Attorney’s Guide to Healthy Law Firm Billing
Healthy billing practices can help your firm capture and collect on more of your billable time.
What percentage of your firm’s billable hours would you say get captured, invoiced, and paid on every month?
The painful truth is that, for most firms, there is a significant gap between hours worked and revenue collected for that work.
Thankfully, healthy billing practices can combat that gap, helping your firm capture and collect on more of your billable time. In this short article, you’ll learn the 3 essential steps your firm can take to close the gap between hours billed and revenue collected.
Step 1: Make Time Tracking Instinctual
Anyone who works in an office environment faces bothersome, but necessary, daily tasks that stand in the way of getting real work done. For lawyers, there is no more bothersome a task than daily time tracking.
If you track time on paper, in a spreadsheet, or using a software that’s more than 15 years old, you probably sit down at the end of the day and try to reconstruct your billable time from memory. But what if instead, your time tracking was done for you while accomplishing your daily tasks?
Modern time-tracking software tools discussed in this article are designed to help law firms solve this problem. Many softwares offer time saving features like tracking your time as you work (called contemporaneous time tracking) or the ability to turn tasks and calendar events into time entries.
Tools like this make your firm’s time tracking instinctual, rather than bothersome, while helping to capture billable hours that may have gone uncaptured otherwise.
Step 2: Simplify Invoice Creation and Distribution
Say it’s the 23rd. Is your firm feeling the end-of-month dread?
Complicated invoice creation and distribution can hinder a firm’s normal workflow until the bills are sent out, but it doesn’t have to be that way.
One of the easiest ways to simplify invoice creation is to adopt new legal technology. Software programs that create and send out invoices can, and have, saved law firms hours per month and helped assuage end-of-month dread.
Take a look at some of the helpful legal billing software discussed in this article. Up to date technologies like these offer features like batch billing, so you can generate all your end of month invoices at the same time. Some offer the ability to send invoices to clients online, saving you from stuffing envelopes or drafting emails.
With these simplifications, end-of-month dread will be banished for good.
Step 3: Expand Collection Options
Lastly, it’s imperative that law firms take advantage of 21st century payment options in order to ensure that clients are able to pay their legal bills quickly and easily. After all, in 2020 legal consumers expect to have multiple payment methods available to them, and the more methods your firm offers, the more likely legal bills will be paid promptly and in full.
In this article, you’ll learn about the payment processing tools available to law firms that make it easier than ever for legal clients to pay their bills.
Using these software programs, law firms are providing their clients with a number of different ways to immediately pay their bills, including credit card and ACH payments.
Improve Your Law Firm’s Financial Performance
Healthy legal billing is just one part of running a successful, profitable law firm. If you’re looking to take your firm’s financial performance beyond billing practices, take a look at How to Run your Law Firm Like a Business.
This free ebook details the steps you can take to identify blind spots in your firm’s financial performance while using data and technology to make better business decisions.
