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all right can everybody here everybody hear me hopefully all right so we're gonna start this is best practices salvage your ajr and close out the year financially strong my name is jordan turk and as sasha hit on before i'm a practicing family law attorney down here in texas and i'm also the legal content and compliance manager over at law pay so pumped to be here and i'm rosemary kepfert former uh legal software implementation specialist i've been with bqe for a while and we are moving forward with our product core legal right and without further ado we're happy to be here today and we're going to try to make this as kind of uh interactive as possible so again if you have any questions please drop them in the chat and again we'll just continue and a little bit about law pay real quick and about what we are so essentially if an attorney wants to be able to take credit cards or e-checks in their office that's where we come in so essentially the biggest kind of part about us and what we do is that we keep you compliant so they're very specific specific and i know most of y'all are familiar with it uh guidelines and rules with regard to what you can do with your trust account and how you need to make it be compliant essentially and that's where lawcate comes in to help you out with that and then i should also mention too that i believe and rosemary correct me if i'm wrong but i believe that core legal also provides for a freeway reconciliation process or a three-way request accounts the core legal provides your firm with matter level and client level trust accounts and we have three-way reconciliation it's a beautiful thing yeah so essentially if a client comes into your office and says hey i want to pay your 10 grand retainer and i want to do that by credit card that's where we come in in that regard all right so a little bit about what we're going to talk about collection 101 because when i started up my firm i had no idea what any of this was and i definitely was not an accountant and so kind of take you through the very basics of that very top level how that applies to your firm the impact of covet 19 on your receivables because of course i think everybody's kind of seeing some form of impact of that and then steps to collect so we'll talk about how to assess your outstanding receivables how to prioritize those receivables and how to embrace technology and actually get paid on those receivables [Music] if your law firm is that first option i'm very very jealous i want to see how many people how many people's uh clients are perfect and pay immediately that is the dream but i feel like it's so rare in family law i mean and every family lawyer knows my plight on this one all right well perfect and thank y'all for answering that we'll have a couple more polls too just so that you can kind of see where everybody lands on specific issues all right so we're going to start with a very basic premise for collections so if your pay is dependent upon your collections then it just stands for reason that you want to collect on as many outstanding invoices as possible and that's easier said than done so basics what is current ar so that's your accounts receivable so essentially any outstanding invoices that's what your current ar is what is age jr so this is going to be different depending on the person but essentially how i treated it hdr would be invoices that were over 120 days old so if a client hadn't paid an invoice in 120 days i put them in the aged ar pile and actually i would put them in i would put them in the hjr after 30 days of not paying your current is everything before 30 days and then once you hit the 30 60 90 i personally would keep them in hjr yeah i think i was just always too hopeful that clients would pay no no no i mean you know everyone i think classifies as different depending upon their practice areas and you know clients right yep and then you hit the i mean basically you're wondering why is this important well for one you have your end of year finances and budget so essentially if you're trying to forecast for next year it's difficult if you don't have all of that money in and some firms for instance mine it was a high asset family law firm and so sometimes people would you know you're owed let's say 85 000 by the opposing party because they were supposed to pay you maybe out of the proceeds of a house and they haven't done it yet and so that's a huge receivable that you have on your end that you have on your uh that you have on your books but you have actually no idea when it's going to get paid or what so it's hard to actually look at and forecast for you know let's say 2021 and it also affects bonuses my bonuses were directly tied to what i could bring in as far as receivables were concerned so if i was i could bill you know 300 hours for the month which is insane but i could do that but i'm not going to get really paid on that unless i'm actually collecting those hours so therein lies the rev also could affect partnership distributions which that usually affects office morale because if the partners aren't receiving the distributions that they thought they would chances are the rest of the office is probably going to feel some form of that frustration and also just dealing with client satisfaction too because you want them to be able to pay immediately and the longer that a bill or an invoice that's unpaid the less likely you are to get paid on that and also the longer it's unpaid kind of sometimes the more resentful clients can get because they can't remember necessarily the work that you performed for them four months ago when you're now trying to chase down the payment so just things to keep in mind and then as far as the impact of kobe 19 this should come as no you know surprise to anybody on this call but essentially you're now seeing less clients or less clients are able to actually pay their bills in full because they've lost their jobs and things like that or money is tight more clients are asking for payment plans to be able to pay over time and i see this even with clients that absolutely have the money in their account but they're thinking what if next month i don't have a job so they're really trying to conserve the cash that they have on hand and then more clients are simply just not paying their bills they're just walking on their bills which is not what anybody wants to see but there so this is kind of the problem what's happening with code 19 but there are certain things that you can do to still increase your collections on this so in your quest to collect consider these two important questions one how can i ensure that all or most of my bills get paid and then two what behaviors habits skills and processes will help maximize my collections and rosemary i'm sure you'll you'll back me up on this too but the problem that i find is you read this and these two questions are really no-brainer questions but it's you know you really have to think about when is the last time i actually sat down and was able to think this through and i actually wasn't you know putting out a million fires or trying to do all this other admin stuff for my law firm when is the last time i sat down and actually thought what can i do and what technology can i use in order to get more collections and in order to increase my revenue in my office and for me i think that's having the tools in place to be sure that your invoices get emailed out so clients get them promptly that your descriptions for your time entries are accurate and you know written correctly so clients understand sometimes you have to write them in layman's terms and then being having the ability to run reports and auto generate um you know remind your invoices and retainer invoices to get your retainers replenished so having the tools in place with core legal would give you the ability to maximize collections right which is always my goal okay so and bring in good habits great accounting habits you know especially for 2021 coming up i feel you know and i just you always want to get better every year and i think that's an easy way to get better so historical ways that attorneys have tried to maximize collections in the past so you require all cash upfront in your flat-fee situations which i would love in family law but you know very rarely can that actually happen and work out uh or you obtain a sufficient retainer in your ielts trust account to cover expected fees and expenses and so that's mostly where a lot of family attorneys especially live is in this you know getting enough for your retainer but very difficult to actually uh not burn through your retainer and you know the retainer very rarely covers the full amount of the case because things always happen or you choose to limit your practice to predictable clients or controllable tasks which i think for everybody that would be an absolute dream and i would love that but a lot of people aren't there yet to be able to do that so as you enter no go ahead i was just gonna say and you know just having the tools in place to be able to monitor with an expenses for your clients that do have retainers if you see in a dashboard when you log into your program and you get a full picture of your firm's financial health because you have the tools in place to do that then you're going to be able to see where you are with your trust accounts am i going over budget are this did this expert witness cost me more than the client's retainer allows so just keeping tabs on where you are on a day-to-day basis with real-time data i agree and i think a lot of firms don't utilize evergreen retainers like they should i think it's kind of an off overlooked or forgotten thing but in reality that's the goal right so you know how we did it is hey if their retainer ever dips below 40 percent we'd get notified or we would run a report and look at that so if when that happened they would get an email to clients with it said hey per the you know we put an evergreen clause in their contracts we'd say per your contract your ever your retainers did below 40 please replenish it within the next three days or something like that and so that email would get sent out because of course the goal is to always work against money that you already have rather than trying to change money down later which is what we're discussing now so which brings into kind of what happens in the fourth quarter so as law firms enter the fourth quarter most are starting to think about their end of your calendar finances and budgets and so including what can be done to one increase the receivables and two decrease the amount of bad debt that they have on their books or that they just end up writing off so remember that the longer a bill sits unpaid the less likely it is that it will ever get paid so your goal should be to enter the new year sans unpaid invoices if you can help it because again you just want to maximize profit and get as much money in the door before the end of the year so your steps to collect so this is the meat and potatoes of this entire presentation kind of what you need to do in order to bring more money in the door by the end of the year so first off assess the situation so you want to generate a report of your clients with outstanding receivables make sure that it includes say the client a matter name and number so that you can identify the client as you're going through the amount and age of the outstanding balances dates of invoices and a payment list to confirm history and consistency so rosemary what does this actually look like well well the age accounts well there's an aging report so you can just see your clients um and oftentimes you can run the reports in different ways and i did not present all the different examples because we'd be here all day if i did but oftentimes i like to run reports by the highest balance okay what client has the highest balance we'll start there or you can run it um you know groups clients by matters you and then you could also include information on your collection report like when was the last time they paid what's their average day to pay and so you can actually get a full picture and kind of get a feeling for when these clients are going to pay so there's several tools and reports in a in core legal um that will give you the ability to make your collection process more efficient and even with automatic invoicing and reminder invoices and the other thing i want to mention real quick while you were doing on the trust account just know that when you are doing a regular invoice with your current ar your current bill that invoice is going to have the link to your general account when you generate a retainer invoice the law pay link will have the link to your i ulta account so you don't have to worry about getting the monies in to only one account and transferring it over and you also do not have to worry about the compliance issues with the state bar on law pay taking the fees and jordan could talk more about that i just want to make sure okay i can absolutely wax poetical on if anybody has any questions but i do want to point out why these reports are so important because you could do all this manually and it will take you an insane amount of time especially to backtrack and see when the last time they paid was and how much which is critical when you're doing this and you'll see as i explain the process of getting these collections and what you need to do it's extremely important because if somebody owes me twenty thousand dollars and i don't see that they've made a payment of a thousand dollars last month that's going to affect how i talk to them so if i say hey you owe this money please give me this money here's this link you've owed it for x amount of time they're going to be really angry with me because they're going to say look i'm trying to do this i just made a payment last month is your billing department not talking to you or what are we doing so you want to be as on the up and up as possible i'm sorry i skipped over a slide but this is what we were talking about with regard to that reporting for you know what rosemary was showing you so your practice management solution just like core legal should provide several ways to generate reports so play around with it be fun with it but this saves you a bunch of time if something like core legal that you're utilizing you can just pull these reports and it's beautiful i love data it makes me happy inside i also don't have a life so it's fine all right and having your data in one solution one fully integrated time billing and accounting backend accounting solution yeah having especially gone now and i'm on you know i'm technically a solo at this point it just makes my it makes my heart happy honestly all right oh and we're next poll question please hi hopefully everyone can hear me okay i'm taking over uh for sasha this is gabby mim from the ltrc i'm the marketing specialist our next poll question is does your firm have modern cloud technology in place to badge email invoices with electronic payment submittal options the first option is yes we have cloud solution the second option is yes we badge email invoices with payment options the third option is no we do not have a cloud solution and the fourth option is no we do not email our invoices or provide electronic payment options i'd love to know how many people are still using paper invoices that'd be that'd be very interesting oh look at this 10 okay i want to talk to the 10 because that fascinates me for people who don't email invoices that's fascinating but all right thank you so much for that and we're just going to move right along in the interest of time all right so step two you need to prioritize these receivables okay so you have your list of clients that have outstanding balances now you need to prioritize them into younger current receivables and then also age receivables so essentially what you're going to do is make two separate lists so one and you can play with those dates right so like rosemary was saying she says that anything that's over 30 days for her is aged but for the purposes of this and what i did in order to bring these collections in because family law is crazy and everything is weird and there are no rules i ould separate it into receivables that are less than 120 days old so people that haven't paid invoices in 120 days that goes on a list and then everybody else over 120 days goes on another list so let's just talk about the one list for your current or young receivables as i like to say i'm not an accountant i say young it's fine but essentially what you're going to do is you're going to be reaching out to these people and sending them an email and you should receive a copy of this pdf feel free to use this email and tweak it to what you want but essentially it's going to say hi hope you're well my records show that you have an outstanding balance view of x please remit payment immediately because you think these are the people that you think that you're going to get the full amount out of that you think that they're going to pay their full bill so you just want to remind them and sometimes it all it takes is this little reminder for the client to say oh my gosh i'm so sorry i didn't see the you know i didn't see the prior emails go out from the billing department i'm so sorry thank you so much and really i would try to make sure that the attorney is the one that sends these out it adds a little bit more gravitas to it the clients are more willing and proud and probably more likely to open up an email from say their attorney then rather than the firm's billing department and things like that so make it short make it sweet put a link to your online payment account at the bottom so all they have to do is click it and they can pay immediately it's beautiful now let's talk about this is where the big stuff comes in for your age receivables which the goal is that you're only ever going to have to do this one time because as we discussed earlier with rosemary hopefully for 2021 you're going to set yourself up much better than the position that you're in now where you have these aged receivables on your books so set time on your calendar to do this but what you're going to do is take the list that you have of the receivables that are over 120 days old now you need to call that list you're going to have two separate sections one or the clients that you believe will actually pay you the full amount of what they have due so for instance sometimes i had clients that would say hey i would love to pay you but i'm not going to be able to until next year when my tax reform refund comes in which i know that they're good for it they're not lying to me i've definitely had that happen before so i'm just going to carry that on the books until next year because i know that they're going to pay me and so you're always going to have clients like that or maybe the case hasn't settled yet you should be getting paid other proceeds of the house or something like that i'm obviously going to keep that on the books because i'm pretty sure that i'm going to get the full amount now the other list is your is your dream list we call it we call it your hope and a prayer list so these are clients that if you were to get a payment from them tomorrow it would be a miracle it would be like the absolute end of the world you never expected it it would be like christmas morning for you if they actually made a payment on that account because they haven't paid in 120 days or more so that's going to be called your dream list where you have no hope of ever getting paid with that or on that account or on that money and you're fully expecting to just have to write that off at the rest at the end of the year so take that dream list and what you're going to do is try to determine how much of a discount you're willing to give them in order to get money in the door before the end of the year so what i did was and what our whole firm did really at that point is basically we would say hey we're going to give you a 50 discount you are going to if you pay in the next let's say five business days you only have to pay half of what you do the firm will forgive the rest and 50 sounds like a lot but actually it's i think one of the only things that's going to grab their attention because client that owes you ten thousand dollars and they haven't paid in six months if you only offer them a twenty percent discount they're not even probably going to entertain that fifty percent i think it's people's attention and again you don't really care because this was all money that you didn't expect to get in the first place you were going to write it off so i'll take 50 rather than zero all day long so i have a sample email here that you can send definitely tweak it to what you want but you don't have to reinvent the wheel with it but essentially it says hey client i've talked to our billing department and i've made you a deal whether i have a billing department is irrelevant but it makes the client feel special that you're trying to work something out for them so you say hey if you remit payment of let's say you owe ten thousand dollars if you remit payment of five thousand within the next five days we'll forgive the rest and you know merry christmas kind of a deal and you can pay it online by clicking this link below my signature line done and you'd be shocked at how many clients then at that point say okay i'm just going to borrow this money from my friends i'm gonna take a loan out to pay this bill because that's a huge amount when you're talking about 50 off essentially so i had a very nice little christmas bonus to myself last year by implementing this and it was wonderful and the goal is that you do this one time again and next year you're going to have processes in place or you're going to fire clients when you're supposed to fire clients who aren't paying you and you're not going to have to do this hopefully next year but that's the big big thing is you're trying to offer them a deal to push them to pay before the end of the year and then also if you're the managing partner or say you didn't work on this case day to day consider getting your associates and skin in the game so what we would do is offer them a percentage of everything they brought in from these hjr dream list accounts right so say they brought say a client owed 10 000 and the associate emailed them did all this you know really chased after that payment and got them to pay five thousand the associate would be offered twenty five percent of that five thousand dollars off the top so gives them a little skin in the game it also makes it so that you don't necessarily have to deal with it as a managing partner because that can get overly cumbersome and we have our next poll question our next poll question is does your law firm have a practice management solution with online payment options in place the first option is yes and implementing has solved 80 percent of aging and collection issues the second option is no and our law firm needs to learn more asap there are some really crazy cool statistics too about using online practice management tools along with online payment tools that get you paid substantially more per attorney at the firm and i think i have some i think i have some uh data in here on that that we'll get to hopefully in a minute that i can show you all because it's really fascinating so you don't mention going to arbitration when do you send them the threat of our arbitration i really don't and that's another i mean i love it you said that because it's a big thing for like for instance family law you know either if somebody owes me a ridiculous amount of money either i'm going to write it off or you you put them at a collections firm right and the problem with that is i still want that client to refer other clients to me and then also at that point what happens is the client will say you're saying that i owe you forty thousand dollars well you know what i don't like you anymore and i'm gonna report you to the bar they don't have an actual grievance to report but they still threaten grievances because you're trying to go and chase after that money so it's a whole kind of cost benefit analysis for attorneys where for me i'm just like it's not worth it to have to fight against this groundless you know thing with the bar that they're about to file and it's you know i'm just going to write it off so that's the problem is very rarely will i actually go after it go to collections go to arbitration if you have that clause in your contract or anything like that but that's completely uh depends on which field you're in for law i think yeah looks like a lot of fun i'm sorry go ahead no absolutely yeah that's what really that's what really gets me because yeah i still absolutely want them to refer me clients because at the end of the day that's your goal all right step three embrace technology here oh yeah so these were the stats i was talking about so 79 of people now prefer to pay with a credit or debit card and that's actually from a study that was done in 2018 they haven't updated the numbers so you can imagine that that's really more in the you know 80th percentile at this point and with coded probably in the 90th and then 74 say that they pay bills online 79 percent of switched to paperless billing again none of this should feel crazy to you because chances are everybody on this you know webinar pays something online and your clients want these options now this is a very powerful statistic from the legal trends report so in 2019 firms that used electronic payments collected over ten thousand dollars more per lawyer than firms that did not utilize electronic payments and firms are projected to collect over 15 000 more for 2020 than firms who aren't utilizing electronic payments so really and all that kind of blends in with practice management systems too i actually think the number is higher if they're using both practice management systems and online payments to their advantage so something to consider too if you're really trying to debate what you want to do with your law firm and if you want to take them into this you know online payment uh stratosphere and then they're also an asset to your firm so 40 of clients that were surveyed in this report said that they would never hire a lawyer who didn't take credit or debit cards and you also get paid faster so attorneys who accept online payments get paid 39 faster than those using traditional billing methods and then fifty seven percent of electronic payments get paid within the same day that they're billed so i can send out invoice to a client from core legal and chances are at 57 they're going to pay that same day or their 85 are going to get paid within that same week and so you think about that as you know what if you're just doing the traditional i'm sending them you know a bill and then they have to pay me by cash or check so i have to wait for them to receive the invoice i then have to wait for them to find their checkbook which by the way you know 50 percent of people don't have their checkbook anymore so that's fun or don't know how to write a check or anything like that over 50 so i have to wait for them to find their checkbook to write me a check to go and put it in an envelope find a stamp send it to me have me receive it deposit it in my bank and wait for that check to clear so think about how much time you're spending as far as your you know accounts payable is concerned and really think of if that's worth it to your firm and then also with covid oh sorry rosemary go ahead no and and the clients love the fact that they get their air miles or their bonus points on their credit cards so that's what you know they can take usually take vacations after paying a lawyer bill yeah for real one especially too with covet i mean so if i'm a client i don't want to leave my house i don't want to go to a bank i don't want to get cash i don't have a checkbook how am i going to pay you and the easiest thing and what what i like to say all the time is my goal is to eliminate any friction between my client and their payment to me so if i can eliminate as much friction as possible because i just want to get paid i don't care how i just want to get paid as quickly as possible because in family law it changes day to day people you know money gets moved around day to day i just want to get paid immediately that's always my goal and then i think we might be running out of time and we should actually be getting to q a but just really quickly wanted to touch on what core does and i think it's an incredible product too and the fact that it encompasses so much really makes me as a solo as a solo attorney especially very very excited and everything it just looks insane now when you um could just go back one slide um or one more just real quick and just so you know you know you have your your matter as a central point and then in that circle you just have everything that the solution will provide you to manage your firm and business operations and then when you get to that next slide with that management dashboard we have management dashboards as well as timekeeper dashboards so not only is mana well these can be customized for management on what they want to see but timekeepers can also get their metrics as they log in or at a moment's notice and these are customizable and i think most important for me too because this was my biggest issue as a baby law attorney and the partner would come into my office screaming at me is time entry and actually capturing your time and realizing it because what i would do is i would work 12 hours a day and i'm running to a courthouse i'm running to opposing counsel's office i'm taking phone calls all the way and think on the way and things like that and i'd work 12 hours a day but when i go back to try to add my time and think about what i actually did i was only maybe adding in six hours a day which of course was making the managing partner upset because they're losing out on money i'm losing out on money and everybody kind of loses with it so looking at this kind of time card entry process and especially this mobile app which makes me happy inside but that i think would have been a game changer for me and my attorney in my baby attorney infancy and probably would have caused a lot less yelling on the managing partner side so i'm happy to see this and i think that's just so cool because that's a huge issue with regard i think to actually generating revenue and starting your 2021 off on a very good foot so just my two and and two when you think about um lawyers they need to enter their own time real time data if you ever sub out and the recreation of time at the end of the month is overhead that your firm does not need to be spending so even if you have employees entering time for lawyers it's inefficient if they're waiting till the end of the month it's inefficient if they are not entering time as they work on their files bottom line it's inefficient and your firm is losing money and there's lots of metrics out there just having a uh even the mobile app that can also upload your receipts as you leave the courthouse scan your parking receipt tracks your mileage for your clients so you have some great business intelligence in our core legal fully functional app so it can even generate an invoice um look up balances with artificial intelligence as well it's just beautiful and then rosemary's got some fun thing to announce oh our webinar special today you get a 50 amazon card when you um attend a demo of core legal you