Billing Assistance- Ways to Make Billing Easier and Faster (from LOS Spring 2022 Newsletter)
Posted April 5, 2022 to Billing.
Billing is both a necessity and a curse for many law firms. It can be time consuming especially when the attorneys hand writes their time and staff are self-trained and missing out on more efficient ways to manage the firm’s billing. Often inefficiencies and errors show up when there is staff turnover. Firms often end up with manual or cumbersome processes simply because the bills have been going out and no one has reviewed the process. If the attorneys review their time entries regularly during the month you can eliminate an editing bottleneck at billing time since the edits have already been done. Most billing programs allow you to review and edit bills while they are displayed on the screen. Having a system to review payments can also save time and ensure more accurate bills. If your firm takes credit cards, consider services like LawPay which lets you receive trust funds or payments for bills. LawPay or similar services have links to many billing programs saving on data entry tasks.
Often when we assist firms, we can recommend changes to procedures that can save hours of time. Whether it is making the bills clearer, so clients understand the charges and fees due or creating reports to track payments or instituting new procedures for checking the accuracy of entries, we have a proven track record of helping our clients. Email us or give us a call!
More and more firms are being asked by their corporate clients to submit bills to third party auditors in LEDES format using ABA Task Codes. We have recently begun working with a company that uses artificial intelligence to check your time entries when they are created against your clients’ requirements and make suggestions or corrections as you record your time. Even better, they can integrate with your current billing and accounting platform, pull in your time entries, check for compliance and you are told what and how to correct all non-compliant line entries and when the corrections are done, they will automatically update the slips in your system with those edits. For firms that don’t have the ability to create the LEDES format in their billing program, this service can format and submit the LEDES invoice. As firms that do LEDES billing know, the challenge comes with selecting the right codes and descriptions and getting the time approved on the first try. This service makes appeals and rejections a thing of the past. If you are interested in learning more, please contact us.