From conducting legal research to meeting with clients to drafting document after document, it’s no secret that lawyers have demanding schedules. Add administrative work like billing and invoicing—on top of growing their practice as a whole—and it’s no wonder that legal professionals feel stretched thin.
That’s where automation comes into play. Automating tedious and repetitive tasks is a time-smart strategy for attorneys, and there’s no shortage of opportunities to automate work in your law firm.
One type of task that provides a lot of bang-for-your-automated-buck is legal invoicing. Legal invoicing reduces the amount of time and energy you need to put into getting paid while increasing client convenience—and it’s easier to implement than you might think!
Six ways automation can improve your law firm’s invoicing processes—and your cash flow
It’s one thing to provide excellent legal services to your clients. But to continue providing those services, your law firm must maintain profitability. You need to ensure you’re getting paid quickly, accurately, and efficiently so you can continue advocating for your clients’ best interests.
Here are a few ways automation can help.
1. Templatize invoices
Creating new invoices from scratch each month? If that’s a recurring item on your to-do list, it doesn’t have to be. You can set up automatable templates with features like:
- Custom branding
- LEDES billing codes
- Automatic tax calculations
- Customized narratives
- Client-specific discounts
- And more
2. Create batch invoices
Individually invoicing clients can be a time-consuming process that robs even the most organized legal professionals of time they could otherwise be spending on billable work.
That’s why it’s important to use a legal-specific software solution that offers batch invoicing features. Batch invoicing allows you to automatically create and send multiple invoices to clients who use similar services with the click of a button.
Some instances of situations where batch billing can help law firms include:
- Groups of clients who are billed for the same or similar amounts each month
- Multiple clients that use a similar amount of billable hours every month
- Clients who have a regular billing schedule every month
- Clients who use retainer fees to pay for their services
FREE Legal Billing Terms Cheat Sheet
Legal billing terms can be confusing.
TimeSolv has prepared a list of the most commonly used legal billing terms that lawyers use in routine. It's a must to have it in your pinned files, sticky notes, or however you carry your essentials while practicing.
Download our cheat sheet and get all the information you need!
3. Reduce costly mistakes
Another issue with manually invoicing clients? Human error. Spending long hours manually inputting important billing data can lead to invoicing errors that could cost your firm money—or worse, clients.
Automated invoicing software enables you to simultaneously save time and reduce human error by generating unlimited invoices for multiple clients who use similar services, based on information already stored within your system.
Not only does this solution mitigate your risk of billing blunders, but it can also eliminate hours of administrative work.
4. Automate UTBMS/LEDES coding
UTBMS/LEDES coding helps standardize legal billing systems by categorizing legal tasks and translating them into invoices. They’re necessary and valuable…and they have long been a manual process for attorneys and legal staff.
What’s more, when done incorrectly, clients may reject invoices. This can damage your collection rates and deliver a hit to your profitability.
When you use the right billing application, though, you can set up the software to automatically assign correct codes to tasks and expenses. Even better, the software can use machine learning to adjust to changes the more you use it.
5. Schedule recurring payments
Sending invoices and providing multiple payment options is one thing, but actually collecting those payments in a timely and efficient manner can prove to be a challenge. From back-and-forth email reminders to finally receiving and processing those payments, this process can eat away at billable hours and increase your law firm’s accounts receivable.
Get back your billable hours and get paid on time by using automated legal software to schedule recurring payments for your clients. With this time-saving solution, you only need to secure a payment pre-authorization from your client and store their credit card or bank information in your system so clients can pay—and you can get paid—as soon as the agreed-upon payment date arrives.
To make receiving payments even faster and easier for your firm, you can combine scheduled payments with a batch payment solution to secure payments from multiple clients simultaneously.
6. Create automated payment reminders
Instead of spending time and energy chasing down overdue invoices, set up your legal-specific software to send automated reminders to clients about upcoming and overdue payments.
Chances are, your clients aren’t avoiding your invoice on purpose—it may be on their to-do list, or may have even slipped their minds. Automated payment reminders can come in handy when it comes to giving your clients a gentle nudge to submit their payments on time (and they’ll appreciate the reminder if it helps them avoid late fees!).
The best part? You’ll only need to program your reminders once for each client, so those reminders run in the background while you focus on high-value tasks.
Spend less time chasing payments (and more time on billable hours) with TimeSolvPay
Stop spending hours behind a computer screen going through repetitive invoicing processes or chasing down clients for payments. With TimeSolvePay, you can automate time-consuming processes and reclaim lost billable hours.
We pride ourselves on transparency which means that with TimeSolvePay, you’ll never have to deal with monthly fees or hidden costs—we offer compliant end-to-end payment processing that your firm can trust. Our custom-built portal provides essential data about deposits, and our straightforward pricing lets you know exactly what you can expect.
If you want to spend more time with clients, reduce your accounts receivable, and help your firm receive prompt payment from clients, start your free trial today and see what TimeSolvPay can do for your firm.
FREE Legal Billing Terms Cheat Sheet
Legal billing terms can be confusing.
TimeSolv has prepared a list of the most commonly used legal billing terms that lawyers use in routine. It's a must to have it in your pinned files, sticky notes, or however you carry your essentials while practicing.
Download our cheat sheet and get all the information you need!
