainly on Worldox and Amicus (I will be 70 in September). If I were 10 years younger, I would probably link up with PracticeMaster and a couple of the SaaS programs in addition to the other software I support.
I had drafted an article on the state of LexisNexis in February of that year (2007) and finally published it my blog in February of 2008 as “Acquire, Merge, Destroy.” I published a followup a year later, and numerous articles since then
Sad to say, most of the analysis in those articles has been borne out, and many of the predictions have come about.
Since that time, I have continued to recommend Time Matters as one of the best products on the market. More recently, to the increasing number of people who have asked me about switching, I have advised them to sit tight for a year or two. Their existing software (assuming it is reasonably up to date with a version that supports Windows 7) will perform well for that amount of time, and by then other options may be available, SaaS programs such as Clio or Rocket Matter will have matured and it may be easier to switch (Amicus, for example, recently released a Time Matters conversion option).
However, with the brain drain of Time Matters programmers, including with some programming apparently now being outsourced, with senior Quality Control people having left, I now believe that LexisNexis is no longer capable of maintaining the original quality of Time Matters. The latest fiasco with Service Release 3 for TM 10 was the final nail in the coffin. This is an objective assessment, independent of the more subjective issue of whether the current leadership is adequate to the task or even has the desire to maintain Time Matters at the quality level it was under Bob Butler. Given the number of Time Matters consultants who have more or less surreptitiously been looking around for other options, I believe this assessment is widely shared, if not expressed.
A number of third party vendors have solutions that will make Time Matters work decently, but then you are looking at a significant additional cost on top of the program and maintenance.
I recently received an invoice to renew my Annual Maintenance Plan and was also contacted by email to the same end. Over the past several years, Time Matters’ pricing has become increasingly predatory in an effort to churn additional money out of existing customers who may not be in a position to do anything about it. However, since I do not depend on TM for my daily work, I am not in that position.
In fairness to LexisNexis, predatory pricing seems to be the way the industry is going. Amicus seems to have started down that path as well, and of course if you purchase Word 2010 there is no upgrade pricing from previous versions – the first time this has happened. And don’t forget, Microsoft has about an 80% profit margin on Word and Windows.
I have therefore decided not to renew my maintenance and not to upgrade to TM 11 when it comes out. Sayonara Time Matters.
As a consultant, where do I go from here? For me, that decision is colored by the fact that within the next couple of years I expect to substantially reduce my business, focusing mainly on Worldox and Amicus (I will be 70 in September). If I were 10 years younger, I would probably link up with PracticeMaster and a couple of the SaaS programs in addition to the other software I support.
Is it just me, or have software prices gone up since the introduction of SAAS? With some SAAS solutions for case management costing upwards of $80/month/user ($960/year/user), I have started to wonder if software vendors aren't raising their pricing to SAAS levels?
Although, I wouldn't include Office 2010 in your predatory pricing analysis. The fact is the price of Office has been coming down through the years. Office 2003 and 2007 Standard were both priced at $399 new and $239 for the upgrade. You can get Office 2010 Home and Business over at Amazon for around $220 for the disc version and around $180 for the product key (download) version. Both of those are less than the prior upgrade prices for Office 2003/2007. Plus, the disc version includes an extra license that you can install on a secondary computer that you use.
Posted by: John Federico | July 12, 2010 at 10:48 AM
I can only agree with your assessment of Lexis Nexis Time Matters. I reluctantly moved from Version 6 to Version 10 earlier this year. I found no significant changes and certainly no improvements. To add insult to injury, the Excel macro to save documents to Time Matters did not work with Excel 2003. After spending almost two hours with the much touted technical support, I was told that the problem would be addressed in a service release.
Although I never edited an Excel macro before, after about 10 minutes of tinkering, I found several lines of code that had been added to the macro by the geniuses at Time Matters. I commented out all ten lines of code and never looked back. I certainly do not want to debug more code by installing the latest service pack. Unfortunately, I depend on this software in practice and have not any substitutes to date.
Posted by: Bill Finucane | July 12, 2010 at 06:06 PM
As I have previously noted, I made this decision two years ago when the writing was on the wall. Just give me a simple program (non-SaaS since I expect a solar flare to fry the satellites within the next three years!!) that I can transfer from TM and BM, keep track of time, prepare bills like in Timeslips 5, and post my Word 2003 and Firefox docs and emails to, and get the hell out of the way. (Damn, I may have to write it myself!!)
Posted by: Bob Browning | July 19, 2010 at 05:11 PM
We followed TM all the way from Version 2.0 to 9.0. What a disappointment. Since Lexis Nexis acquired Datatxt, they have done nothing but release yearly upgrades (I use the term loosely) which were increasingly bloated and subject to locking up. Then they decided to really get predatory and insist that the only way to get support for any version was to sign up for the Annual Maintenance Plan in which they charged exhorbitant fees for you to debug their increasingly buggy releases. No Thanks. I'm done with Time Matters and Lexis Nexis. I would prefer to migrate my data back to version 3.0 if I could. In fact, version 9.0 didn't really add anything meaningful other than a lot more lock-ups. So Sayonara you under-performing predatory #@%*&'s
Posted by: Anthony J. Vrsecky | July 20, 2010 at 05:48 PM
Got off the TM express and never looked back! I migrated off of TM and BM last year. No more system crashes. No more messing with logmein for remote access. It was a really great program but was owned by a company that slowly destroyed it. I made the decision to migrate as soon as the announcement to sunset BM came out. What a relief !
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