Discover Sample Attorney Billing Descriptions for Quality Assurance

Sample attorney billing descriptions for Quality Assurance

good afternoon and welcome today's we webinar best billing practices is hosted by the ABA legal technology resource center and will be presented by Bruce piki from tabs 3 Bruce has worked for 20 years at software Technology Incorporated which is the maker of tabs 3 and practice Master software Bruce has held many positions in the company including quality assurance manager technical support supervisor systems trainer uh currently Bruce is the product manager and is responsible for managing all project development and maintenance activities he works closely with the product development team to oversee the creation and production of new features and the software development life cycle so thank you again for joining us and Bruce take it away thanks Joshua um I know that you know everybody is busy and uh so I do plan to keep today's presentation under under 30 minutes um so I'm happy to stay on the line after the presentation to answer any questions that people may have and uh you know Joshua did give you a little bit of my background information I do also want to give you some information background information on our our company um in our products which are tabsry and practice Master which they make up an an award-winning Suite of software products ranging from billing to practice management and checkw writing to trust account um lawyers have been using tabs 3 since 1979 that's before IBM was even making personal computers and today we have over 10,000 law firms across the country that use our software uh and over the past 30 years we have learned what you must do to successfully fill for your time so that you get paid and that's what we're going to discuss today so let's go ahead and get started uh the webinar is going to focus on three specific billing practices what I call call the ABCs of best billing practices first of those is accountability second uh is billing and third is collections our goal for today's session is to teach you how to work smarter get paid faster reduce writeoffs first topic that I'm going to touch on is the accountability part and that includes three different things um tracking your time reviewing the pre- bills and attorney productivity just like uh anybody else most attorneys just like the accountability aspect of their job but they view it as a necessary evil whether you crack your uh time uh hourly flat fee billing or you do contingent billing you know it's vital to the Financial Health of your firm that you track your your time daily even for non-billable work most successful firms can account for every hour so that they know how they're spending each day and can make better time estimates regardless of your billing method tracking your time will help you know which matters clients and areas of practice are the most lucrative over 80% of attorney's fillable time falls into one of these four categories creating documents uh going to appointments sending emails or making phone calls you know many attorneys put off recording their time until the last minute they treat it uh as if it's little bit of an afterthought or they record their time in a cursory or non-descriptive manner we all know that good typing timekeeping practices lead to Greater efficiency and productivity but they can also help you prevent later problems such as me disputes so the real key is you know finding out how we can become better timekeepers and and here's my best billing practices tip number one the key to becoming a better billing timekeeper is to make time tracking less time consuming easier said than done right um you know we're going to go through some different things that you can do the first step really is is to make uh yourself work smarter and that's again easier said than done but there are several ways we're going to show you that you can take advantage of things that you already have available to you uh you have records of everything you do you have your calendar records you have email messages in your inbox sent messages folder uh your computer has a list of the documents you recently worked on your phone can probably show you all the phone calls that you've made and received and you can leverage that information uh by using different resources some of those are timers what the term toolbar plugins uh simply converting existing records to feed and recording things in journals know a lot of attorneys do start out using timers they are a great tool to help you track your time as you go and allow you to e easily turn billable hours to the fees another way to work smarter is to a what I term a toolbar plugin and a plug-in basically it it helps facilitate the exchange of information easily between applications uh practice sem provides toolbar plugins for most of the programs you use such as Outlook word Adobe Excel uh and Word Perfect allowing you to easily create practice Master Journal records B records calendar records from within those programs as an example uh you can send or receive an email when you do that it can be saved to practice Master as a journal uh pervert the actual Associated client or contact the Outlook or your email system is not really a client Centric system generally uh and then when you're reviewing your calendar you have the option to convert that event or task would be if you're scanning a document uh or saving a document you can click a button to create a doc management record to track that in the system as well or if you're researching online uh we have toolbars for uh Internet Explorer to click a button to add a fee to go for that time and then finally if you're reviewing a document you can click a button and and automatic schedule a calendar event to meet with your client a lot of ways that you can use your existing uh software and work a little bit smarter to track what you're doing throughout the day here's an example of of the journal that is available in practice Master we call it matter manager uh once you Journal that information you can see a list of all the activity for a matter and you can easily see items that haven't been turned into fees by looking for the timer icon to the right of the list my best building practice tip number two is to make use of technology that makes sense take the time to analyze how you work then figure out a better way to accomplish whatever it is you're doing in a less timec consuming Way by leveraging that technology another thing that you can do is consider time and activity tracking software products like prometa uh proximity there's others out there that create what I call an all activity log and basically what's happening is that your computer can tell you how much time you spend working on all of those items as well whether it's an email or Word document or website the activity log like this one from cha gives you a list of what you have done so you know exactly how you spend your time or you spent your day uh when you're not in the office you know make use of different mobile technology there are a lot of smartphone apps out there for time tracking when you have a tablet generally you can get mobile access to your data anywhere you can connect to the internet uh we have a product called tabs stre connect that gives you access to your client and contact information your fee and cost entry personal and your firmwide calendar and much more using your iPhone an Android device device iPad laptop or even an Apple computer my best building tip number three is to get software that makes tasks easy for everyone you know it's easy to look at that individual app uh and and inrease what you're doing but take a look at what the firm can do to to make it easier for everyone in the office to do a better job of tracking their time you know I would recommend you start with time building soft software using time and billing software is is really the most reliable way to make sure that attorneys and paralegals bill on time and it also helps reduce unreported billable time it allows firms to minimize the manual and clerical effort in the billing process helps Partners understand how the law firm is actually performing now bilding software usually tracks both your hours work and hours to Bill as well as non-billable time uring all your hours are booked it also allows you to capture your expenses it provides useful reports to to stay on top of your billing and then to you know analyze what's happening daily weekly monthly when you're looking at your billable and your non-billable time when it comes to time tracking there are many systems that can work paper time sheets work for years but some of the new computer programs work very well and really the bottom line here is that the most important thing is to decide on a system that works for everyone and then commit to it you really have to get that commitment and have the firm really commit to using that software or using that technology in Tred time my best billing practices uh fourth tip is when you're doing the time entry is to enter the time as if you had to pay the bill now when you're reviewing your pre- bills you know sit back and ask yourself would I pay this bill um in addition to verifying the the accuracy in Billing U pre- Bill review is vital to ensuring that you are communicating the value that you provide to your clients so draft your bills so that they communicate your efforts and are visually presented in a way that makes your clients grateful for your services that you're providing clients are more likely to pay hey if the bill is clear and concise and they know exactly what they're paying for you should make it you know a habit that you review all unbuilt time and expenses by timekeeper or client and also you know pay attention to how long it is gone unbuilt timing is very important when reviewing your pre- bills the faster attorneys can turn them back to accounting the faster invoices will go out to the client which will help shorten the receivable CLE uh it's important to establish policies regarding the submission of time sheets timely review of pre- bills so if you don't have a policy in place you really need to step back um and take a look at what makes sense you know whenever you're implementing policy of course you have to in this case you have to find out what's you the suitable requirements for your billing cycle whether that's monthly bonly whatever it is uh you have to find a system that's acceptable to all time Keepers and and really to key is when you're doing that you have to make sure that whatever policy you're implementing that the odds are are high for everybody to comply uh but once that policy is in in place um you know make sure you keep up on it and that things don't extend beyond your weekly bi-weekly or monthly due date U because if you don't enforce that it just invites floppy timekeeping behaviors which really need to be avoided the other thing you need need to do is you must plan for and actually make time for the billing uh the billing process really happens in one day common to have stacks of client statements in your inbox waiting to be approved but if you take the time to keep on top of your billing you'll soon find out that you will get paid faster the final aspect of accountability uh is attorney productivity hundreds of hours can be spent on a case but your bottom line will not improve if that time is never build or if the firm is absorbing costs that are associated with that case so keep your eye on the firm's productivity by reviewing your billing systems reporting which can be by client and attorney and set onset area practice you really need to know the difference between hours worked and hours build and to make sure that you're not unnecessarily writing off fees and costs billing aspect um I tell you aside from the accuracy of the bill the one thing that matters most in getting clients to pay is getting your bills out quickly timely billing is is vital for generating streamlined cash flow cash flow is is basically the flow of spendable money into your business and then back out again uh it's not the same as profit or loss believe it or not a company can be very profitable while experiencing cash flow profit problems that drive it into bankruptcy you could earn $20,000 this month but if you don't get paid until January you could run out of cash in your account so cash flow is is really key to keep an eye on and in order to maintain a a streamlined cash flow you really need to to do two things you need to Bill promptly and you need to Bill regularly um imagine receiving a bill yourself from a vendor for services that were performed six months go chances are you feel that if receiving payment was terribly important that they would have build you long before now and you know probably paying this vendor uh is not at your top most priority and your client's feel the same way uh be prompt in your billing your clients will in turn return the favor clients also expect to receive their bills from you on a regular basis and your billing cycle should be predictable so that the clients can be prepared to pay for your services process your invoices on a regular basis whether that's monthly or bi-weekly whatever it is and send them to your clients at the same time each month so they know that they should be expecting that bill one way you can expedite that billing process is their emailing statements many billing programs can automatically email statements they can produce PDF statements that automatically attached to the bills with different email templates for every attorney in The Firm or each client and they can even password protect those for security purposes emailed statements obviously get to a client faster and it makes it easier for them to quickly reply uh if they have any questions about the bill itself everything fresh usually in their mind at that point you would really be surprised at what a difference getting the statements out few days earlier to make and how much time you need to spend on collection office managers tell me that the only thing that they hate more than collecting time from all the attorneys is is proing clients to pay their bills um you may have provided tons of services and have a pist full of invoices to show for it but you can't spend those invoices or pay employees or suppliers with them unfortunately just sending an invoice doesn't always result in getting paid you know and if if a client's account becomes over do uh how long do you wait before sending them to collections the longer they go without paying the less they remember the details and extent of your services the less likely they are to pay results of a recent survey of members of the commercial collection agency section of the commercial law League of America shows that at three months delinquent 27% of accounts receivable will not be collected at six months delinquent 40 3% of your accounts receivable will never be recovered and if you extend that out to 12 months 75% of your delinquent accounts will have to be written off so if you don't currently have one you need to develop a assistant accounts receivable policy you know re review what your firm is doing right now and document and take that write your policy out um really if you do want your clients to know what's expected you do have to have a a detailed policy in place it's really crucial to the collaborative effort between you the attorney to the clients uh it's a good idea to include terms of payment and engagement letters and then on your part you really do need to run accounts receivable reports monthly and act immediately on collecting those pass two balances this takes us to our uh tip number five of best filling practices that is simply keep good clients now important to know uh your clients and know what a good client is and the way to do that really is is run different reports um most successful law firms you know they'll keep a list of their top clients for fillings you also need to know who your uh top clients are in collection and check it every month know who brings in the revenue for your firm whose business is actually costing your firm money and that can be at it at various levels not just at the matter level but also the area practice level as well if you want to get paid right away uh one other tip is that you must give your clients payment options really you need to have a plan to get paid where you take on your clients you need to get money in advance if uh you feel that that's going to be a slow pay or a no pay type client uh you're an existing client especially before you do any additional work you need to look at what payment options uh you can offer you may want to consider setting up payment plans you don't do that presently but another option is to consider uh allowing firm to accept credit cards for payments and if you don't accept credit cards right now uh I know that some people are reluctant to do that and I'm not suggesting that you put the Visa and MasterCard stickers on your front door but uh what I would suggest is this that you you do get a merchant account so that you can accept credit card and then when your office needs to make collection calls you can let those clients know that you can take their payment now right over the phone uh and in those cases it's really worth the additional charge um you get paid and be done with it and by accepting credit cards you will offer your clients a convenient way to pay which really will help you get paid faster reduce those writeoffs and it really does help you spend less time collecting those past two billings my final billing tip tip number six is to automate as much of the billing process as possible it's really vital to your billing processes that they're streamlined um and unfortunately in many organizations this is far from the case many can struggle with manual methods for submitting and reviewing hours coordinating those approvals processing expenses and much more and these all factor into that into slow cash flow and they really hinder profitability just as much as clients who pay L pay late so in order to control the cash flow you really do need to make sure that number one you're entering your time efficiently and accurately uh that you Bill for your time quickly and that you collect on your Billings and this really is an an ongoing process that involves review and Improvement which is you know the first step of what we're talking about today step back take a look at the process that you're doing for uh entering time reviewing that time with pre- bills uh also look at your billing processes whether you can improve those uh in addition to that the collection process to how quickly do you jump on that and what procedures are in place you know look at all of those processes that are in place and Mark areas for improvement you know when necessary uh generate new policy the key there is that you got to have the commitment to it uh so you do have to make sure that you get the right people on board uh that day take some planning you know and then the implementation itself can be uh again somewhat tricky but it will pay off finally don't stop there this is a constant process that requires ongoing evaluation there's always room for improvement uh but your firm must be open to making those types of changes I hope that you enjoyed uh today's presentation that some of my ideas and comments make a difference in your firm uh maybe one of my suggestions maybe something that's been rattling around in the back of your mind looking for a time to come out uh however it happens I hope that you come up with some good ideas during our time today and that uh you take a few minutes out of your busy day shut down your outlook put your smartphone in a drawer and really think about a billing practice that you would like to change and you will find ways to make that uh better process and to make a difference and we want to thank you all for attending uh keep an eye out for more webinars that ltrc will will be sponsoring we'll have one every single month at the very least and again thank you and thanks Bru and thank you Josh for setting everything up and allowing us the opportunity to to present this today and I hope in the future that uh you know if you have any questions you certainly give us a call and we continue the conversations thanks again