For law firms, billing clients correctly is critical for their success. Law firm billing includes billing clients of the firm and tracking down their payments can be translated as a time-consuming, and monotonous part of any lawyer’s work. To have a successful legal practice, you may need an effective billing solution for your firm. In an era of digitalization, moving beyond the traditional paper billing process for increased transparency, and earning client satisfaction means adopting digitalized billing solutions for law firms. Thanks to the breakthrough in the LegalTech industry, law firms can easily employ e-billing software to save the precious time of their lawyers, ensure invoice accuracy, and avoid any post billing disputes with the clients.

A Legal Trends Report 2020, believes that attorneys on average record only 2.5 billable hours per day, with the rest of their day consumed by less important non-billable tasks. It often includes billing-related activities like creating and sending out clients’ invoices, receiving and processing payments, and updating trust ledgers. Is there a way to simplify this cumbersome manual billing process and save the financial resources of the firm? Yes, legal e-billing software, powered by artificial intelligence is now extensively used by lawyers for invoicing clients in their private practice and at law firms. It has a long list of features including but not limited to tracking time, storing profiles of active and non-active clients’ and much more. Undoubtedly, e-billing solutions have proven to increase revenue. They are easy to deploy, simple to use, and can securely be synced with the cloud, therefore there’s no good reason to avoid them.

In today’s blog post, we will draw your attention to the key benefits of adopting these solutions for your firm. To begin, let’s first look at the concept of legal e-billing for law firms.  

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What is Legal E-Billing for Law Firms?

A conventional billing system in a typical law firm involves manual preparation and in-person sharing of paper invoices with the clients. Whereas electronic billing or e-billing is the process of automating the legal billing to create, review, approve and deliver invoices automatedly at a law firm. Legal Electronic Data Exchange Standard (LEDES) is the standard format that allows organizations to translate a bundle of files about the bill and process it quickly. Those employing this system have cut down considerable administrative costs and feel more technically equipped to collect data, which they can evaluate to draw results for predicting the future of the firm. 

Amongst the distinctive features of e-billing software, the most important one is its ability to automatically create an electronic file with a header that contains detailed information of the client’s case, billable hours. And have other minute details, such as important timeline, and expenses related to a case. These details are coded against the appropriate activities to ensure a faster, transparent, and more effective e-billing system for an improved client-centred experience. 

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Benefits of Legal E-Billing 

As afore-mentioned, the advantages of e-billing may outnumber any risks to adopting this solution for your law firm. Those firms that put e-billing into its daily use will experience instant benefits and positive long-term outcomes. 

Save your firm’s precious time and resources with improved billing accuracy

Legal e-billing for law firms increases workflow by automating manual billing tasks. This includes time tracking and invoices generation to delivering invoices. Your firm can now use billing software to electronically send invoices to an individual or to big corporate clients. This saves the law firm precious time.

When attorneys and paralegals or legal assistants spend less time on managing invoices manually can also help law firms to save financial resources. Additionally, by using e-billing solutions, firms can improve their billing accuracy and reduce the chances of errors caused by manual billing. ‍

Improves the speed of payment, and firms cashflow

Having an e-billing solution at your law firm can diminish the risk of dispute resolution between clients and your firm. It can bridge the gap between the invoicing and collection of payments. If a client is receiving a clean invoice, it can be easily processed for payment and does not require back-and-forth communication with a lawyer for clarification. 

Legal e-billing solution, powered by artificial intelligence focuses on providing great value to a law firm. Some billable solutions, available in the LegalTech market enable lawyers to record their billable hours with their voice. 

Using legal e-billing software reduces the time often spent by a lawyer on timesheets, recording billable hours and reviewing itemized bills and invoices. This can help lawyers to take up more productive work that can bring business and add value to a law firm. 

‍Increases chances of client acquisition 

If a law firm is having knowledge of legal e-billing software and is equipped with this tool can prove to be an effective marketing strategy for attracting new clients to the table. Because of their high expectations of a transparent billing process which can only be addressed by e-billing. 

 Currently, law firms are no longer confined to their traditional role of just offering legal advice. However, they are often required to walk an extra mile for appeasing clients. Not having an e-billing solution or the ability to create legal invoices in LEDES formats can prove detrimental for a law firm to onboard a client. 

Final thoughts

In a law firm, legal billing was all about traditional paper billing, but now legal e-billing software has revolutionized the billing system. It can help a law firm to produce, review deliver, and collect payment for invoices more swiftly than ever imagined before. Legal e-billing software ensures that it provides value to its users instead of being a point of contention between the law firms and their clients. Private legal practitioners and law firms lose revenue due to instances of unbilled work, waste of time on non-billable work, and non-compliant client invoices. Legal e-billing solutions ensure that this does not happen while streamlining the workflow and timekeeping process. With improved efficiency, accuracy and transparency ensured by e-billing software is now the way modern law firms do business.

Although, employing e-billing for a law firm may require an initial investment to acquire a new solution, and train staff members to handle it properly. It’s important to note that if your law firm is keeping up with traditional paper billing practice you and your firm could be missing out on potential clients, and the benefits of a legal e-billing system. 

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