Operating Your Law Firm to Ensure Payment on All Invoices

• State of legal billing
• Opportunity – Zero AR
• One firm’s journey
• Demo of Zero AR using TimeSolv
• Ethical concerns
• Q&A

Runtime: 55 minutes
Recorded: May 18, 2021

With little recourse to pursue non-payers, the legal profession instead uses retainers and trust accounts to protect from clients who won't pay invoices. One side-effect of managing two separate trust and operating accounts is the burdensome work of managing those accounts, both ethically and legally. For a small firm, the effort to manage the bookkeeping is especially taxing and eats into valuable billable time. This also leads lawyers to bill time towards a retainer fee instead of an outcome. If a firm collects $5,000 on retainer, the mindset becomes they must work enough billable hours to invoice for $5,000, regardless if that's necessary or needed.

The industry average collections rate for invoices is around 88%, so there does appear to be some justification for using retainers. And while how much a firm is collecting for sent invoices should always be a priority, that is never more true than during this last year with the business repercussions from the pandemic. Not collecting 12% of your earned work could be the difference between staying in business or having to shutter the firm.

Join our industry leaders and explore ways to reduce both the bookkeeping work of trust account but also increase the collection rate on sent invoices.

This program will help attendees learn the steps necessary to reduce the trust accounting load and increase collection rates.

This program was recorded on May 18th, 2021.

American Bar Association