Category: Practice Management

Giving a discount to your client can go a long way towards boosting client satisfaction and ensuring repeat business. It’s a small gesture that can have a big impact, both for your law firm and for your client.

TimeNet Law offers several ways to provide a discount to your client. Take a couple minutes to learn about them, and be sure to use them to increase client satisfaction at your law firm.

Discount vs. Markdown vs. Write-off: What’s the difference?

They all achieve the same end result — your client gets a discount. The difference is on the accounting side. If you’re not familiar with these terms, it can be confusing, but it all boils down to this:

• A discount is applied to the total fees and/or expenses before invoicing.
• A markdown is applied to a specific task before invoicing.
• A write-off is applied to an invoice’s balance after invoicing.

If you want to give your client a 10% discount on their next invoice, use a discount. If you want to give your client a $50 discount on one specific task, use a markdown. If you want to give your client a $100 discount on a balance they already owe, use a write-off.

Using “No Charge” Tasks

One of the simplest ways to provide a discount is to set one or more tasks to No Charge before invoicing. This will show the task on the invoice, along with the normal billing rate, but show that this task was performed free of charge.

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Remember — dealing with the legal system can be a very scary and stressful time for your client. Giving them a discount is a powerful way to build trust and client satisfaction for your law firm.

2020 has been extremely disruptive and stressful for many people, and that includes attorneys.

Offices and courthouses have had to close, court proceedings placed on hold, and even taking a meeting in person with your client can be a logistical nightmare.

Some law firms have struggled to evolve in this rapidly changing world. Others still have flourished, by either implementing or relying on a previously implemented virtual office strategy.

Now is the time to focus on ensuring your law firm remains relevant and successful during the pandemic era and beyond.

Why you need to consider transitioning to a virtual law office

The pandemic of 2020 has forced an evolutionary change on business. But even after the pandemic is over, the overall trend of business is shifting toward working from home and virtual offices. Already, many companies are saying that work from home options will remain in place long term, even after things get back to normal.

The truth is, you need to be able to deliver every service and interaction that you typically offer your clients in your office – remotely.

Whether you are a larger law firm or a solo practitioner, it doesn’t matter. You need to be able to conduct business and run your firm from the office, from home, and anywhere else you happen to be.

How to transition to a virtual law office

In this section, we’ll cover:

• How to make your documents and billing data remotely accessible
• How to make sure your data is secure and private
• Pros and cons of cloud-based software
• A better, safer option than storing your data solely in the cloud

How to make your documents and billing data remotely accessible

It’s actually much easier than you might imagine to begin transitioning right now. Chances are, you’re already sharing files at your office. Any simple shared folder setup can be adapted to allow remote access. This is typically handled through a Virtual Private Network (VPN).

You may also be using a cloud storage service, such as Dropbox or iCloud Drive, to sync files between your devices already.

If you’re doing one of these two things, you’ve already set yourself up to operate as a virtual law office. If not, its as simple as creating folder in your iCloud Drive folder, signing up for a free Dropbox account, or setting up a shared folder on your hard drive using Apple’s System Preferences > Sharing preference pane. Just turn on File Sharing, and drag a folder you want to share into the Shared Folders list.

How to make sure your data is secure and private

Accessing your documents is only part of the puzzle. You’ll also need a good system in place to manage your clients, track your time, create invoices, log and track payments and retainers, and effectively search your documents and link them to clients.

Cloud-based software offers some advantages – mainly that you can access your data and enter time using a website from anywhere. However, using web-based software comes with some significant disadvantage. It is often slow and clunky, and it is unwise to store all of your data in a system that is only accessible when you have internet access, and when that system itself isn’t down or otherwise unavailable.

There are also important privacy implications to consider. With cloud-based software, all of your data is stored using their own proprietary formats and encryption, and that data can be accessed by them anytime. The risk of having very private information about your law firm and your clients sold to advertisers and other third parties, or otherwise inadvertently leaked through a security breach, is very real. It has happened many times before.

A better, safer option than storing your data solely in the cloud

A much better option is to store all of your data on your own hard drive or device, in an independently encrypted format. This way, it is always accessible, with or without internet, and all of your critical documents, client billing and accounting aren’t at risk of becoming unavailable to you in the event of a service outage. You also don’t have to worry about your data willfully or unintentionally being put into the hands of third parties.

By using a system that keeps all of your data on your own hard drive and automatically syncs it to all of your devices, you have an extremely robust solution for data management. Your data is always backed up on a cloud server in case your computer has a hardware malfunction, or becomes lost or damaged. Your data is always available on your own hard drive. And it’s encrypted and only readable by you. You can also be assured that no cloud service that stores your data also has the ability to read or decrypt it. These things are absolutely critical.

A law firm management system like TimeNet Law that has a native app for your Mac and integrates with cloud or shared folder syncing can give you all of these great benefits. But whatever system you choose, be sure that it cannot access, sell, or lock you out of your data.

Running your law firm remotely

Now that you have a good handle on storing and accessing your data, and have a good law firm management system in place, you’ve got to put it all into action.

Adapting to a Home Office and Staying On Track With Your Team

If you are aren’t a solo practitioner, make sure to schedule regular virtual meetings with your team using a service like Zoom or Skype. Just because you’re not all going to the office every day doesn’t mean you can’t see each other and communicate effectively.

Working from home is an adjustment for a lot of us, so be sure to check in with each other often and identify pain points that anyone is running into so you can address them and keep things operating smoothly.

Be sure you have a dedicated workspace if at all possible. Comfort, posture, and an environment conducive to focus are all vital. There is a mental mode shift that happens when you enter the office. It’s the same thing that happens when you go to the gym – your mind and body are ready to workout. Sitting at the kitchen table signals your mind that its time to eat. Sitting on the couch often subconsciously switches us into a mode of relaxation. Having a dedicated workspace is an extremely important key for all successful home office operations.

Interacting With Your Existing Clients

Your clients can’t simply walk into your office, so make sure they have other options for contacting you. Offer appointments on Zoom or Skype, and make sure they have all relevant phone numbers and email addresses to contact you. Make yourself available for virtual meetings and let your clients know about these new options.

Be sure to reinforce that even though the world we live in is a very different place right now, they can still expect the same level of service from your law firm. That has not changed.

New Clients

For new clients, make sure you have a simple intake form on your website so they can establish themselves with you as a lead and quickly schedule an introductory virtual meeting with you. This also allows you to quickly determine whether this is a client that you wish to take on or not.

2020 has been a year like no other in our lifetime, this much is certain. But the most successful law firms are adapting quickly, and you can too. Working from home offers many benefits, and even as things slowly return to normal, the idea of “the workplace” has forever been changed. Implementing a virtual law office strategy for your law firm right now is a fantastic option.

If the answer is anything more than “a few minutes”, you’re doing it wrong.

You don’t get paid unless the invoices go out. It has to be done every month. And the last thing you should be doing is scrambling to remember your time and update your entries on billing day, printing or emailing invoices by hand one by one, or not sending them out on a predictable schedule.

Using a time tracking and billing system like TimeNet Law makes it easy. Your time is already entered. And your time is accurate, because you’ve used a timer to track how long your tasks took. Your invoices are scheduled, automatically created in bulk, and ready for you to review and send out with one click.

We’ve been told over and over again by attorneys that billing is stressful, time consuming, and monotonous. But it doesn’t have to be that way. If you have a system in place that offers One Click Billing, it can be completely handled for you.

Don’t waste hours every month on your billing. Once you see how nice it is having it handled for you automatically, you’ll never go back.

Many lawyers aren’t tracking their time like they should. It’s all too common to scribble your time out on a Post-It note, or enter it into a spreadsheet. Sometimes you guess how long a task took. Even worse, you do some work and don’t even account for it at all.

How much time are you forgetting, or miss-calculating? How much money are you leaving on the table? We were curious, and so we asked. And what we found was surprising.

Comparing similar matters before and after implementing a time tracking strategy, lawyers billed up to 35% more time when using a timer like the one built into TimeNet Law.

It turns out, humans aren’t very good at estimating time. And we’re not overestimating. We’re coming up short. Psychologists have coined terms and written books on the phenomena (for example, “the planning fallacy” and “optimism bias.”)

Contractors often miss project completion dates by weeks. A common rule for programmers and video editors is to estimate how long a project will take, and then double it.

That task you did that felt like 45 minutes could easily have been 2 hours. Maybe it took you “10 minutes” to read a document, but a timer would tell you 24 minutes. Those things all add up to significant increases.

By not logging and timing your tasks as you go, you could be losing thousands of dollars in potential revenue for your law firm every single month!

Time tracking isn’t particularly glamorous. It can be tedious or seem unnecessary. But it is absolutely critical that you start building good time tracking habits today. By using time tracking software and recording your time and tasks, as you do them, you will increase your billable hours. We guarantee it. And while time tracking itself may not be particularly exciting, it’s fun to see the money ticking up.

Your time is valuable. What you do is important. Don’t shortchange yourself.