Legal billing is one of the most important aspects of any legal practice. Properly building invoices based on payable hours and sending them to clients in a timely fashion is what secures revenue for your practice or law firm. However, it is also tedious and time-consuming. Lawyers spend hours of valuable time each week documenting their hours and preparing invoices for clients. These are non-billable hours that build pressure and stress on your legal staff when there could easily be a better way.
Legal billing automation through time tracking and billing software makes it possible to not only get back the time your lawyers spend on preparing and sending invoices, but also vastly improves the precision, transparency, and reliable timing of your legal billing, leading to a wide range of benefits for the law firm.
Let’s explore the role of automation in legal billing and the benefits that it can provide.
Reducing Errors in Billable Hours
Automating legal billing starts with automatic legal time tracking. Using time tracking software, your lawyers can easily and accurately keep track of exactly how much time is dedicated to each client’s case. They can separate billable and non-billable hours with ease and jump between tasks while keeping up-to-date digital time records.
This leads to highly accurate and precise records of billable hours, which means reducing the margin of error in legal billing. You will be able to capture every billable minute that lawyers are working on a case while also ensuring perfect ethical alignment by avoiding accidentally charging for time spent on non-billable tasks.
Ensuring Consistency in Billing Format
When lawyers build their own invoices for clients, there tend to be little differences – or sometimes big differences – in how they are arranged. Even using the same invoice template, lawyers may record data differently, use different spacing and different levels of detail. No two lawyers’ invoices look the same when they are prepared by hand.
Automated legal billing, however, will use the exact same invoice format and data structure every time. Billing software not only uses the same invoice template, but it also uses the same logic and stylistic format when building each invoice. This gives clients confidence through consistency. They can rely on each billing statement from your law firm to be uniform, easy to read, and predictable, which is exactly what clients want to see.
Improving Legal Billing Transparency and Detail
Clients also desire transparent and detailed legal invoices when they are billed. It’s only natural to check the veracity of a bill in the price range of most legal services, and clients often have a lot of questions about exactly how their billed hours were dedicated to their cases. Transparent and detailed legal billing can improve the confidence of clients and save lawyers the trouble of walking clients using their billed hours simply by sharing the most important details in an itemized list up front.
Time tracking data makes it possible to automatically generate a detailed record of how many hours were spent each day on the case and even provide an outline of the specific tasks the lawyer or legal team performed during those hours. Clients gain confidence in their legal team when they can see that their lawyer(s) are hard at work and understand how that reflects on their case progress.
Ensuring Bills are Sent on Time
You might (or might not) be surprised to learn that many legal practices have cash flow challenges partly due to un-sent invoices. When lawyers must take care of billing personally, it’s easy to shuffle unwanted paperwork to the eternal bottom of the stack. Automated billing, however, ensures that invoices are always sent in a timely manner at set intervals after billable hours for a case have been clocked.
Automated legal billing protects lawyers from forgetting to bill for their valuable services, also securing a steady cash flow for the entire practice by consistently sending invoices for all billable hours worked each month.
Providing Clients with a Predictable Billing Schedule
For clients with an ongoing case or who keep the law firm on retainer, automated billing ensures that they receive itemized invoices like clockwork – on a predetermined schedule. Clients feel more confident that a law firm is trustworthy and efficient when invoices arrive precisely when they are expected. Whether your clients are billed first thing every Monday or on the 14th of every month, that predictability ensures two things.
First, that your firm shows a professional and reliable face through every aspect of the business. Second, that clients get into the habit of paying their bill on a routine schedule. Simply sticking to an automated billing schedule can significantly increase the rate of timely payment from clients in response.
Saving Time for Legal Professionals
Most importantly, however, is that automated billing saves time for your legal team. With the help of automated time tracking, lawyers and legal staff will be able to accumulate accurate records of billable hours for every case without losing time to note-taking throughout the day. Lawyers also save time on tedious paperwork when their time-tracking data is automatically converted into accurate and transparent invoices sent out to clients at regular and predictable intervals.
Your team can focus on providing top-tier legal services and rely on automated legal billing software to streamline the process, reduce errors, and always bill clients on time.
Automate Your Legal Billing with LawBillity
If you are looking for a way to eschew the time-consuming process of legal billing for your law firm, LawBillity offers a comprehensive software solution. LawBillity was designed with the unique needs of law firm time tracking, accurate billable hour records, and automated legal billing in mind. The software solution integrates smoothly into existing legal software stacks and can help you streamline the entire process of recording, preparing, and sending legal invoices to clients.
Automation can transform the legal billing process, reducing errors, increasing client confidence, and saving time for legal professionals. Start a free trial to explore the promise of LawBillity time tracking and billing automation for your legal practice.
