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June 3, 2022

Why legal billing software is a must for law firms

Once you decide it’s high time to implement legal practice management in your firm (financial, marketing management, etc.), you should clearly understand what goals and outcomes you’re trying to reach. We’ll find out how effective legal management and automation solutions can help your firm generate revenue and outperform competitors.

Why traditional billing hinders legal business growth

Since charging clients is inevitable for lawyers and law organizations of all sizes and types, we’ll use the billing process in law firms to illustrate what has been said.

Besides time spent handling client cases, which lawyers count as billable, legal specialists would barely count the time spent manually filling in invoices or other documentation as paid jobs. These include any tasks related to payment processing, such as creating and sending invoices or updating trust accounts.

In most cases, these time-consuming administrative duties turn into non-billable or after-hours time that negatively affects legal experts’ productivity and cuts lawyers’ time from doing their actual job — providing legal advice and helping clients.

What manual payment pitfalls do lawyers face?

Typically, lawyers bill clients for time spent on solving their matters. And invoices are an instrument that represents the value of legal services, which is the cost lawyers obtain for their work. With traditional manual billing, the client may never know how many extra hours lawyers must have taken to solve their case. If so, the customer might become confused about why additional fees and expenses were added to their invoice.

Manual billing might look like a time drain since there is no transparency: clients simply don’t understand where their money goes. Furthermore, no legal specialist is immune to untrustworthy clients who may call a lawyer and question the value of legal service and hence won’t proceed with the payment. This leads to missing time and costs, especially when legal professionals have to adjust or edit invoices that cause a payment delay.

Besides being stressed by addressing ongoing clients’ demands, legal specialists must often waste time tracking their billable hours by hand. Moreover, they should deal with late payments, write reminders, and accomplish the same repetitive administrative tasks and bulky paperwork on a daily basis.

How legal billing automation can improve law firm revenue

Most legal firms work per the billable hour system when lawyers charge clients by the number of working hours spent on legal cases. Therefore, every working minute must be recorded. An average lawyer at a large law firm works from 50 to 60 hours per week, while more than 40% of legal professionals spend at least one-quarter of their week doing manual, repetitive duties. So it’s obvious how much lawyers’ time remains unbillable.

Today, digital tools and legal software products exist on the market to help law specialists automate administrative work as well as all parts of a law firm’s financial management, including charging customers. So acquiring robust, all-in-one software is a must for lawyers if they want to manage their workload with maximum efficiency.

Using legal software might be a life-saver in improving billing. The system can track billable hours and support advanced invoice creation without installing additional third-party payment systems. You can bill your clients in a click using time tracking, expense tracking, invoicing, fee options, discounts, etc., and get everything you need in one place: keep track of client cases, tasks, and events, automatically bill clients, or sign documents anytime and anywhere.

Jusnote billing and time-tracking for your law firm’s success

Once you decide to make charging clients transparent and convenient, the best choice for your law firm or individual practice is to find a legal tech solution that integrates time tracking, billing, and accounting into one place. This way, you’ll save money on technology and reduce the number of human errors. Look more in-depth into how Jusnote cloud-based legal software will benefit your practice.

Track time

Manual time-tracking is a tedious activity that often makes lawyers skip this process or put it off, thus losing paid time and income. Using an automated time-tracker, you can easily record your time on a particular case, specifying when you start and finish the project. So all your billable hours will be logged in automatically.

Track expenses

It might be a daunting task to dig into your calendar or emails and revise clients’ history to mark and record all expenses or extra hours. Expanse tracking automation allows lawyers to add these fees to invoices and send them directly to clients. In doing so, you stop losing money on poor time management.

Add time entries

With the Jusnote timekeeping feature, lawyers can easily categorize time and expense entries to see what their time and money are spent on. It grants lawyers the flexibility to correct and add time entries if needed or when they accidentally miss putting a timer on or off.

Generate in-depth reports and analyze data

Lawyers can categorize time entries and generate in-depth reports to estimate work results and visualize the law firm’s performance metrics (get details about hours, fees, unbilled and billed time, etc.). Besides managing and analyzing personal productivity by accurate and automated timekeeping, law firm owners can monitor their team’s performance, split legal matters, and assign responsibilities equitably.

Streamline pre and post-payment invoice creation

With automated invoice creation, lawyers don’t need to create an invoice from scratch each time; that otherwise costs them time and financial losses. Instead, legal specialists can create professional invoices and effortlessly customize them as per their firm’s needs, adding details such as logos, payment terms, late fees, task descriptions, etc.

Jusnote functionality will let you automate invoice reminders, add taxes and discounts, register payments, and share them via email or a link on one platform. If you’re ready to facilitate your billing process, measure and estimate legal performance, and set fair prices for clients, check this article to deepen your expertise.

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