Time and billing are inherently linked to any legal practice. Billable hours are at the heart of invoices, and invoices determine your operational revenue. The efficiency of how you keep time records and how they become invoices can determine the overall success of your law firm. From capturing all the billable hours worked by your team to accurately billing your clients with satisfactory detail, the task can be daunting unless you have dedicated time and billing software designed to meet the needs of a legal business.
How do you know if your law firm needs time and billing software? Often, the signs are clear if you know how to look for them.
- Are your invoices frequently delayed because the time data isn’t available or prepared yet?
- Do you often miss recording billable time due to manual data entry and late record creation?
- Are you keeping track of your time or billing on paper?
- Do your clients dispute their bills due to a lack of detail and transparency?
If the answer to any of these questions is “yes”, consider the advantages of legal practice time and billing software to upgrade, streamline, accelerate, and add precision to your time and billing workflow. Let’s take a closer look at the five signs your law firm could benefit from a new software solution for time-tracking and billing.
1) Delayed Invoices
Clients appreciate invoices sent like clockwork. Whether you are working on an ongoing case or have long-term clients who rely on your legal services, routine invoices help clients feel calm and expectant when it comes time to pay the bills. However, delayed invoices are a common symptom of manual time tracking and billing.
To create an invoice, you need to receive billable hour records from each member of your legal team, collate them into an invoiceable format, and prepare the bills to be sent out to clients. This process should run like clockwork, but doing it manually often results in late submissions and delays in converting personal time records into an invoice-ready format.
The Software Solution
Legal billing software can swiftly convert automated time records into detailed invoices and then send invoices on a preset schedule. This ensures that your invoices are prepared and sent on time, every time, to secure a more reliable payment flow for your law firm.
2) Missed Billable Time
Every minute that your legal team works on a client’s case or account is valuable. Minutes accumulate into hours, but smaller work sessions and fractions of time below an hour are often lost through manual time tracking. Lawyers who note their billable hours at the end of the day can lose over an hour a day of untracked time. Waiting until the end of the week results in even more forgotten time that could have resulted in invoiced revenue.
The Software Solution
Time tracking software designed for law firms can automatically track time and create easy time logs without manual entry. Through a computer or phone app, lawyers can select the case they are working on and tap a single button to stop or start recording billable time. Automatically generated time records are then automatically converted to invoiceable data so that every minute dedicated to a client can be accurately billed.
3) On-Paper Time Tracking and Billing
Is your team keeping hand-written timesheets or billing with paper invoices? Law firms represent the full spectrum from old-school to cutting-edge when it comes to technology implementation. Some traditional procedures can be reassuring for your clients. However, it is possible to be too traditional when it comes to paperwork and internal operations.
On-paper timesheets are prone to mistakes and are time-consuming to create. Even lawyers who prefer to make notes in their personal agendas and planners benefit from a streamlined way to keep detailed records of every minute worked. Paper billing can also be achieved without performing the entire billing process by hand.
The Software Solution
By switching to legal time and billing software, you can streamline the process of collecting time records and generating invoices. Once the invoices are formatted, they can still be printed and mailed to your more traditional clients. But many of your clients will appreciate the convenience of online and email billing to better integrate with their modern lifestyles and business practices. Your time records and billing will become more accurate and take less time.
4) Excessive Administration Tasks
Speaking of time consumption, consider the amount of time that lawyers and your billing team spend on invoicing every month. Time is precious and should be spent on billable work whenever possible. Administrative duties cannot be billed to clients, so take away from potential billable time. Lawyers shouldn’t have to spend hours each week collating their timesheets to submit for invoicing. Nor should your billing team get bogged down processing individual time records into neatly formatted invoices.
If your law firm is losing excessive time to administrative tasks, a software solution is the natural remedy.
The Software Solution
Minimize admin task time by helping your lawyers and billing team streamline the process of invoice creation. Provide your lawyers with a tool where they can easily create digital time records with the level of detail they desire in a fraction of the time. Then, send those detailed records to billing, where they can be efficiently formatted into invoices without a time-consuming organization and formatting process.
5) Client Billing Disputes
Client billing disputes are often caused by vague invoices where legal services are not itemized. Clients like to see the number of hours put into their case and a general summary of the legal tasks performed on their behalf. If a bill seems high without any details to justify the cost, then billing disputes ensue.
Providing this level of detail and formatting it clearly into invoices can be time-consuming for your staff, but it doesn’t have to be.
The Software Solution
Automated time tracking can create the detailed yet organized data that clients desire to see on their invoices. With dedicated legal time and billing software, you can easily create clear and illuminating invoices that set clients at ease about each of their bills. Paired with on-time invoicing and reliable billing formats, clients are more likely to feel comfortable with their bills and you will see a reduction in billing disputes.
Specialized Legal Time and Billing Software
Law firms benefit from software designed to accommodate the unique needs of the legal sector. LawBillity provides automatic and convenient time tracking to catch every billable hour, keep detailed notes on the work performed, and smoothly convert time data into scheduled invoices that improve client satisfaction. Specialized legal time and billing software can help improve your revenue cycle, save time, and keep your clients happy while streamlining the process of collecting and billing legal hours. Reduce your law firm’s administrative time and try LawBillity for 14-days for free.
