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Most small law firms – about 62% of solos and duos – spend roughly 8 hours a month on billing processes including invoicing. About a quarter spend upwards of 16 hours a month. There are handfuls that can spend more according to a law firm billing survey LexisNexis published in August of 2014.
The business case for efficient billing process is straight forward: law firm business administration is non-billable time. The longer it takes to get invoices out, the longer it takes to collect on that revenue.
Open-ended comments in response to that survey, provide color to the sentiment in the data.
“I would love not to have to bill clients at all,” wrote one attorney. “Someone else who will do the billing because it takes all the fun out of practicing law to have to bill every minute,” said another. “Streamline it, make it faster, easier, more efficient while maintaining high level of accuracy,” requested a third.
LexisNexis Firm Manager Introduces Batch Invoicing
While LexisNexis Firm Manager® can’t do invoicing for attorneys – it certainly can make the process a lot easier. The team announced yesterday, batch invoicing to “significantly reduce the amount of time, effort and administrative burden spent on the billing process,” according to the announcement.
The Firm Manager product uses a “wizard” style tool to guide attorneys through the process of creating a batch of invoices. This enables a law firm to establish a regular billing cycle to prepare all their invoices for email or mail distribution in just a few clicks. The wizard provides a set of options so attorneys can choose how they want to bill clients. For example, a firm can bill for all legal services performed by a specific attorney, or by date, a range of dates, or by total amount due.
The batch invoicing process also enables law firms to customize invoice templates, for example to include a standard message across all bills. It also provides the means to write a custom note for specific clients and includes options for applying discounts or even “no charge.” Existing invoicing capabilities automatically deduct – and track for record keeping purposes – any draw from a trust account, or can set a bill due date (net due) immediately or along a range from seven to 60 days.
The latest product update is just the latest release in a very long (and growing) list of product updates over the course of the last year. The Microsoft “Office Blogs” site is now listing the Firm Manager app in its store which following an announcement about integration projects with Microsoft® Outlook and Microsoft Office 365™ productivity solutions.
Read these independent reviews of Firm Manager:
- TechnoLawyer: Review of LexisNexis Firm Manager
- Attorney at Work: The New LexisNexis Firm Manager Emerges
- Lawyerist: LexisNexis Firm Manager Law Practice Management Software
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