3 billing fixes Missouri law firms can implement this month
Jordan L. Turk, Smokeball attorney and director of education
From St. Louis to Kansas City to Springfield and across the whole country, one issue that seems to unite lawyers is this: We’re not great at billing our clients.
We didn’t go to law school to learn how to become bill collectors, and my school certainly didn’t offer many “how to run a law firm” management courses. So, when and how exactly are we supposed to pick up the details on invoicing?
Because of this, many firm owners learn receivables by trial and error (legal pun intended). With that in mind, here are a few billing tips and tricks to help along the way:
Three tried and true billing tips for Missouri law firms
1. It’s a mental game.
Clients come to you at some of the worst moments in their lives. The least lawyers can do is be predictable in our billing schedule.
Clients shouldn’t be waiting months to receive an invoice, and sending bills sporadically doesn’t foster confidence (or trust) between you and your client. Whether you bill monthly or on another cadence, the key is consistency.
A practical rule of thumb: send invoices around the 4th of every month. If the client gets paid on the 1st, their paycheck has likely cleared by the time your bill arrives, making yours one of the first bills they’ll pay rather than something that gets pushed to “later.”
2. The call is coming from inside the house (yes, you).
Often, the real reason firms fall behind on billing is simple: hours don’t get logged. We’ve all been there; waiting until the end of the month to input time, only to realize we’re trying to reconstruct an entire month of work like it’s a missing evidence timeline.
The problem is that it’s nearly impossible to recreate every billable increment for a month. We forget details. You log six hours for a day that happened two weeks ago, but you know you were at the office for ten. Now you’re losing revenue for the firm — and for yourself.
You and your staff need a rule for tracking time. Ideally, this happens daily, but weekly is more realistic for many firms.
And if you have a few “problem children” at your firm who struggle to track time consistently, consider adopting Smokeball’s Autotime feature. It runs in the background and tracks what you’re doing and for which matters.
3. It’s time to join the modern day
Lawyers are not always known for being early adopters of change, but if there’s one place where modernizing pays off quickly, it’s billing.
It’s time to adopt technology that can automate the most frustrating parts of the process. Your firm administrator will thank you. Your future self will, too.
That means using software like Smokeball, which lets you:
— Print prebills in bulk (and separated by lawyer)
— Automate invoice creation
— Send bills to clients all at once — without going case-by-case
Instead of manually pushing invoices one matter at a time, you can press a button, and your bills go out in a batch.
And if you bill hourly, it’s also worth thinking about adopting an evergreen retainer policy, which can also be automated with the right system.
Bottom line for law firm billing
Billing doesn’t have to be the headache it was back in the day. Technology exists now to make it easier and more consistent.
Try it and give yourself one less thing to chase at the end of every month.
Trust accounting and billing software by Smokeball
As a member of The Missouri Bar, you get access to Smokeball’s trust accounting and billing software at no cost, valued at $588/user/year, to help you manage your trust accounting compliantly and bill easily. Click on this link to access your software: https://bit.ly/mobarbill-blog-0226.
Jordan Turk is a practicing lawyer in Texas and Smokeball’s director of education and attorney development. Smokeball is cloud-based legal practice management software.