Money, Technology

Show Me Other People's Money, Fast

What are some of the tools available to attorneys for billing clients and getting paid? Technology columnist Sean Doherty investigates.

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I grew up with money. Unfortunately, that money was performed by Pink Floyd (1973), not printed by the U.S. Treasury. Now, however, I’m after real money to make a living. And I have found that other people are as reluctant as me to part with their money.

It often takes 60 to 90 days for clients to pay my invoices with “Net 30” payment terms—even when I offer a two-percent discount if they pay within 10 days. And I have done enough debt collection work to know that I am a reluctant debt collector. I need to change my invoices to “Net 90 days” and move my accounting system from cash to accrual or make it easy for clients to pay me for legal services. What are the payment possibilities?

If you subscribe to MyCaseInc.’s practice management (PM) software as a service, the San Diego, California-based company recently launched MyCase Payments, a new feature for clients to pay invoices using an eCheck system, an electronic check paying system. Once MyCase approves you for the service, your clients will have a one-stop shop to access invoices and pay by electronic check, using a bank routing and account number. The eCheck system is not a third-party integration but built into MyCase and included in the subscription price, starting at $39 per attorney per month.

Themis Solutions Inc., maker of Clio PM as a service, offers to subscribers Clio Payments, a service that processes secure credit card payments inside the Web-based system or the Clio mobile app. Like MyCase Payments, Clio Payments does not require you to interface with an external service provider, a physical device or manage the integration. But Clio Payments is powered by LawPay.

LawPay is a credit card processing program recommended by more than 90 state and local bar associations across the country for its support in handling credit card payments in law offices, which involves separating earned and unearned fees when accepting card payments and avoiding the risk of commingled funds. Lawyers can subscribe to LawPay services without an intermediary like Clio.

LawPay can process a credit card payment for fees earned directly into an operating account or a card payment for unearned fees, i.e., a retainer, into an IOLTA (Interest On Lawyers Trust Account) and debit the processing fees from an operating account.

To deposit funds into an operating and trust account, LawPay charges $20 per month plus a processing fee and a $0.20 transaction fee per charge. The processing fee for American Express is 2.89 percent of the total charge; for Discover, MasterCard, and Visa, the processing charge is 1.95 percent of the total; and for specialty cards, such as cash-reward cards, the processing fee is 2.95 percent of the total. Note that batch transactions incur a $0.20 transaction fee.

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A LawPay subscription can include a virtual terminal (a one-time fee applies) to process credit card transactions from a PC and a free secure payment page. The secure payment page can be mapped onto your law firm’s website and the link can be sent via email to clients. Clients access the secure page to input card information and process payments. See the secure payment page for Linder’s Mediation here.

If you have a LawPay account and you are a Clio subscriber, you can transfer the LawPay account to Clio Payments and use it within Clio’s interface to e-mail clients PDF invoices with secure payment links. Rocket Matter and Abacus Data Systems also integrate LawPay into their PM systems.

Next up: Bitcoin payments! “Money, it’s a hit.” – Pink Floyd.

LEGAL TECH UPDATE: LEXISNEXIS

LexisNexis Legal & Professional recently launched new capabilities and resources to Lexis Advance, the company’s online legal research platform. The new enhancements are designed for legal professionals to more precisely find and efficiently share information.

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The Lexis Advance now supports a form-based approach to advanced searching that enables experienced users to surface information and zero in on specific document segments, such as restricting queries to the title of news articles or the attorneys of record in a case law opinion. The Advanced Search form helps novices enter terms in palpable fields and build search requests from the ground up. It’s also simple for advanced or novice users to quickly restrict results to specific date ranges or jurisdictions using pre- or post-search filters.

LexisNexis added Arizona, the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Washington jurisdictional pages to Lexis Advance. It also added Antitrust, Data Privacy, Environmental Law, and Government Contract practice-area pages, making 26 Lexis Advance Practice Pages. Each practice page brings authoritative content and workflow to a practice area in one mouse-click.

Lexis Advance users can now export files directly to Dropbox without first downloading them to their PC and then uploading them to share in Dropbox. A new feature for the Recycle Bin permits users to recover items deleted from work folders within the previous 30 days. And folder storage limits have increased for users to store up to 2,000 documents per folder.

(Disclosure: The author is conducting trials of LawPay and MyCase and maintains test accounts in practice management systems courtesy of LexisNexis (Firm Manager) and Themis Solutions Inc. (Clio).)

Attorney Sean Doherty has been following enterprise and legal technology for more than 15 years as a former senior technology editor for UBM Tech (formerly CMP Media) and former technology editor for Law.com and ALM Media. Sean analyzes and reviews technology products and services for lawyers, law firms, and corporate legal departments. Contact him via email at sean@laroque-doherty.net and follow him on Twitter: @SeanD0herty.

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