Billing is an essential part of running any legal practice. From small partnerships to large firms, the efficiency of your billing management defines the revenue cycle for your entire practice. The right legal billing software gives you the tools to streamline your billing cycle and empower your legal team to optimize earnings based on their hard work.
The question is what should you look for in your legal billing solution? With many options to choose from, it’s important to keep your priorities in view and consider which features will provide the greatest benefit to your workflow, client experience, and overall revenue management. In a landscape of software opportunities, why settle for a solution that is anything less than ideal to increase your practice’s efficiency and income?
Let’s dive into the nine features that make legal billing software the right fit for your practice.
1) Legal Specialization
While it is normal to build a solution from popular business software, the legal industry represents a unique business model. Especially the way that invoices and billing are handled. The ideal billing software for a legal practice will be designed for legal business operations. This includes generating invoices based on billable hours and expenses, superb data security, compliance with regulations, and billing practices designed to enhance your client experience.
Your legal practice deserves dedicated software designed to provide billing solutions tailored to the needs of the legal industry.
2) Time Tracking
Never lose another billable minute. Time tracking features make it possible for your legal team to record every minute they spend working on client accounts with an interface designed to organize time data by client and case.
Timers make it easy to quickly stop and start time records, with separate timers available for every client, case, or legal project. This allows your legal team to keep precise track of their work, even if they spend just a few minutes on a phone call or get interrupted after starting a work session. With responsive, automated, and legal-specific time tracking, you can reclaim hours every week that can be lost when lawyers wait until the end of the day or week to record their billable hours.
Great time tracking leads to accurate, detailed, and complete invoices that improve client experiences and improve revenue for your practice.
3) Expense Management
Legal practices also measure income through expenses. Expense management is a feature that is often missing from general business billing software, but it is essential for any law firm or legal business.
The best expense management relies on standard values, receipt record keeping, and perfect transparency with your clients. Expenses accrued during the pursuit of a client’s account or case must be billed according to a strict policy with clear records for each expense. The right software not only makes it easy for your team to log expenses with detail and attach receipts to the records for perfect expense tracking and reimbursement processing.
4) Mobile App Operation
When it comes to both time tracking and expense logging, a desktop app just isn’t enough. Your team will benefit from access to their billing software through an integrated mobile app.
With a mobile app, lawyers and legal teams will be able to update their timers even when they are away from their computers. Taking calls and working away from the office whether meeting with clients, attending depositions, or in court requires mobility and flexibility. A mobile app provides access to time tracking and the ability to create expense reports in real time from a phone or tablet.
5) Offline Management
No internet access should be no problem. Just in case one of your lawyers is without a signal when they need to create a time record, offline management is a must. Creating records should be possible offline, which will then sync up again with cloud-based records once the signal is restored. This makes it possible to keep extremely accurate time records by updating timers in real-time as lawyers begin and end billable work for any client’s account.
6) Billing Automation
Clients appreciate invoices that arrive like clockwork. The more predictable your billing cycle is, the more solid and reliable your legal services fees. That means no delays waiting for time sheets and clear, consistently organized invoices that read the same way with every on-time billing cycle.
This can be accomplished with billing automation if it is part of your legal billing software. Time records generated through the time tracking feature and logged expenses can be used to automatically generate accurate and detailed invoices which are then sent out to clients on a routine billing schedule.
Clients will appreciate the transparency and predictability of your automated billing cycle.
7) Data Reporting
Your billing software can also be an important source for data-driven insights. Billing software with this set of features can reveal how your legal team is allotting their time, which accounts are racking up the most billable hours, and opportunities for improvement. You can identify bottlenecks, expense patterns, predictable setbacks, and identify burnout risks all by exploring the visual reports generated from the data processed through your legal billing software.
8) Invoice Tracking
Invoice tracking makes it possible to quickly identify unpaid bills and may include tools to help remind clients before their bill goes to collections. Invoice tracking is often paired with automated email reminders which can be customized to uniquely reflect your legal brand and the way you want to communicate with clients regarding their bills.
With invoice tracking, you can significantly reduce the admin time necessary to handle unpaid bills and automatically detect when an invoice has been paid.
9) Software Integration
Lastly, always make sure that a new software solution like legal billing software will integrate smoothly with your existing software stack. Modern legal practices run on great software to achieve efficient and well-organized operations. Your billing software should be able to integrate with all the biggest accounting and enterprise platforms currently popular among legal businesses. These might include:
- QuickBooks
- Clio
- Invoice Tracker
- LawPay
- Outlook Email
- Microsoft 365
Empower Your Team with LawBillity Legal Billing Software
Is your legal practice looking for the perfect billing software solution? This checklist of features can be a great guide to help you find the right solution. However, we can assure you here and now that LawBillity has every feature we have listed today and more. Discover the convenience, enhanced workflow, and improved revenue stream that can stem from working with LawBillity for yourself with our 14-day free trial.
