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New Feature Expedites the Process of Law Firm Invoicing Following a Long Series of Product Updates
LexisNexis® Legal & Professional, a leading provider of content and technology solutions, announced today it has added batch invoicing to the LexisNexis Firm Manager® product. The Firm Manager product is an all-in-one online solution for small law firm practice management that powers front and back-office firm operations.
The new functionality is designed to enable law firms to get their bills out faster, reducing the time, and expense firms spend preparing monthly invoices.
“Batch invoicing enables small law firms to significantly reduce the amount of time, effort and administrative burden spent on the billing process,” said Susan Harman, vice president and product champion for the Firm Manager team. “Our research suggests most attorneys describe billing as laborious and uncomfortable task that many would prefer to avoid altogether; the Firm Manager product makes running a law firm, including billing process, a lot easier.”
The Firm Manager product uses a “wizard” style tool to guide attorneys through the process of creating a batch of invoices. This enables a law firm to establish a regular billing cycle to prepare all their invoices for email or mail distribution in just a few clicks. The wizard provides a set of options so attorneys can choose how they want to bill clients. For example, a firm can bill for all legal services performed by a specific attorney, or by date, a range of dates, or by total amount due.
The batch invoicing process also enables law firms to customize invoice templates, for example to include a standard message across all bills. It also provides the means to write a custom note for specific clients and includes options for applying discounts or even “no charge.” Existing invoicing capabilities automatically deduct – and track for record keeping purposes – any draw from a trust account, or can set a bill due date (net due) immediately or along a range from seven to 60 days.
Batch invoicing solves an enormous inconvenience for small law firms – especially solo and duo law firms – where attorneys hold down many responsibilities from marketing to practice to invoicing. In a recent survey of law firm billing practices, about62% of small law firm spend roughly eight hours per month on their billing processes while another quarter spend about 16 hours per month. More than half (58%) suggested they were already spending too much time on billing, which is non-billable time.
Business processes, and perhaps the technology supporting those processes, were also highlighted in the survey. Some attorneys indicated billing for services too far in the past was a reason accounts fall in arrears and about half (46%) put the chances of collecting on an invoice as “unlikely” or “very unlikely.”
One respondent, a solo attorney practicing Family Law in Texas, wrote in open-ended comments he had a strong desire to streamline “the process so it doesn’t take so many steps, and so long to complete. For my solo firm I can easily spend an entire business day billing clients.”
The Firm Manager product is a completely redesigned product launched early in 2014, after years of field research with small law firm attorneys. In essence it was created by attorneys, for attorneys and engineered to be easy-to-use, affordable and lightning fast.
“I became productive with Firm Manager in less than an hour,” wrote Edward J. Zohn, a New Jersey-based lawyer in aTechnoLawyer review of the LexisNexis Firm Manager product. “Firm Manager is an attractive, reasonably priced, well-designed web application in which lawyers clearly had some input.”
Since then, the LexisNexis team has released multiple software updates bringing new features to the product including the “Money Finder” feature which automatically finds activities that haven’t been associated with logged time. In addition, expense integrations including bidirectional synchronization with the Google Calendar™, more powerful invoicing, and document foldering. The Firm Manager team also recently announced integration projects with Microsoft® Outlook and Microsoft Office 365™ productivity solutions.
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