Accounting & Reporting

Billing is an integral part of running the business that is your law practice. That’s why having legal practice management software with robust billing and accounting features is so important to day-to-day operations of your law firm, and for staying competitive in an ever-evolving legal industry.

Let’s face it: remote work is here to stay. It doesn’t matter if you’re going into an office every day or meeting in-person with colleagues a few days a week; remote work will always be a fallback for many industries, especially the legal industry. With this thought in mind, optimizing your law firm for the new year is integral to the overall health of your business, and it’s never too early to start planning. That’s why it’s more important than ever to have a cloud-based legal practice management (LPM) system at your disposal.

In poker, table stakes are the money or chips a player needs to lay on the table to be part of the game. Similarly, in a law practice, your ability to compete in legal services increasingly depends on the tools you have available to deliver excellent service to clients. In recent years, the shift to remote work and the increasingly sophisticated demands of clients have upped the ante on practice management software. Standard practice management software features have shifted from nice to have to must-have.

Automation can be defined in many ways by many industries; however, it doesn’t always have to apply to complex procedures like robotic process automation (RPA) or “advanced tasks.” In law firms, automation is frequently defined as using software to automate tedious and repetitive tasks to get work done faster and more efficiently. Law firms can automate a substantial portion of their work with technology. For example, most firms repurpose their pleadings, templates, form letters, and other documents completed for past clients – why reinvent the wheel? Yet, according to a recent Statista survey, 75 percent of the lawyers who responded said they spent more than 20 hours per week on non-billable work like legal research, court filings, and administrative tasks.

We, as professionals, have been working remotely for years, long before the pandemic. Attorneys and paralegals have been emailing work home to themselves forever – despite IT’s pleas to not do that (you know who you are). The hybrid work environment is not new. What is new, however, is the normalization of it.

Communication is imperative to the success of any law firm, especially when most businesses are operating on hybrid or fully remote work schedules. According to a recent survey, about 16% of firms invested in communication software at the onset of the pandemic in addition to other cloud-based practice management systems. And with the way things are trending, having open communication is going to be integral to building out your practice and making your business a success. However, it isn’t just communication between clients about the status of the cases that’s important, but also communication within the firm and keeping employees on the same page about tasks and matters.

With payments trending as such a buzz-worthy topic in the legal industry, we were excited to sit down with Ari Kaplan, attorney, author and leading legal industry analyst, to hear all about the evolution of payment options for law firms on Ari’s podcast Reinventing Professionals. Our very own General Manager of Payments, Kevin Gallagher, sat down with Ari to talk about these trends along with the benefits of a practice management system with built-in payment options, and how firms can manage costs and maintain advanced security standards.

Let’s be honest: Billing and invoicing are no one’s favorite tasks. Manual processes have long made these tasks time-consuming and tedious. Nonetheless, they’re still critical to the success of any firm. Thankfully, there’s a better way, and many firms are starting to realize it. Manual processes are slowly giving way to automated online payments that result in faster and more secure payments. Abacus Payment Exchange (APX) is the automated, integrated, secure way to handle business payments that offers your clients the convenience they need while seamlessly working with the realities of a post-pandemic, virtual world.

According to a McKinsey Global Institute report, over 23 percent of a lawyer’s work can be handled by technology. In addition, half of all lawyers are already using some form of workflow automation. Legal practice management software is a valuable part of a law firm’s toolkit that will save time by automating tedious, low-value tasks, allowing attorneys to focus on substantive legal work instead.