Law firm staff lose money through missed billing and fragmented timekeeping systems. The speaker recommends integrating Clio and LeanLaw with QuickBooks, delegating time capture to paralegals, and automating real-time tracking so work gets billed as it happens instead of forgotten.
Chapters
This week we're gonna talk about overcoming the billing and the timekeeping challenges in law firms. So I know a lot of you that follow this blog work at law firms. You have a job that you are probably the admin, the timekeeper, help the paralegal, you do it all. And then maybe you also do the bookkeeping. So accurate timekeeping, we're really gonna talk about timekeeping today. Accurate timekeeping and billing are the lifeblood of a law firm's profitability. Any missed time is just money that they're never gonna get back. Ever going to collect on. And that's really important that we get some kind of a process in place. You might notice that there's a theme with these posts that week after week I start talking about workflows and processes and important things that if we don't have things in place, even in our own firm, you'll find that sometimes this is a roadblock, right? If you don't have a— If you have staff and you don't have a good practice management tool, you're kind of dead in the water if you're using spreadsheets and patchworking it together. The same thing goes with timekeeping. I see firms that try to use Harvest or try to use these free time things on their phone. They just grab some kind of a free app and I'm gonna do this. And a lot of times the time lost, the time not billed will pay for the timekeeping software. We like Clio, we like LeanLaw. Those are the two that we use at our firm. We find that that's the most important one. And this is also something that if you follow Clio's trend report, you'll see that there's some significant challenges to firms that don't use the software, that don't actually have something in place. The cost of not having having good timekeeping is inefficiencies is really, it's really high. So a lawyer can actually, they, a lawyer actually bills about 2.5 hours of time daily despite being at the office 8 to 10 hours. So that's 75% of their workday is spent on tasks that aren't billed. And another place that we find too with attorneys, we see this all the time where the attorney, we're guilty of this too. I can just do it myself. I'll do it faster. I don't need to have somebody else do it. A lot of time the paralegal maybe can handle some of this work and they don't need to do every single aspect of the job. It's less expensive for the client 'cause you can now bill at a lower rate, but it's actually more efficient. Should the, should the attorney be doing the level of work that maybe a timekeeper or a paralegal is doing? No, absolutely not. So that's another place that time can eke out or you're overbilling your clients at that point. You want to ensure with your firm that you work with, the law firm that you work with, that the attorney's firm law firm has good-looking invoicing in place. And it's kind of on our lap to make sure that the invoice itself looks good. The software that we use sometimes can dictate how good our invoices look. And then there's also some tweaking. If you're using QuickBooks, there's a lot of tweaking you can do to fix the colors and fix the way it looks. But you wanna have a— A law firm invoice is always, you think of, and they have a lot of line items. You wanna have itemized invoices that clearly outline the work that was done. The work that was performed, clearly amounts of time, who did the work. And accurate billing is paramount to having a very successful law firm. And also the clarity between the client, really the relationship between the client and the attorney hinges on how well that is dictated. It's part of the work with a law firm that you'll see that sometimes attorneys kind of drop the ball and it can get annoying to the client. We don't wanna have clients that are really annoyed by us because, or annoyed by the attorney at the firm because the referral referral-based, right? That's where a lot of attorneys get their clients from. So you wanna have a good relationship with your clients. Technology's definitely gonna be in place, and I think we're gonna start to see things better and better and better. I mean, in my perfect world, I'd love it if my team was able to log in to do their work, and in the background, the software was picking up what job they're working on and how to kind of select the time. And I think that's coming someday, but you wanna automate that time tracking. You wanna use the tools to record the time in real time and Really reduce the reliance on your memory. Oh, I had a meeting with him. How long was it? You know, 3 days ago. You don't wanna be doing that. And you want detailed invoices. And a lot of the software like LeanLaw has snippets, so you can make these snippets. It's just short words that you use over and over again and repetitive language, but you can streamline the way the invoices go out from the firm overall. So if a different attorney's also in the firm working on the same matter, the language looks uniform. And truly, if you're working with a firm that's really patching it together with a software, an app, or, and they're trying to use a timekeeping tool over here and a practice management tool over here and a billing software over here, you wanna have something that really works well. This is where a Clio comes into play or even LeanLaw. Now you want to really use the tools. There's great tools inside of Clio that can help you do this and track the time. LeanLaw as well, you have it on your phone. If they're in court, they can track their time in court. You want to make that an automated system, but also a system in place that billing happens. For example, in LeanLaw, you, you, you do the billing, you put the billing tab in place and grab the amount to be made to a draft, create the draft, let the attorney know the draft is there. They review it and, and approve it, and then it gets passed along into QuickBooks and then obviously out to the client. You don't wanna be printing and mailing things. You really wanna be using the systems in place to email, have the links in place so that you're able to collect payments easily that way too. And then you want to train your staff in those best practices. So ensure that the team understands the importance of timely and accurate timekeeping, and that none of the time is missed. And also monitor the metrics. You really want to monitor, you know, regularly review the timekeeping and the billing data to make sure that there's no inefficiencies, that someone's not double billing or something like that, because that will really tick off the client too. So effective timekeeping and billing is really not just about increasing revenue, but it's also about building that trust with your client. As a law firm, you want to have that As the bookkeeper working in the law firm, same thing. You want to be sustainable, you want a good workflow in place, and you really wanna address all these challenges with timekeeping and use technology to track and reclaim those billable hours that you can put on the bill and get paid for your time as you do your work. And it's really time to stop losing money and not using software. So hopefully this helps. If you have any questions, comments, please feel free to reach out. And until next time, I will see you then. Bye now.
