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For many firms, accounting is a huge pain point. It’s time-consuming and tedious, but it’s crucial to any business’s operations.
But before we get into the nitty-gritty, what does it even mean to close out a firm’s books? Keep reading and we’ll tell you!
Closing a firm’s books is the process of finishing up all accounting activity for an accounting period and ensuring that the general ledger accurately reflects the financial activities of the firm.
There are many closing procedures that should be followed on a regular basis throughout the year, but there are also additional procedures to include at year-end. We know, that’s just adding more to your plate, but these year-end procedures should be given special attention prior to closing the books for the fiscal year and we’ll tell you why.
Profit distribution can occur at any time during the year, so it is critical to maintaining a complete and accurate financial picture so that appropriate projections of net income and cash flow can be made whenever required. By establishing regular month-end procedures, your firm can better maintain an accurate financial picture throughout the year and, in turn, will ensure a smoother year-end closing of the books.
Of course, each firm is different and the procedures that are put in place will vary from firm-to-firm, but we have tried to make it as easy as possible for you and compiled a list that includes some basic, monthly procedures that your firm may find useful.
1. Distribute a list of outstanding, unpaid accounts receivable that are 90 or more days past due to the responsible attorney for collection efforts.
2. Ensure that all timekeepers are current with their time entries by the end of each month so that billing will not be delayed.
3. Record all incoming cash.
4. Review the Aged WIP Report to identify fees that can be billed and those that should be written off.
5. Reconcile all cash and credit card accounts, entering all unrecorded transactions.
6. Review and reconcile petty cash.
7. Record month-end payroll journal entries.
8. Review the Payment/Credit Allocation Details report, filtering for any credits for expenses.
9. Review liability accounts to ensure accuracy.
10. Review the Comparative P&L Report.
11. Review the Trial Balance.
12. Prepare draft Profit & Loss Statement, Balance Sheet, and Trial Balance and provide to CPA for review and tax planning (and tax preparation at year-end).
13. Enter any adjusting journal entries per your accountant's instructions.
14. Print and save finalized financial statements.
15. Update the closing date in System Settings to ensure no changes can be made that will affect the financial statements for prior periods.
And if you were thought that was it think again because we have more! In addition to the above, at year-end the items below should also be added to the closing procedures.
1. Request that all expense reports be submitted to accounting in plenty of time for processing, so they can be paid prior to year-end.
2. Review IOLTA balances and request replenishment according to the firm’s policies so there are sufficient funds on hand to apply to client bills at the end of the fiscal year.
3. Update accounts payable.
4. Pay down line of credit.
5. Plan for and enter any retirement plan funding.
6. Plan for and enter any year-end bonuses.
7. Budget for sufficient cash on hand and adequate line of credit for the first quarter of the following fiscal year.
8. Account for partner/shareholder distributions.
9. Enter adjusting entries for depreciation, bad debt, etc.
10.Enter final adjusting journal entries per accountant's instructions.
11. Per the Accounting Period End Date set in the Accounting System Settings, Centerbase will process the year-end closing entries to book the current year’s net income to retained earnings.
At this point, you’re either thinking “oh boy,” or “wow that was helpful!” Either way, we want to try to make this process as easy as possible for you so we have created an Accounting Period Closing Procedures Checklist to assist you in assigning and tracking the tasks listed above.
End-of-year closing is never fun, but hopefully these steps and checklist will help you keep billing, collections, and your financial records up to date!
As we draw near the end of 2020, many attorneys find themselves faced with the same universal question — “Is there any way I can collect on my outstanding receivables before the year is out?” Although it’s not something you dreamed about in law school when you thought about practicing law, collecting on unpaid bills is a vital aspect of your business. Ideally, you should want to end your year with as much money in your pocket as possible. But, how can you collect on invoices that some clients thus far have ignored or refused to pay?
First, some quick definitions. Accounts Receivable, or “A/R,” is a term that refers to unpaid balances left on a client’s account. Furthermore, an “Aged A/R” is an unpaid balance that has been left standing for a certain, prolonged amount of time (say, for example, a client has not paid their invoice in over 60 days).
Now, let’s present a common scenario: Your client emails you saying she cannot pay her outstanding invoice. In this instance, many lawyers choose one of three options: 1) hang on to the invoice and hope their client eventually pays it; 2) enlist the help of a debt collector to obtain the funds; or 3) simply write off the debt when the year is over. Option One is less than ideal, because you have no assurance of ever getting paid. Option Two is hardly ever preferred because you still want referrals from that client, and handing over their outstanding balance to a collections firm is not likely to instill good feelings between attorney and former client. Thus, the majority of attorneys end up choosing Option Three, wherein they simply write-off the debt at the end of the year.
But, is there another way to get paid on an account that you were all but ready to write off?
The short answer, for the most part, is yes! Attempting to collect on unpaid invoices is not a fruitless endeavor, no matter how aged the invoice is. Let’s look over a few quick tips to point you in the right direction.
Naturally, every client you take on is unique in their own special way, and this also translates into their invoice payments. There is no “one-size-fits-all” solution to collect on A/R—every client with an outstanding bill will require a different strategy, but there are still some universal applications that you can utilize to track down your payments.
You can accomplish this by first creating a list of every client with an unpaid invoice, including their name, their matter number, the amount they owe, and how long the balance has been overdue (i.e., 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, and 120+ days). If you work at a firm with multiple attorneys, you could also label each invoice based on the primary attorney overseeing the case.
Once you’ve put your list together, you can then determine which invoices you should go after first. You may consider tackling the “youngest” invoices first—that is, the invoices that have gone unpaid for the shortest period of time (let’s say 30 days, for example). Set aside time in your day to email these clients with a short, to-the-point message about their outstanding invoice, including the amount they owe. Include a link for the clients to pay online - the goal is to eliminate friction between your client’s pocketbook and your bank account. From there, you could expedite the process by duplicating the email for the remaining clients on your list—simply change the names and the amount owed, and send it off. This email should come from the attorney working the case; the attorney’s email address is more likely to grab the attention of the client.
When dealing with the older invoices, you can follow a similar plan as above, at least with the clients whom you believe will pay if prompted (or will have a way to do so in the near future once you’ve reminded them). However, there is a high likelihood that you have clients on your A/R list whose ability and/or willingness to pay don’t inspire much hope on your part. These are the clients that you fully expect to write off at that end of the year.
In these cases, consider offering the clients an opportunity to wipe a portion of the debt away if they pay within a certain period of time. For example, if a client owes you $10,000.00 and has not paid you in over six months, consider emailing them with an offer that if they pay half of their balance ($5,000.00) within the next three business days, you will forgive their remaining balance. You would be surprised at how many clients will take you up on this.
Another way to turn unpaid invoices into paid invoices is to make it easier for your clients to pay you. That’s where an online payment solution can make a big difference. These solutions give you the power to email your clients an electronic invoice that they can pay with a credit card, debit card, or eCheck. Rather than having to find their checkbook, write out a check, find an envelope, and break out their stamps, your clients can pay you with a few clicks of a button.
You would be doing yourself a favor in the long run by integrating online payments into your practice. Like it or not, cash and check payments are becoming less popular in favor of online payments and credit cards, with less than half of U.S. adults carrying cash on them on a regular basis.
Ideally, you should use an online payment solution that was built with the legal industry in mind, with features that can correctly separate earned and unearned fees and protect your IOLTA account from third party debiting. You can stay compliant with your state bar and also provide a benefit to your clients at the same time.
In short, giving your clients the ability to pay online will not only entice your late-paying clients to pay their invoices, but will also entice future clients to seek your services by giving them the payment options they most commonly use for most every service in their daily life.
This is only a cursory look at some of the strategies you could employ to get more cash in the door before the year’s end. If you’re looking for a deeper dive on collecting unpaid invoices from clients by the end of 2020, read LawPay’s latest e-book, Finish Strong: How to End the Year on Better Financial Footing. You’ll discover essential steps to keeping your cash flow strong at the end of your year, and you’ll leave with the right tools to reduce your outstanding receivables going forward into the new year.
Jordan Turk is a practicing attorney in Texas, and is also the Legal Content and Compliance Manager at LawPay. She earned a B.A. in Classics, History, and Religious Studies from the University of Texas, and went on to earn her law degree from the University of Arkansas School of Law. Prior to LawPay, Jordan worked with a high-asset family law firm in Houston, Texas.
You can be the greatest law firm in your city or even your state, but lacking the necessary legal billing processes means your practice won’t be sustainable. Proper client billing is not a one size fits all approach – you must find what works well financially and work with a system that allows the flexibility needed to be efficient (without reinventing the wheel). There’s a major shift to cloud-based software for firms looking to get their bills out faster and to consistently generate more billable hours.
We’re going to walk you through the top legal billing features your law firm needs in order to account for the specialization and unique processes that go on in day-to-day billing. Chances are, you’re aware many of these systems must coexist, but you may not realize how to make them work together to effectively work for your staff.
From the moment a client contacts you to when they pay their last bill, a lot of things are happening behind the billing curtain that they don’t see. There are so many intricacies and steps that have to be taken to ensure the right bills go out to the right clients at the right time. Because of this, it’s important to have a solid standardized billing policy that is accepted uniformly across the firm. This policy may differ from firm-to-firm but consider including elements such as a timeline for pre-bill approval, a hard date for when invoices should be sent to clients, how the bill should be delivered to the client, and how your firm would like to accept payments.
You’re familiar with how it goes:
When going through all your features, ensure you’re transparent when presenting the billing process to clients. Not bringing up expectations on the cycle, billing method, payment timeline expectation, and stance on late payments can create lots of problems later when alignment isn’t there regarding a bill.
With that said, here’s what you need to have for a smoother, more efficient legal billing process:
While you may be accustomed to billing for work at an hourly rate, that may not be the best way to retain clients. According to the 2019 State of U.S. Small Law Firms Report, only about 60% of the day is spent actually practicing law – making generating billable hours difficult. It’s why having new billing strategies can help reevaluate the way clients are billed, and how to add more time back in everyone’s day with revenue-generating activities versus client onboarding or administrative work.
Depending on your area of law, if you’re representing a single person, a contingent fee or flat fee may work better for clients’ needs.
Consider all methods of billing, such as:
For each attorney at your firm, there may be rate adjustments due to tenure and other experience. For the ability to fluctuate between them, rate tables are one of the most useful features to staying agile around billing.
Some software today allows you to configure your rate tables around the matter, client, system default, and timekeeper. Not two matters are the same, and the work you provide per case is not cookie cutter. Because of this, it is important you have the ability to change your rates and make one-off exceptions on services that may not be standard billing protocol. At the end of the day, rate tables should be as flexible as you are.
Learn more about how Centerbase uses rate tables to manage rates from multiple users seamlessly
If you ask someone on the billing team how many times they've been asked to print out a client bill or bill payment history, you can bet that you'll probably be met with an eye roll and a chuckle. Clients can be relentless. They want hard copies when you don't have them and they want electronic copies when you have paper.
Providing your clients access to a secure billing portal will take some strain off your billing team and allow your clients 24/7 access to view, pay, and download their bills. The job of a billing portal is to increase visibility into what is due and make it easier for clients to review and pay their bills. Additionally, this increased visibility will allow your clients the ability to find answers to their billing questions on their own before calling in for support. This way, your clients get what they want, and you have peace of mind knowing that you have provided them with a solution to all of their possible requests.
It's no secret that clients don't always pay on time, but the fact of the matter is, your client's actions shouldn't influence your firms. The more consistent your firm is about sending bills, or having them readily available to view will help create a level of consistency where your clients will soon grow to expect to see your bill and pay them more regularly.
In 2020, most people are texting. Compared to ten years ago, people actually prefer to text with businesses vs communicate with them through email. Not only does texting elicit faster responses, but it is much more convenient. All of this sounds great, right? Well yes, but what about for attorneys? Your time is precious, and although texting your clients may be easier for them, how do make it easier and more profitable for you? If your clients are mostly texting, and you spend hours responding to their messages on the train, at home, or on the go, you have to have a way to track how long you communicated with them for. Otherwise, you are losing thousands of dollars each month.
Today, an agile law firm has the ability to capture the time spent sending messages or making phone calls. This mobile timekeeping feature is incredibly important to not only capture more billable time but also eliminate the manual work of logging it after a conversation. The goal is simple: provide better, top of the line client services while increasing your billable hours.
You can substantially improve your firm’s cash flow by having a simple, easy-to-follow approval process for everyone involved to send out invoices more efficiently. With electronic pre-bill approval as a feature, you can create a single or multiple step approval process, and flow a pre-bill up the approval chain. What this allows you to do is move a single bill from one attorney to the next once it’s been approved. You can keep track of every change and edit through electronic records and ultimately you'll relieve pressure on your billing team by having the attorneys make mark-ups directly to the bill.
For example, this is how it works in Centerbase:
For billing insights and monthly reports, having everything in one place is an excellent resource to make informed decisions about your firm’s financials. With robust legal billing software, everything from matters, billing, and accounting data can be viewed in custom reports that suit your preferences and needs.
All the legal billing features mentioned in this blog are made possible with the right practice management software. While many firms are continuing to move to the cloud in this new world of remote work, it’s important to choose the right software that meets your needs and everyone’s in your firm. This includes steps involved to get onboarded and what should be imported into your new legal billing software.
Are you ready to step into the conveniences and revenue-generating abilities of cloud software? Then let’s talk. You’ll love seeing what Centerbase can do – all at no obligation to you. Contact us today and let’s talk.
Although eBilling may seem intimidating if you have never done it, there are ways to make the adoption easier. You may have questions if you’ve never done eBilling, or if you’re thinking of taking on a client that relies heavily on an electronic billing system, but don't worry, we have some tips on how to make this painful process a little bit easier.
eBilling, summed up, is electronic billing for your clients, so your billing department doesn't have to send invoices through the mail. This makes transactional payments for matters easier – especially in a COVID-19 world where in-person contact is made to be limited.
Many guidelines have been put in place for law firm billing procedures for standardization and convenience for your billing staff. The nice thing about establishing eBilling as a precedent is that it helps avoid errors earlier on in the legal billing process. There’s no more re-typing or manually generating invoices with eBilling – as you can program what in-house can enter in as a bill against invoices outside counsel sends for payment.
System parameters such as checking for budget limitations or accidental duplicate entries can be caught before it’s officially submitted on a matter. The same can be said about bundling bills, which can create confusion when processing and understanding what’s being paid for.
This one-time implementation of eBilling in practice management software (or combined in a software solution you may already be looking at) helps put a stop to rogue charges that are difficult to track.
Using a preconfigured billing system, outside counsel will need to submit a digital form detailing what the charge(s) for clients are in that cycle. Then, the eBilling system typically accepts and generates an invoice and ensures there are none of the aforementioned parameters that can occur due to human error before going to the in-house team to evaluate.
The best value for implementing eBilling? Data insights. You can automatically capture data insights and ensure your matters don’t exceed the budget for certain services from outside counsel. All of this can be configured into the system so it automatically sweeps for this every time.
For many of the reasons stated above, firms love the convenience of sending electronic bills for the quickness and added accuracy from the settings. Having a simplified invoice review process makes managing budgets and keeping track of where your billing is at during any given time is a huge convenience many firms have already switched to and reaped the benefits.
Read more: Key Demands for Your Next Cloud-Based Law Firm Billing Program
With eBilling, there are no more wasted ink or duplicate bill prints. With legal billing software, you can make markups and approvals for bills directly in the software. Having trackable comments and feedback also ensures those extra copies and notes don’t get thrown in the trash in lieu of the newest, most updated copy. No one misses anything, and that multistep process gets whittled down to smooth, easy sailing.
Because you won’t have to print pre-bills, the multiple rounds of approvals can be completely eliminated. That single pre-bill can be moved up the approval chain, with the software automatically tracking it to the next person needed to see once it’s approved. This relieves pressure from your billing team to have to track anyone down or clog the inbox with reminders.
Electronic records will always be kept of any notes attorneys make on pre-bills, making it easy to go back into the software to check anytime. This is especially useful if someone is out of the office or an attorney has left, who may have taken tribal knowledge with them on a certain client matter or bill. With extra visibility comes increased alignment from all departments.
There’s no getting around it: eBilling has boosted efficiency and accuracy in law firms, all while saving time. By getting bills out more efficiently, clients have more time to review and pay their bills, keeping everything neater than before. At Centerbase, we’ve been able to help timekeepers at firms get bills out 30% faster – creating more room for firm-wide improvements that generate revenue and maintain a “work smarter, not harder” mindset.
Interested in learning more based on the question “What is eBilling?” Some systems sell eBilling as a separate offering that can be on-premise or in the cloud. But while that can offer customization, it won’t integrate seamlessly with any existing software or outdated systems you may currently be using.
You can prepare to move to eBilling with a few simple steps:
Read more: 5 Questions to Ask a Legal Practice Management Software Vendor Before Purchasing
Cloud-based practice management software and eBilling are packaged together with Centerbase, which means you only have to worry about one software for everything vs. a la carte options. We’ve helped thousands of firms implement solutions that work with their team, and not against them.
We encourage you to read more into how you can integrate eBilling into everyday processes sooner than you think, and hope this has been helpful. Feel free to subscribe to our blog or check out our resources page for more content.
In the unpredictable world we live in, it isn’t uncommon for you to wonder if your firm is charging too much or too little. Are your billable rates in line with your competitors? Is it best to bill by the hour? By flat fee, subscription? It's no question that there are a lot of options. So with all this in mind, how do you determine your firm's profitability? How can you make decisions that will be in the best interest of both your firm and your clients? Let's take a look.
There are five critical steps you should be taking when you're considering how to price or re-evaluate your legal services.
Yes, you are delivering legal services, but that is not your quote-on-quote product. Take the time to evaluate your niche and your unique value proposition.
Whether you’re a software company or a law firm, you are ultimately selling a product. There are millions of products in the world, so being able to narrow down and pin-point your offering is crucial to making you stand out. Are you a real-estate attorney with subject matter expertise in environmental liability issues? Are you a family law attorney who has expertise in same-sex couple adoption? As you begin to look at your profitability metrics, it is important to narrow down what your firm specializes in and use those case numbers to more accurately reflect how lucrative your firm is. Drilling down on what makes your firm unique will only bolster your client experience, but your profitability as well.
When you look at your revenue model and you’re considering how you want to bill your clients, the first place you need to be looking at and research are the market demands. Analyze what your potential clients want, what they are looking for, and what they’re demanding. Are you serving small business owners who may want to pay for services as work pops up? Or perhaps you’re serving primarily start-ups with small budgets who prefer to see all costs upfront? No two clients are the same, so it is important to understand what they’re looking for and how you can best meet those expectations. Additionally, you must also take into consideration the operational requirements needed to manage those clients. For example, if you’re billing hourly, then the operational requirements to successfully do this would require a software that allows you to capture and track your time.
The truth of any business is that it costs money to acquire new clients. Customer acquisition costs represent the time, money, and effort required to get leads and then convert those leads into paying customers.
Look at the data you have available. It is best to go over things in increments of 6, 9, and then 12 months to ensure you’re getting the most accurate information. When you’re considering your sales and marketing costs for your firm, the first thing you should think about is your time. This could be the time spent on business development, networking events, anything that takes time out of your day to pursue in the effort to expand your book of business. Next, tabulate any additional money spent on digital advertisement, or direct mailings. These hard costs will be the foundation for determining your customer acquisition cost. Your costs to close a lead are incurred through the bottom of the funnel activities that take up your time like consultations or meetings.
Let’s go through a fictitious example utilizing 12 months of made up data:
In this example, we took the estimated cost of your time plus the amount you spent on marketing and targeted campaigns to determine a total sales and marketing figure. We then took that figure and divided it by the total number of clients you work with throughout a given year. With that number, you subtract the final estimated costs associated to close that specific lead, and what is left is your total cost to acquire that particular client.
So going forward when you consider growing your business, this type of easy calculation will be able to help you understand that if you invest X amount of dollars, you will be able to attain X amount of new clients. By adding some predictability into your equation, you will be less surprised at the end of the road if things don't go your way.
Customer LTV represents the amount of business value or gross margin that is received over the course of a client’s lifetime. When that client first steps through your door, you must begin to evaluate how much revenue you are gaining from your client on a case-by-case basis.
Let’s go through a fictitious example of an attorney who bills by the hour utilizing 12 months of made-up data:
In this example, we took the number of hours this fictitious attorney was spending on Client X’s matter and multiplied it by their billable rate. Next, we took a look at how much money the attorney was spending to do that work. In this case, 25 hours of work resulted in 17 billable hours, which converts to a little over 70% profit margin. And lastly, we multiplied that total profit margin number by the total number of matters Client X typically brings to this attorney in a 12 month period. This resulted in an LTV around $14,400. A customer’s lifetime value is important to calculate because it will highlight to you which clients bring you repeat business without you having to spend those marketing and sales dollars to get them through the door.
Understanding how to calculate LTV in this easier scenario will allow you to replicate this information when you start looking at multiple fee arrangements. Like discussed earlier, if the market is demanding subscription billing, or consolidated billing (to just name two), you and your firm need to be able to meet these needs in order to remain competitive. Your customer experience will make or break your business, and how your clients want to be billed needs to be met with “yes we can make that happen,” not “sorry, we cannot accommodate that billing arrangement.”
At this point, you have figured out what expertise and skill set you have that sets you apart, you have determined what specific product you’re offering, how your want to set up your billing structure, how much money it costs for you to get clients in the door, and how much margin you can generate from that client in a given period of time. The last step now is to understand your fixed costs. Fixed costs represent the amount of money you are spending to support your law firm as a whole. On an annual basis, how much money are you spending to pay the firms office rent, support staff, legal technology, annual license fees, etc? These are your fixed costs.
The things that are really important when you look at customer acquisition costs and lifetime value are the scalability of your law firm and whether or not you can be sustainable in the long term.
The first thing you can do when you have these numbers is to look at how long it takes you to recoup your customer acquisition cost. To do this, you take your total $627 CAC cost and divide it by how much profit you generate, which in our fictitious example was $4,800. So, what this means is that you recoup your CAC by the time you are 13% of the way through your first case with that client. A general rule of thumb is that you recoup your customer acquisition costs within that first year of starting the particular matter. This low percentage indicates that you have a little more room to spend on acquiring new clients if you so choose.
The second thing you must do is ensure you’re making money over a customer’s lifetime. If you take the $14,400 LTV we calculated in the fictitious example (profit per case multiplied by the number of cases that client brings to you in a year) and divide that amount by the $627 CAC cost, that’s roughly a 22.3x return on investment per client. This is a huge number! This indicates that you could lower your billable rate to get clients through the door and still make a decent size profit. Do your research and determine where the market stands and then evaluate if you have room to adjust.
Your CAC and LTV are what we describe as unit economics. In the long term, if what we calculated are your unit economics, can your firm ultimately make money? The answer would be yes. From a business perspective, there are always things you can do in the short-term that will get you by, but those bandaids will eventually come off to reveal a less than favorable result. Let’s do some quick calculations. If you’re generating $6,800 in revenue per case (determined from our LTV example), and you’re taking on about 50 cases per year, that’s about S340,000 in annual revenue. Now let’s say your direct costs total around $95,000 a year to serve that revenue, you’re left with a gross margin of around $245,000. Now, after your fixed costs, and sales and marketing expenses (for this hypothetical example, let’s say those total up to $50,000), your total income before tax comes to $195,000. If you can make these calculations each year, you will be able to determine if you can serve your clients profitably, while also saving enough cash for future growth.
All of this leads to what you should walk away with… without favorable unit economics, you will not have a sustainable law firm in the long run. Understanding how much it takes to bring new clients in and how much money those clients bring to your firm over the course of their lifetime will ultimately tell you how successful your firm will be in the future. There are levers you can pull after you understand this data. These levers are either revenue or pricing driven like billable hour vs. flat fee, or whether you’re above market or below market. You can adjust these metrics accordingly. The other thing you can do is adjust your service levels. If you’re spending too much time serving one client then you need to either keep your service level the same and bump up your rate, or if your rate is already in line with your competition, then keep your rate the same and spend less time performing that work.
The goal is to understand your data at the customer level to determine whether or not you’ll be successful in the long term with your entire book of business.
The purpose of a billing workflow is two-fold: save your firm time and drive the collections process. There is a lot going on in the world and for your firm, if you can save time on non-billable tasks, stay organized, and increase client satisfaction, wouldn’t you want to? Sure it isn’t always easy to adopt new change and break old habits, but if it means increasing your profitability wouldn’t you want to try?
It’s this simple, technology can help you bill while you work, get your invoices out much faster, and reduce your bottom-line. We’ll show you how.
The first thing you should do is set up your invoice template. Your template needs to be consistent, clean, on-brand for your firm, and easily digestible for your client. It is important that everyone at the firm is trained on how everything is documented so that there is a level of uniformity that is maintained. Additionally, you should ensure your invoice templates account for all of the critical information that your clients want to see, like who worked on a particular item, what they’ve paid you recently, any money in Trust, ledger details, etc. This is an essential piece of communication for your clients, so it is imperative that you give an adequate amount of detail. Your invoice also contributes to your professional appearance, so make sure that it accurately represents who you are.
First, you need to ask your client for approval to email your invoice rather than sending it via snail mail. It is strongly recommended that clients opt into this agreement in a written way. This will help combat those individuals who claim they never got your bill in the mail.
The beauty of an electronic invoice is that it will eliminate the time spent on printing, folding, stuffing, and then mailing every invoice you have each month. This is will also help you keep an electronic repository with documentation on who has paid what and who hasn’t, and depending on what platform you use, some systems will give you the ability to track whether the email with the bill was opened by the recipient or if it went unread.
Legal technology is really opening the door to so many possibilities when it comes to your billing practices. For example, there are some software that will allow you to take advantage of a billing portal where you can provide your clients access to view and pay bills or to access a complete history of bills. Your clients want visibility, and with a portal like this, they're given the autonomy to review what they owe, on their time.
Taxes need to be accounted for in jurisdictions where taxes apply to legal services rendered. Whether this is applied based on where your client lives, or where you’re performing the services, these rates can automatically be applied when you’re creating your invoices. The goal here is to prevent any kind of bottleneck at the end of the month when you’re trying to send your bills out. You could also consider assessing interest on past due invoices to help drive the speed of collections. This will need to be discussed with your client beforehand, it should be drafted up in writing, and something that they can expect if they’re late on a payment. Additionally, some states have found this to not be usury, so please take note of that and do your research as you’re making decisions. Lastly, you can incentivize early payments with discounts. If a client pays within the first 5-7 days of receiving the bill, you could consider offering a loyalty discount. Especially for clients with multiple matters, this will not only get you paid quicker, but it will build trust and establish a stronger partnership.
Even if your firm chooses to pursue only one of these options, you will still be contributing to the reduction of bottlenecks and ultimately speed up your collections process!
Do you want to hear something shocking? According to studies compiled in an ABA blog, if you don’t get your time in by the end of the day, you’re likely to lose 10% of your billable hours. If you don’t get your time recorded the next day, you’ll lose 25%! If you don’t get it in by the end of the week, you’ll lose a full 50%.
So at this point, you’re either thinking, wow, I have lost my firm a lot of money or wow, I need to figure out more efficient ways to track my time.
If you’re thinking the latter, we’ve got you covered. There are services that address the pain points of being a timekeeper. With today’s technology, you have the ability to bill directly from tasks, phone and text conversations, email, and word documents. You can use multiple timers, you can set time to bill in advance and then adjust the figure accordingly in the pre-bill process. All of these solutions aim to remove the inaccuracies that come from waiting until the end of the month to record all your time.
As you are creating your ideal billing workflow, consider setting a hard billing due date. The most well-run law firms bill on a bi-weekly or monthly basis. When you’re ready to bill, you need to identify a cut-off date. Utilize a firm-wide calendar or practice management system to schedule these dates, so any work that was done between that designated time frame needs to be recorded before that billing cut-off date. This does not mean that the billing stops for any work moving forward, but any work that has happened previously needs to be submitted to allow the person in charge of billing time to run those pre-bills.
The next thing your firm should do is set-up automated payment emails. This communication is a reflection of your firm and should motivate your clients to take action and to pay those bills. The email should not be abrasive, but rather warm and include their invoice and clear descriptions for how payment is accepted. If you have it set-up in your system to pay securely online, then this would be an opportunity to include that link. It should also include contact information if questions arise on the bill. The objective here is to make it as seamless as possible for your clients to pay you.
Running pre-bills and batch billing is the ideal, most efficient process. You get all of your information into the system regarding the work and services you’ve performed by that billing cut-off date, then pre-bills are run. Pre-bills allow you to see a preview of your invoices so that you can check for formatting, errors, or omissions without changing matter ledgers. The best part about pre-bills is that they can now be done electronically. Gone are the days where firm administrators have to give their timekeepers different colored pencils to mark up a pre-bill by hand. And did you know that by electronically reviewing and sending your bills, you will speed up your billing by 30%! That is a lot of time!
If you use batch billing, this will allow you to generate all of your invoices at once, in whatever format you designate, in just a few minutes. A lot of powerful billing systems have this feature for you to capitalize on to increase your billing and collections processes.
In, 8 Tips to Improve Your Firm’s Collection Process Right Now, we talked about alternative fees and why you should set those up on your retainer or fee agreement with your client. If you have a situation for example, where you have a monthly retainer agreement, you can set this up to bill automatically. This is one less thing you would have to take care of. If you have matters that you’re billing hourly and then collecting on or deducting from Trusts and you have a monthly retainer agreement, you can set all these permissions up to draw directly from the bank account, or to automatically charge the credit card on a specified day. For payment plans, this is useful to accommodate your past-due clients or flat fees that cannot be paid all upfront. Sometimes clients do need a little flexibility and this fee arrangement is a great way to show them that your firm can be. If your firm chooses to use a reduced rate as an alternative fee, you want to ensure that you document the rate that deviates from your standard hourly to save you time when you bill and ensure you’re not inaccurately billing your clients. Taking care of these things up front will make running your bills at the end of the month much easier.
All these steps can help you deliver an exceptional customer experience while also driving your firm’s profitability. If done correctly, billing doesn’t have to be dreadful! Centerbase offers countless tools to serve your law firm, take a free product tour today, and see how!
Do you want to hear something scary? More than 73% of small law firms surveyed said they experience past due client accounts at least some of the time. And nearly half of those firms say that between 10% and 39% of their total client base is typically past due. These are staggering figures!
Unfortunately, clients don’t always pay on time, and the truth of the matter is law firms are collecting less and less from their clients each year.
So the question that remains is why does this keep happening? Are there specific reasons that bills go unpaid? The short answer is yes.
Aside from a clients inability to pay due to financial constraints, the primary reasons clients forgo paying their bills are as follows:
Let’s break these down further...
When bills are sent inconsistently, it breaks the client’s trust. They may feel they are receiving your services for free at some point if it has been months since they’ve last received a bill. If more than a month goes by between billing cycles, the client may feel like they are being charged too much for services performed months ago and they will consciously choose to not pay the bill. Clients may also dispute bills if they do not know what they are being charged for. Incomplete, erroneous, or unclear billing descriptions are common reasons you may not get paid. If your clients don’t understand what they are being charged for and if they don’t believe you completed the stated services, they are simply not going to pay the bill. This is where follow-up comes into play. Clients may call you if they have a question about their statement, but they also may not. It is your responsibility to follow up with them to ask if they have any concerns or if they need a better explanation of what is in the description for the services rendered. Lastly, if you’re sending your client a paper bill that requires them to fill out and mail a check back to you, you’re making it easy for them to either forget about the bill entirely or see significant delays in receiving payment.
This all goes back to running a client-centered law firm, yes it is your client’s job to pay you, but if you can get into the habit of billing your clients the way they expect, and not the way you have always done it, what will result is a much more efficient collection process. Additionally, it is important to keep up with the technology that your clients are already using. A majority of payments are sent and collected electronically. If you have a client who pays all their other bills online, you can guarantee that they will be disappointed if they receive a paper bill from you. Giving your clients a way to pay immediately will also increase collection. For example, integrations with LawPay make it easy to accomplish modern services like this.
There is an art to billing. Although it is a routine part of your business, it must be treated uniquely and skillfully. It can be very uncomfortable for attorneys to ask their clients for money, but you must recognize that is your value. You worked long and hard hours and you need to be compensated for that. Firms that don't put time and resources into their billing process, are typically the firms who are getting paid less and less frequently.
Allowing younger attorneys to bill for small matters earlier in their career will help build a framework of good habits. Giving the younger generation this experience will also help encourage them to ask questions which will ensure best practice in the future. A good young biller and collector will be a good old biller and collector, and if you make it clear that your firm coaches and teaches newer attorneys on how to bill better, that is just one more advantage you have when recruiting talent. It is important to practice technique and to have worked through a few client concerns early on, that way when you’re working with a client who has a significantly larger amount owed, you will have experience navigating those waters.
Additionally, establishing this culture of mentorship will lead to attorney retention and a greater workplace environment. In Tips For Firms to Attract the Best Recent Law Grads, we discuss how your firm can combat challenges and find solutions to gaining the best new talent. Offering this type of mentorship in the areas that are not being covered in law school will differentiate your firm and subsequently keep your clients happy.
Know your staff. There may be some attorneys on your team who really struggle with the client-facing nature of billing. If you have coached this attorney before, given them all the tips and secrets to learn how to successfully bill, and if they are still not getting it, then it is time to pivot your strategy.
There are practice management software available to you that offer easy and automatic ways for your timekeepers to keep and bill for their time. Whether it’s through phone or text, email, or word documents, make it easier for your staff to bill the way that makes them comfortable while also meeting the client’s expectations.
Your good billers need to be responsible for billing your major clients. This entails knowing your staff, communicating properly, and maintaining just the right amount of teamwork. To be able to quickly detect when something is and isn’t working will be the difference between the revenue coming into your firm and a pile of unpaid bills on your clients kitchen counter.
When it comes to billing, creating, and establishing a standardized process will not only make it easier for your team, but it will ensure more timely payments from your clients. This process will look different for every firm, but billing every possible transaction in a monthly cadence with not only contribute to a routine, but it will also be better-received by your clients. And if you bill paper copies, having a minimum dollar value threshold for bills will help offset the cost and time associated with manually printing, enclosing, stamping, and then delivering the bills to the post office.
Some staff turnover is inevitable, so writing these policies down and training your team on how your firm bills will contribute to uniformity, overall best practice, and easier transition for newer attorneys.
This seems like a no-brainer but a lot of firms will send bills out and then never follow-up on them. If you want to turn receivables into cash, you need to be following up with your clients. Check in on them if they have questions and give them alternative payment methods if the way you originally sent the bill isn’t working for them. If the invoice is more than 30 days old, you minimally need to be sending a new statement, with the first invoice attached. If your bill still has not been paid after 60 days, you need to speak with that biller and find out not only what their billing process is, but what their communication with the client surrounding the bill has been, and their plan to recoup what is owed. If your clients do not want to pay in full, technology nowadays will give you the ability to set up reoccurring payment plans. Asking for money that is owed to you is never fun. Discussing expectations around billing and timeliness of payments with your client at the start of the matter will help increase transparency and hopefully, eliminate the need for you to consistently reach out to your client for payment.
Your bills need to describe your services. If a client can understand and digest what you have done for them, it will be easier for them to pay. Each client you work with is different, some may need more explanation, others may not. Establishing what your client needs to see on their bill will help increase payment frequency and reduce any questions that may come from not understanding what the services you’re charging are. The likelihood of a client not paying their bill is higher when you give a shorter, less detailed description of your service. Investing in software can make this process easier for you.
Your pre-bill process takes a lot of leg work. But with features like epre-bill, you can seamlessly markup your bill, add descriptions, follow all the edits and streamline the entire process. To go a step further, you need to be detailing your billing processes in your retainer agreement. The most important thing you can do before you begin billing is to set expectations with your clients. Here are some potential points you should be thinking about to go over with your client at the start of a matter:
By addressing all of these questions and concerns, you will be able to quickly reference the policies you outlined with your client in the event of a dispute.
The sooner you send your bill after completing a service, the faster your client will pay. Different clients will require different billing strategies. For transactional matters, make sure you bill at or before closing because your clients will likely reinvest the proceeds of their closing. If it’s a litigation file, be sure to bill monthly, and if you bill bi-monthly, make sure your clients are made known of this billing schedule beforehand so they are not blindsided by receiving multiple bills within 30 days.
If you can get an injection of cash upfront to hit the ground running, you need to. And when those funds are low, you need to be able to replenish them smoothly, and efficiently. Automation exists to make your lives easier and to improve your profitability, so take advantage of it! If you’re already a Trust/retainer heavy firm, your clients should be able to make one payment and it automatically split between AR and the replenishment retainer in trust to the correct accounts. This way you do not have to manually track and write multiple checks or transfers from one account to the other.
Communication with your client on the fee agreement regarding retainers is important as well. Is the retainer refundable? Is replenishment on a monthly basis, or on an evergreen basis? These are all questions you need to address with your clients beforehand.
Use financial reports to maintain better billing and collections habits. Everyone at your firm should be receiving a WIP report and Account Receivable report, every month to review. Increase transparency, make it known where each attorney is, and what work they are pursuing. With some software, you can even set up a report center to match the way you analyze data. It will allow you to easily group important reports and set up security on each table, providing different levels of access to your staff.
If you are spread too thin and do not have time to review and follow-up on these reports, then perhaps consider hiring a part-time billing associate. This person would strictly be on board to receive the AR reports, digest them, and then begin following up with the clients who are past due.
Hopefully these eight tricks will help assist you and your firm with expediting your billing and improving your collection process. Results won't happen overnight, but instituting universal practices and methods with undoubtably increase your profitability and keep your clients happy.
If money talks, then why are so many lips sealed at firms when it comes to discussing billing? According to the 2019 Legal Marketing Association’s annual meeting, “only 49% of law firms are teaching their attorneys how to talk to clients about pricing.” That’s over half of firms out there. Although it’s a puzzling revelation, it’s not altogether surprising. There are a variety of struggles law firms face when it comes to finding that sweet spot in legal billing. Everyone wants to keep the books balanced and income regularly flowing in at a rate owners are pleased with – it doesn’t always happen, but with today’s technology, it’s definitely doable. It’s all about finding the workflow that works best with your staff and clientele.
To truly move your legal billing into modernity, you must embrace everything that organized processes, technology, and automation has to offer. In this blog, we’ll be identifying the common pieces that firms struggle with when it comes to billing, and what modern tools you’ll need in order to accelerate your monthly billing cycle to get paid faster and more regularly.
Legal billing challenges commonly stem from an overburdened staff who are pulled in different directions and activities that don’t generate revenue. There’s no one single cause to why this happens – it’s the combined day-to-day bustle of sending out invoices and client onboarding that are likely the common culprits.
The bane of every legal assistant or billing staff's day is the dreaded double work. Perhaps you have an Excel spreadsheet of client expenses that isn’t synced with your existing software. If you have clients fill out physical paperwork, your staff has to file the papers while entering it into whatever digital system you have. Sure, you may have V-lookup or some other formula that appears to save a few minutes, but if they’re re-entering information multiple times, it’s not making much of a dent in the long run. That time lost is ultimately hurting your bottom line and keeping everyone from controlling scope creep. You can get time back with an effective software that integrates with your everyday systems and enters data everywhere you need it the first time.
The cost of not communicating the billing process to clients upfront can add up. This will inevitably lead to an invoice sent – perhaps with a vague or unfamiliar itemization – causing a client to call upset, misunderstanding what was billed and why. Whether you’re billing hourly or a la carte, to keep clients happy, many firms are pressured to write things off and undercut themselves and the firm. Think about it: if you got an unexpected bill in the mail you weren’t informed about, wouldn’t you also be upset? The more transparent you can be about the legal billing cycle, like bi-weekly or monthly according to work completed, your clients will be happier for it.
The increased demand for clients to be billed in alternate ways from hourly has led to the creation of the Uniform Task-Based Management System (UTBMS). For flat fees, subscription, or project-based instances, using these billing codes provides transparency to your clients about what exactly is being billed, while simultaneously easing the load on your staff to push invoices through for approval. Taking the guesswork out of legal billing will, by default, help move the process along for everyone involved and create alignment for your staff.
Vague descriptions of billing line items perpetuate confusion and can make a client start to mistrust you and your staff. Don’t give anyone reason to feel out of the loop or like they’re not being communicated with. Many clients feel despondent and lost through their cases – they look to you for guidance and fair pricing. Instead of “Consult call: 30 minutes,” consider something like “Reviewed case details for next month’s deposition.” If your billing areas are easily categorized, labeled by date, with the aforementioned line item, your client is much more likely to remember and feel the value of what they got out of that experience. We all want to feel like our money is going toward something useful and helpful to us, especially in the form of legal counsel.
When it comes to modernizing your legal billing, before jumping on any technology initiatives, you must first lock in the core billing process itself. This is the foundation to everything that’s automated. If there are bottlenecks and issues in the process, you can expect those same issues to emerge no matter what software or system you implement. Don’t underestimate the power of refining your billing and listening to your staff on where common problems may be lingering. Are attorneys extra delayed in approving invoices? Is there a workaround billing staff have to use that takes longer in order for it to be done right? A billing workflow is meant to be as simplistic and efficient as possible. Here’s how you can make your billing just that:
With a robust legal billing software like Centerbase, your staff will be able to create time entries for expenses while staying in the programs they work in every day. Programs such as Microsoft Word and Outlook can be easily tracked per matter – making the accrual of time and expenses when it comes to billing an absolute breeze.
Cut down the amount of time spent waiting on bill approvals by generating pre-bills. The ability to electronically distribute pre-bills to staff can speed up your firm’s pre-bill approval process by 30%. As soon as a pre-bill is approved, it’s sent to the next reviewer in order to move things along.
Automated invoices can pull services rendered from a custom frame of time. For example, if a client is billed bi-weekly, an invoice can be automatically created with all the services rendered within a certain date range to be delivered to the client. All the minutiae between – the manual entry, cloning of templates – are no longer needed. You’ll find those minutes back in peoples’ days really adds up.
Having an easy payment system is just as important as presenting a clear bill of services rendered. That smooth process will really speak to convenience and professionalism – two things clients expect out of firms nowadays with the “get it now” society we live in. A compliant integration to software such as LawPay lets you send bills directly to clients’ email inboxes, meaning they can pay electronically within moments of receiving.
Satisfy the itch for data with productivity and budget reports to see how you’re doing with a new technology system in place. If you can track it, Centerbase can report on it – your billing can be laid out however you need it to with custom reporting and tracking in place. This gives you the transparency to make big business decisions when it matters most.
It’s time to bring your systems into the digital age – safely and efficiently, of course. The mere presence of practice management software isn’t going to solve all your problems, but if used as a means to improve existing processes, it will help move your legal billing into considerable modern efficiency that helps you get paid on a cadence that works best for you.
It’s time to talk about pricing with your attorneys and ensure everyone’s on the same page about billing throughout their case. The combination of communication, clear invoicing, and automation are sure to deliver top-tier results that create lasting rapport and trust from your clients.
Have a question about legal billing? Be sure to let us know in the comments, or schedule a no-obligation demo to see how Centerbase can help you get paid faster.
Much like supermarket fruits, there are many law management software options of all shapes and sizes out there – but to make the most of your staff’s efficiency, there are some basic functionalities needed to claim that highly coveted time back in everyone’s day. These integral features include: word processing, email, practice management tools, billing, accounting, and document management. For some of you, the first two on the list often live in the form of Microsoft Office or G-Suite. While these certainly have the potential for efficiency on their own, it’s important whatever software you choose has the capability to share information in real-time between programs.
Although integrating with existing apps is one option, you’ll reap the biggest rewards by consolidating your practice management, billing, and accounting software all in one place. Why? No incredible, life-altering reason – simply that it’s easier and more convenient this way. It’s a decision that requires careful consideration, since a software investment can be quite costly upfront, and individual “best of breed” solutions may seem more appealing when comparing them.
To help your decision, we’re going to explore the advantages to consolidating your legal technology:
One software platform to train employees on all their day-to-day duties simplifies onboarding for everyone. Depending on the work a staff member may do, having to train them with multiple interfaces and programs means more time until they’re up and running on their own without asking for help. With three separate programs, for example, that means three systems users will need to learn and navigate. Learning only one system saves time and empowers people to be more productive quicker.
There’s no dancing around it: multiple programs are more difficult to manage. Along with training, providing access and logins to new employees can be a big pain when you have to do it three to five times across all your programs. This means not only giving them a user ID and password, but also setting up permissions on what they can and cannot see. For small to midsize firms, this can be laborious when people come and go – constantly removing access and ensuring your data is secure and only seen by those currently still in your firm. This difficulty increases when you have to adjust permission types for sensitive data.
Read our tips on how to begin using legal practice management software for a deeper dive on getting everyone working efficiently together with new software.
Data accuracy is the biggest benefit to using one program for billing, accounting, and practice management. One-time entry for a client versus multiple minimizes the chances of human error. It’s happened before – entering information in your practice management system for client communication separately from your billing system. These differences, even if one number of an email address is mistyped, can cause problems later when you need to mail important correspondence or contact the client.
Those errors cost valuable time figuring out where the discrepancy lies. Even if these different systems claim to “communicate” with each other, temporary disconnects and ascertaining which software is prioritized or “wins” in information adds more complicated variables to the confusion.
Regardless whether you have on-premise or cloud software, it’s important to note that your firm is always responsible for scheduled diagnostics to ensure separate systems communicate properly. An update in one program may not be compatible with another program, leaving you with the difficult choices of having to disconnect and operate separately, not upgrade, or invest time with the vendors to find and address issues.
When working with multiple programs and an issue emerges, the onus is unfortunately on the firm to troubleshoot and determine the root cause. If it’s something between two programs, the firm will need to invest time and resources to work with the vendors, resulting in them pointing at each other if neither vendor accepts responsibility. While this is not ideal, it happens more often than we might like to think.
With a single program for billing, accounting, and practice management, you don’t have to worry about who’s responsible. There’s one place to contact for support and maintenance issues. This can save the firm time in troubleshooting and help bolster efficiency.
Those errors cost valuable time figuring out where the discrepancy lies. Even if these different systems claim to “communicate” with each other, temporary disconnects and ascertaining which software is prioritized or “wins” in information adds more complicated variables to the confusion.
A single system also makes it easier to track time. Whether you bill time or not, there are valuable insights in knowing where your staff spends most of their time on areas of improvement. That way, you can eliminate roadblocks and create an open dialogue that helps empower your staff to feel they have all the tools needed to help clients.
Plus, having one system to remind you in your calendar and automatically generate invoices for tasks creates less friction for accounting and record-keeping.
Have you ever generated a client bill and received a call saying “we paid that balance already last month?” That embarrassment can be caused by separate billing and accounting systems. When you have to record the payment in two places, it’s easy – almost inevitable, even – for something to be missed. Someone must siphon time from other money-making tasks to ensure everything is correct in both places.
When it comes to billing and accounting, these reconciliations include not only payments, but trust deposits, withdrawals from trust to outsiders, as well as the firm and expense disbursements. Given the critical nature of trust accounting makes this even more important.
Failure to bill clients for expense disbursements in a timely manner can have a significant impact on firm profitability, especially if the firm is paying the vendor before receipt of payment from the client. This impacts cash flow considerably over time. When disbursements must be entered in one system for billing and a separate system for general ledger accounting, the risks of missing something increase.
When information is in one place reporting becomes simpler. If data is in multiple places you may have to export data from the programs and combine into a single report using something like Excel. This is additional time as well as adding the possibility of errors. And, if something is discovered as missing, you have to redo the reports.
A single source is always more efficient and accurate here.
While you probably can’t find one program that does everything, there are benefits to consolidating where possible without losing functionality. Focus on your firm’s needs and consider your choices while keeping in mind the benefits of consolidating your legal tech stack. Software can be expensive – but the amount of time and peace of mind you’ll save can be well worth the investment if it fulfills all your needs, and updates with the needs of your business over time.
If you're curious about what kind of practice management software your firm should pursue, check out our blog, 3 Types of Legal Practice Management Software to Consider for Your Law Firm.
For law firms, time is money, and there’s no time to waste on inefficient billing practices. But many law firms still rely on slow, tedious, paper-driven legal billing processes that hamstring their productivity and profitability. And many have yet to implement—or enforce—billing policies that would govern the creation and review of time entries and hours worked. Yet firms wonder why they can’t shrink their revenue capture cycle.
Inefficient legal billing practices create difficulties at every level of a law firm. For lawyers, every precious minute they spend tracking and recording their time is a minute they aren’t adding value through their legal work. This drives lawyers to take shortcuts, such as omitting explanatory details or using cryptic abbreviations, that lead to unclear bills. Those ambiguous notes, in turn, require further review and clarification and add more delays. Lawyers may not check to see whether their work matches client service agreements, and they may fail to specify proper billing codes. Those that cling to paper timesheets and bills often scrawl notes incoherently in the margin of invoices or pre-bills for their assistant or accounting team to decipher, contributing to confusion and inaccuracy. At the end of the month, the law firm’s administrative team and accounting department must deal with these headaches—and more—all under the time pressure of closing out the month.
Legal billing doesn’t have to be this hard. Here are our top tips for ways that you can start accelerating your law firm’s billing processes.
While administrative staff should support lawyers and paralegals in entering their time, they should not have the primary responsibility for it. Timekeepers themselves are in the best position to describe and categorize their time worked.
Timekeepers often wait until the end of the month to enter their time. At that point, they either consult their own manual or electronic system (both of which require duplicative work), or they comb through the recesses of their brain to recall what matters they handled, what tasks they performed, when they performed them, and how long they spent. Even attorneys who rigorously keep their time while in the office often forget those good habits when they go to court or travel to meet with clients, leading to the end-of-month reconstruction process.
When lawyers enter their time daily, they more accurately capture the time they’ve billed—and they can prepare their bills more quickly. They’re also less likely to be late in submitting their bills for reconciliation, which keeps the billing process running on time. At a minimum, your firm should require its lawyers to enter their time weekly and provide additional incentives for lawyers who finalize their bills by the month’s end.
Lawyers, particularly when working remotely, may not capture the full extent of their billable hours. Adopt billing software that automatically captures time spent on client calls, texts, emails, and documents, whether from mobile devices, email apps, and even Microsoft Word. For example, Centerbase automatically captures client phone calls and texts as billable time, leading to an average increase of six additional billable hours per attorney each month.
To ensure consistency between timekeepers, implement, and enforce guidelines that detail how lawyers should describe the tasks recorded. The more granular your requirements are, the more uniform your bills will be—and the faster they’ll process.
Outside counsel guidelines should help to standardize the firm’s billing practices, but not all firms ensure that the guidelines are disseminated and readily accessible to all timekeepers. Make sure all lawyers and paralegals have access to the most up-to-date versions of all guidelines. Send periodic reminders to counsel to improve consistency. If you have billing software, see whether you can use the guidelines to create rules that will alert timekeepers to potential violations at the point of time entry.
Many law firms still rely on paper-based pre-bill review processes that are fraught with issues. For instance, these processes create bottlenecks anytime that multiple lawyers must review bills. A bill’s first draft is often rife with inaccuracies, such as incomplete or vague descriptions or missing details like task codes, meaning the bills must be returned to the timekeeper for revisions—further extending the billing cycle and adding to the lawyer’s non-billable workload. If these issues aren’t corrected, clients may refuse to pay and lose faith in the firm, leading to lower collections in the near term and a decline in overall revenue in the long term.
Paper processes afford little transparency into billing practices, particularly edits and writedowns. Furthermore, there’s no audit trail documenting who made changes or when changes were made, which may create challenges if clients later dispute the charges.
An electronic pre-bill process avoids the delays of circulating paper printouts of pre-bills, reduces the risk that documents will be lost, and eliminates the frustration of illegible handwritten adjustments. Billing software that allows online revisions also enables firms to see changes at a glance and track bill changes over time, avoiding writedowns on top of writedowns and allowing businesses to identify the source of changes in the future.
Billing software can automate the approval process, notifying the next person in the workflow when the prior reviewer’s work is complete. This process also gives lawyers and accounting immediate visibility into where bills may be stuck so they can rectify delays.
Billing is no exception to the adage that what gets measured gets managed. Billing KPIs should go beyond basic metrics such as hours billed and realization rate. Consider adding metrics to improve timekeeping quality, such as the number of edits made during pre-bill review and the dollar value of those edits. A review of metrics would then suggest which timekeepers may require additional training on billing processes (and if you're curious about how to create a billing training program, check out How to Create a Legal Practice Management Software Training Program). Firms may also want to measure the time it takes to finalize a bill or other time-related measures that may identify logjams in their billing processes.
Your firm should establish clear policies that govern billing for attorneys, administrative staff, and accounting. Outlining your billing processes will help you identify problems that you need to resolve and enforce your policies. It may be prudent to add a penalty for those who persistently violate your policies.
Technology is the linchpin for effective change in billing efficiencies, but it cannot stand alone. New solutions must be reinforced with policies, training, and support. Timekeepers and administrative staff must learn how to use billing software and understand billing guidelines. Follow-up training will help to increase adoption and reduce mistakes.
