Billing — the bane of every young attorney’s existence.
You’ve worked your butt off to get through law school. You’ve sweated bullets doing internships in prestigious law firms and clerking for tough-as-nails judges. And you’ve passed your bar exam with flying colors.
But, like most young attorneys, billing your service providers makes your brain leak…
Here’s Rudy literally melting while trying to figure out
how he’s going to invoice Trump. Don’t be like Rudy.
Don’t worry… you’re not alone here. And if you want to avoid common pitfalls most attorneys make, here’s a list of seven billing tips for young attorneys to make your journey smoother.
Figuring out your law firm’s billing best practices is challenging, even if you are running a one-man show.
That said, if you want to stop selling yourself short, you’re going to have to stop winging it. An attorney without billing guidelines consistently undercharges. And that’s a fact.
Are you ready to stop being that sloppy, unorganized attorney? Do you want to be a good biller?
Yes? Awesome.
In this blog post, I’ll share 7 best billing practices for attorneys. Take notes (because they didn’t teach you this in law school), and get ready to finally start charging your worth.
Let’s dig in.
People don’t enjoy long, drawn-out processes.
What they enjoy even less is jumping through flaming hoops to pay for something.
As a brand-new attorney, now is the time for you to get organized and impress your clients by showing them how easy it is to work with you!
Clustdoc is a client management software that’s packed with features that will support you in delivering your best work every single time. From onboarding checklists and document collection, all the way to secure digital signatures and one-click online payments — Clustdoc does it all.
Voila!
You just saved yourself from doing hours of tedious admin work every week.
Feels good, right?
You want to start billing your law clients faster & without mistakes?
Our client management solution makes the whole process painless for both you and your clients — send in timesheets, get lightning-fast approvals & invoice with a click of the button.
First thing’s first — you start your work when you have a signed agreement, not before.
I’m not saying that your clients will pull a fast one on you, but that’s exactly what some of them might do. Remember, as an attorney, you’ll deal with some questionable characters — having a contract in place protects you from doing unintentional pro bono work.
Now, that agreement will be full of legalese language (unavoidable in your line of work). But, two things need to be super clear and spelled out — your billing practices and your payment expectations.
Before signing on with a client, make sure that they understand your billing process and payment terms. Talk to them about your hourly rates. Talk to them about what minimum billable hour requirements are. And talk to them about what happens when they don’t settle payment on time.
What you’re aiming for here is complete transparency and clarity.
Your clients should know what they can expect from you right from the start. That way, you’re happy, they’re happy — and best of all you don’t have to deal with unpaid bills.
Instead of jotting down things like ‘one minute and 38 seconds for an email reply’ or ‘46 minutes explaining documentation submission to the client’ and then adding it all up, use the tenths-of-an-hour method to make sure that you can quickly and correctly add up your time.
So anything between one and five minutes gets a time increment of 0.1. Anything between seven and twelve becomes 0.2. Thirteen between eighteen turns into 0.3. And so on.
The image below will give you a better idea of how this works:
Experienced senior lawyers use this billing best practice to make sure that they never under-report their time because it makes it easier to attach value to their minutes.
Tracking and entering your time daily adds 5-10 minutes of admin work on top of everything else that you do that day.
And I know that you think you have better things to do.
But consider this — is it easier to do this for a few minutes every day, or would you rather do it for eight hours at the end of the billing period?
Recreating your entire month accurately, line by line, minute by minute, is nearly impossible. In an effort not to inflate your billable hours, you’ll likely record less time you spent on something. And you’ll also forget to record a lot of phone calls, emails, and hours spent on reviewing documents.
The best billing advice that we can give attorneys here is to record every task as soon as it’s completed. Use software or spreadsheets — heck, use a notebook! — to make this easier, and to cut down on those unbilled hours.
How would you like to get a bill that says?– “Some stuff completed + phone call + answering emails.”
Not really, right?
Well, your clients need more clarity than that, too.
One of the core attorney billing guidelines is that you separate your time entries and make them as clear as possible.
So the line items on your timesheets should read something like:
“A 30-minute meeting with the opposing counsel regarding the upcoming settlement meeting.”
Or…
“Two hours on preparing past employment documentation for the visa application.”
The only exceptions here are emails and phone calls — you should group these to avoid multiple entries if you’ve spent the day emailing the client and responding to them.
Also, when writing your time entries, don’t be vague. If you attended a meeting with the opposing counsel, you should specify what that meeting was about. This way, you’ll avoid client pushback when the time comes to pay up. It’s better to spend a few minutes writing detailed entries than an hour on the phone to clarify them line by line if your client requests more context.
This will also help you avoid making mistakes such as double billing.
Ahhhh… multitasking — the easiest way to trick yourself into thinking that you’re doing some actual work when you’re just shuffling papers around your desk.
Regardless, as an attorney, you will most certainly have to swap jobs frequently.
The danger in doing this is that you might forget to record accurate time for those tasks that take you less than five minutes, especially if you’re not diligently recording your time. The best way to get around that is to use multiple desktop timers.
These timers look like this:
When you’re switching between tasks, you simply tap the appropriate timers and they tick away, recording the time you spend on each task. At the end of the day, you have an accurate snapshot that you can then use to fill out your billable hours’ timesheet.
Yes, when you’re fresh out of your bar exam and working on a complicated case, you’ll likely spend more amount of time on tasks than a seasoned pro would.
And that’s perfectly okay.
If you’re thorough, thoughtful, and conscientious about your work, you’re allowed to spend an hour on something… even though it would take your boss 30 minutes.
So, if you think something could have been done faster, don’t report less time than what you spent on it.
There are two reasons for this:
You don’t want to come off as a slacker? And you don’t want to be paid less than you deserve?
Then take this attorney billing best practice to heart and never under-report your time.
When you’re just breaking into the world of law, you’re already doing time-consuming works your seasoned colleagues don’t want to do.
Don’t add insult to injury by being underpaid for it, as well.
Got it?
And don’t forget — Clustdoc can help you save a ton of time every single week by optimizing client onboarding, document collection, and payments. Start using it today to streamline your workflow.
Clustdoc is a client onboarding orchestration platform used by modern teams around the world. With Clustdoc, you can run automated workflows for requesting, reviewing and verifying new customers’ data, documents and contracts – without juggling between tools.
If your team is managing new customers using emails, spreadsheets and PDFs, you’ll probably love using Clustdoc.
