In this environmentally conscious era, everyone seems to be talking about the paperless office. Legal billing software products now have many features that make it easy to manage your billing process from start to finish without having to print a thing. Let’s take a look at the “old way” of doing things, with piles of paper, and then look at the features in modern legal billing software that make it easier than ever to perform the same functions in a paperless environment.
Time Entry
The old way: Timekeepers fill out paper timesheets and hand them to an assistant to enter into the computer.
The paperless solution: Electronic Timesheet Entry.
Timekeepers can now enter their time in a traditional timesheet format, instead of having to enter individual slips. Clients and tasks can be pre-filled so that the timekeepers need only to enter the number of hours worked in the appropriate box. They can make life even easier by using the timer to keep track of the time as they work.
Pre-Bill Worksheets
The old way: The billing clerk prints out a stack of pre-bill worksheets and then gives them to the boss to review and mark up before the final bills are generated.
The paperless solution: Interactive bill preview with drill-down capability
The boss can print the pre-bills to his/her display and click on-screen to drill down and make the changes right in the program.
Billing
The old way: Print out the bills. Stuff them in envelopes. Stamp the envelopes. Put them in the mail. Wait a week for the client to receive the bill and another week (hah!) for them to pay.
The paperless solution: Send bills via email
Many modern legal billing products now allow you to email bills right from within the program, via a connection to Outlook. The client receives the bill as a PDF file. You can create an unlimited number of email templates with different message bodies and subject lines. You can even embed tokens like the invoice number and amount into the message and subject line. If you prefer, you can also print the bills to PDF files and then email them manually.
Reporting/Data Analysis
The old way: Print reports to paper
The paperless solution: Print reports to display, PDF file, Excel or Word
The added bonus to viewing your reports on screen is that you can click on the data elements to drill down for more detail. Sending reports to Excel gives you extra functionality and flexibility. Many legal billing systems now have a “print to Excel” option; typically you can choose to send the data from billing to Excel in columns, or send it as it appears in the standard report format.
Cash Receipts
The old way: Open the mail. Enter checks into software. Take checks to the bank.
The paperless solution: Unfortunately, very few (if any) legal billing packages have yet developed a way to receive invoice payments other than to enter them manually. However, there are many ways that you can receive payments from clients over the internet or phone without using checks. We would be willing to bet that, before too much longer most of the legal billing software developers will incorporate a way to import payment transactions from the internet via electronic funds transfer (EFT), which you can then use to process client payments.
So there you have it. Not only do these solutions save paper, they save time, resources and money.
For help with selecting a legal billing system to facilitate creation of a paperless office for your legal practice, contact one of the legal billing experts at Eastern Legal Systems.
Jack Schaller has been active in the field of law office technology since 1989, and has worked with a variety of commercial accounting, legal billing, practice management, and document management software products during his twenty plus years in the software consulting field. During his tenure as a software consultant he has garnered many sales and service awards for his work with legal software products. Jack is a frequent presenter at legal conferences and seminars, and is a regular contributor to TechnoLawyer and other technology publications.