We believe lawyers and law firms have the power to change the world. Every day we interact with lawyers making positive change, sticking up for the underdog and expanding access to the justice system. But we recognize there can be tradeoffs between pursuing these aims and paying the bills.
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Business of Law,
Confido Legal News
Millions of business use QuickBooks as their accounting platform. From sole proprietors to large corporations, from cobblers to manufacturing firms, QuickBooks users come from all corners of the business world. With QuickBooks serving such a diverse set of clients, there are certain industries and business types with unique accounting needs that QuickBooks doesn't fully support out-of-the-box. Law firms fit into this category.
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Accounting,
QuickBooks Integration,
QuickBooks,
Business of Law
Trust or IOLTA accounts evoke feelings of fear and frustration. Untangling trust accounting mistakes can devour precious hours, and the risk of running afoul of the rules of professional conduct is constant. Yet for all the bad, retainers (in particular evergreen retainers) are one of the top ways to improve your firm’s collection rate. With collection rates averaging around 85% according to the 2021 Clio Trends Report, collections is a major financial drain on the legal industry.
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Business of Law
Whether a client unilaterally decided not to pay your firm, or you made a legitimate mistake in your billing process, disputes or chargebacks on credit card transactions do occur. The card brands have processes in place for settling these disputes, and this article outlines the actions your firm can take after receiving notice of a chargeback. For information on how to avoid chargebacks, see How to Protect Your Law Firm from Chargebacks.
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Business of Law
Vetting, deploying, and managing new technology takes a lot of time and can be expensive. More to the point, while much of today’s cloud computing technology uses some common technologies, the implementation can vary significantly even in the cloud. This can be a real headache for law firms who not only often deal with sensitive information but have specific rules and heightened standards regarding how confidential and privileged information must be protected.
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Business of Law,
Confido Legal News
You can’t really blame consumer bankruptcy attorneys for being finicky about how they get paid. After all, would-be clients wouldn’t be knocking on the door if the those debtors had managed their money well and been able to regularly pay their debts. As a result, many bankruptcy attorneys do way more gymnastics than other lawyers to ensure they get paid. For example, insisting upon upfront payment, payment by the debtor’s friends or family, automated payments that fall on a debtor-client’s payday, or even the development of a new type of bankruptcy, bifurcated bankruptcy, that changes how clients pay in order to improve their odds of getting paid (we won’t get into bifurcated bankruptcy here but watch this space for a subsequent post on the topic). You’ve got to hand it to them.
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Business of Law
Listen, we here at Confido Legal work hard for the money we get paid. Payments isn’t as mentally straining as rocket science or physically demanding as coal mining but it is a fairly complex regulated business and we work really hard to try and make things great for our law firm customers. And while there are still a handful of bar associations that want to make it harder for law firms to accept electronic payments (we’re looking at you Indiana, Iowa, Mississippi, Nebraska, West Virginia, Alabama, and Michigan), today most law firms are largely free to take advantage of the collections and convenience benefits that accepting electronic payments offers.
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Business of Law
Small law firms live or die by cash flow. A few extra percentage points on revenue can help a firm make payroll or pay rent (hopefully not, but “gulp!”), buy software, hire, experiment with a new practice area, or even innovate on a new product or service. But extra revenue rarely comes easy. What if you had a way—using existing systems—to immediately find additional revenue for your law firm?
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Business of Law,
Confido Legal News
This is a guest post by law firm financial expert Brandy Derrick of Legal Ease Bookkeeping.
Every career has its own set of lingo, special terms, and years of learning to master. Attorneys work very hard to become skilled in their field, mastering enormous amounts of knowledge, terminology, and concepts. Although busy with his or her practice, an attorney would do well to learn the basic terms of the financial statements. Understanding each one will help an attorney profit and make adjustments in business.
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Topics:
Firm Financials,
Key Performance Metrics,
Business of Law
Though lawyers are a solitary profession - they spend a surprising amount of time in their own heads - they’re also remarkably social. We made a cursory count recently and came up with 103 state, regional, local, and specialty bar associations. And we feel fairly confident that the total number is certainly double or even triple that. Feels like as long as there have been lawyers, there have been bar associations.
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Business of Law,
Lawyer Communities
Although electronic payments are not relevant for every firm, most law firms do at least a portion of their business by issuing ongoing invoices. For these firms, the data is clear: Electronic payments matter.
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Business of Law
Here's our nearly 20 page white paper on law firms shifting processing credit card processing fees to clients.
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Topics:
Firm Financials,
Credit Card Fees,
Business of Law
Every year, to much fanfare, The American Lawyer releases a list of the largest law firms in the world, also known as the AmLaw 100.
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Business of Law,
Confido Legal News
I recently joined another attorney Dan, Dan Jaffe, from LawLytics for a great conversation that, yes, touched on Confido Legal and on Dan's business, LawLytics, but was mostly focused on a favorite topic of mine, legal technology. On the Confido Legal side we covered Confido Legal's credit card fee shifting technology and integrated ACH features, the Confido Legal Zapier integration, and the forthcoming Confido Legal Quickbooks integration.
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Business of Law,
Confido Legal News
I’ve been working in legal technology for a while. I’ve been thinking about it for even longer than that. And I worked at Microsoft before that. And, if there’s one thing that I know about lawyers - even today - it’s that Lawyers. Love. Microsoft Office. Practice management systems come and go, accounting software ebbs and flows, some lawyers try document automation. But just about every lawyer and law firm uses Office.
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Business of Law,
Confido Legal News
Subscriptions were the name of the game when Dan Lear recently chatted with Houston Estate Planning attorney John Strohmeyer, the namesake of Strohmeyer Law, on John's podcast, Five Star Counsel.
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Business of Law,
Confido Legal News
Here on Financially Legal we recently wrote about the three main ways payment processors rip lawyers off: tiered pricing, monthly fees, and limiting available payment methods. You can read that article for the higher-level discussion but, as we mentioned, tiered pricing deserves its own discussion. We dig in on that here.
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Business of Law
We legal folks are hardly unbiased about the good that we think we do in the world but there’s little doubt that lawyers really do play an important role in our society. In fact, one of the interpretations of the famous line from Shakespeare’s Henry VI “The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers” is that killing all the lawyers is the fastest way to societal chaos, not societal improvement. Lawyers are the bulwark against tyranny and government overreach and the defenders of the rule of law.
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Business of Law
Accepting electronic payment is table stakes for most lawyers and law firms.
The Clio Trends Report has been fairly explicit about the benefits of electronic payments:
- The 2019 Clio Trends Report stated that 57 percent of electronic payments get paid the same day they are billed, and 85 percent get paid within a week.
- The 2018 Clio Trends Report found that 38 percent of consumers prefer to make payments electronically via email, online portal, or on the web.
- Finally, that same 2018 report indicated that 50 percent of consumers are more likely to hire a lawyer who takes electronic payments, or, stated another way, 40 percent would never hire a lawyer who doesn’t take credit or debit cards.
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Business of Law
There’s a lot to think about if your firm is considering shifting credit card fees to clients - is this practice right for our firm? How should we communicate about it to clients? Is it permissible in our state? Do our local rules of professional conduct permit it? What method should our firm use?
The good news is that it’s not that complicated. You’ll likely be good to go if you adhere to some simple best practices. Below we’ve compiled a list of best practices for two of the most common ways that merchants implement shifting credit card fees: cash discounting and surcharging. We’ll start with discounting:
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Business of Law
Although you've probably been charged a separate fee to use a credit card with a given business you may not know that businesses haven't always been able to do this.
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Business of Law
Allison Williams, the Law Firm Mentor, helps law firms grow and reach their full potential. Her podcast, Crushing Chaos, tackles all sorts of issues lawyers face while working to grow their firms.
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Topics:
Business of Law,
Confido Legal News
Even with the effects of COVID still lingering, we as attorneys have an opportunity to make 2021 our firms' best year yet. Join Confido Legal and law firm financial consultant Devon Thurtle Anderson of Skepsis Technologies as we explore the unique opportunities 2021 offers for law firms. We'll discuss how firms can seize these opportunities to realize both short and long-term growth. Spoiler alert: Our strategies don't require raising rates or working more hours! In fact, we specifically recommend against that.
Some of the topics we'll cover include:
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Business of Law,
Confido Legal News
One of the most important things about law practice is getting paid. With the advent of electronic payments technology, the process of getting paid can be easier than ever. Some of you may be saying "Advent?!?!? PayPal is more than 20 years old!" But research suggests that fewer than 25% of lawyers actually use some kind of electronic payments technology. The vast majority of lawyers are still getting paid by some combination of cash, checks, and wires. But I digress.
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Business of Law
Zapier is really powerful. Some law firms struggle to get the most out of it not because they don't know how to use Zapier but because they don't know about everything it can do.
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Business of Law
Zapier is a no-code platform that helps businesses and individuals automate work by connecting different applications. But don't let "no-code" fool you. There is a learning curve associated with Zapier. This post explains the basics of Zapier and how it works with Confido Legal. If you want to go one level deeper and see some examples of legal-specific Zaps as well learn more about the "why" of Zapier, check out our recent longer-form post on automating legal payments with Zapier.
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Topics:
Business of Law,
Integrations,
Zapier
On March 8 Law Firm Mentor's Allison Williams and Maddy Martin from Smith.ai and I held a webinar about whether and how to charge for initial consultations called “The Dos and Don'ts of Paid Consultations for Attorneys.” You can watch the webinar replay here.
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Topics:
Business of Law,
Integrations
Of course you can.
Abraham Lincoln once said, "A Lawyer's Time and Advice is His Stock and Trade.” While it’s true that an initial consultation has that word “initial” tacked in front of it, it’s still a “consultation.” And that means it’s a period of time in which a lawyer dispenses advice. If Lincoln thinks it’s OK, it’s probably OK.
But you already knew that. The bigger questions are really, should you charge for initial consultations? And, how to charge for initial consultations?
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Business of Law
Note: This article was originally printed in the January/February 2021 issue of the ABA GP Solo Magazine.
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Business of Law
Last week I joined Kristin Tyler from LAWCLERK to talk about how lawyers can use subscriptions to build a healthy law firm.
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Topics:
Subscriptions,
Business of Law,
Confido Legal News