The cost is not the subscription
A five-person firm typically runs four tools that do not talk to each other. The expense is double entry and the missing fact at the hearing, not the monthly fee.
Seven criteria
One entry point per matter, holding documents, time and deadlines. One-click time capture from inside the matter. Billing linked to recorded work, with reminders. A calendar synchronised with procedural deadlines. Access separation between partners, associates and trainees. Full data export at any time. Documented hosting and sub-processing.
Questions to ask before signing
Where is the data hosted, and under which processing agreement? Is our work used to train a model? How fast is data returned if we leave? What happens if the vendor is acquired? How many working days does importing our history take?
Budget the migration
Count the transfer of open matters, the rewriting of letter templates, and two to four weeks of parallel use. Firms that skip this step abandon halfway and keep the spreadsheet.
What Qadilex offers
A single tool between the lawyer and the matter: files, calendar, time and billing in one interface, in French, English and Arabic. Pricing and the exact feature scope are on the home page, and functions still in development are marked as such.
Test with your own matters
Vendor demonstrations show the ideal path. Bring three real situations instead: a matter with many documents, a disputed invoice, a deadline moved at short notice. Ask the vendor to handle them live. Ten minutes of that reveals more than an hour of slides.
Involve the people who type
Assistants and associates use the software far more often than the partner who signs the contract. Let them test time entry and document search before the decision. Software the team resents becomes a spreadsheet again within a quarter.
A five-line scorecard
Score each candidate from 1 to 5 on: clicks to open a matter, time entry, issuing an invoice, finding a dated document, exporting your data. Add up the scores. The ranking is more reliable than any feature list.
Data portability is not a detail
Ask, in writing, how a full export is produced, in what format, and how long it takes. A firm that can leave at any time negotiates better and worries less about the vendor being acquired. Ask the same question about backups and about how long deleted files remain recoverable.