My Search For The Right Attorney Billing Software

By Author: Rick Kabra
Total Articles: 32
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A lawyer never has any spare time. The more cases I take on, the more work I have to do in the background. Billing and accounting take up more of my time that I could profitably spend on cases. I had heard of attorney billing software but was a bit confused as to which one to select for my needs. For me the right legal billing and accounting software would have to include everything I did manually. I short listed a few popular law firm billing softwares available and considered their features and compared them against what I needed. For me the ideal software would have to include features I listed below.
Billing
I compared legal time and billing software for the billing features. I looked at the software's capability to keep track of each client and hourly billing with expenses shown separately for each case I handle on behalf of each client. Then I considered whether the attorney time billing software had a provision for fixed fee billing showing the ...
... fees and expenses separately. The attorney billing software I wanted to buy should have these facilities as also account retainer based cases separately, issuing a bill automatically when the retainer amount fell below a predefined limit. I also wanted the legal billing and accounting software to maintain records of cases taken on a contingency basis and issue a bill only on successful completion. I wanted software that could do all these and maintain the billable amounts and expenses amounts separately. I also wanted it to maintain trust based accounts separately where needed according to State laws. I did not want to spend a lot of time in case of future audits, searching for causes of discrepancies and satisfying queries.
Matter Based Record Keeping
In my line of work it is important to maintain perfect records of billing and accounting for each client and in case of multiple cases on behalf of the same client, separate accounting and record keeping of each case. I wanted a comprehensive, easy to use lawyer billing software that would automatically maintain matter based records individually for each case even though multiple cases were connected with a single client.
User Friendliness
Since I had only a passing familiarity with computers and did not have time to spare to learn complicated procedures I searched for legal time and billing software that was user friendly, with an easy menu system and a short learning curve. It had to be intuitive, well designed, fast and easy to use from day one.
Record Keeping
I specially looked for a feature in the lawyer billing software that would maintain complete records of each individual case, cross searchable and linkable with client name, all in one folder and save these in Word or PDF format for printing or emailing any time in the future.
Mobile Portability
Though not absolutely necessary I looked to see if any of the best billing software for lawyers that I had short listed had mobile portability features.
Luckily for me, I happened to come across one such lawyer billing software that had all these features and was affordably priced too. What is more the developer has agreed to give one on trial so I can explore it before committing my accounting and billing tasks to this software.

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