Legal Technologies

Free Training Resources For Easy TimeBill Users

We’ve designed Easy TimeBill to have a simple and intuitive interface, allowing you to start using it confidently within minutes of installation. However simple doesn’t mean simplistic and our legal billing and accounting software includes many powerful features you might need a little help with to use to their best.

Your first stop for information would be the lawyer billing software’s extensive online help system. Just hit F1 or select Help -> How Do I from the top menu to find easy answers to most of the questions you might have on how to use the tools and reports included. You can also select Help -> PDF Manual to see a comprehensive manual you can view or print out.

If you still have questions then come to our side to view free legal billing software training videos that take you step by step through everything from initial setup to generating invoices to bank reconciliation. Here you will also find videos on our other products such as Easy Trust and Easy HUD.

Sometimes you need more personal attention or have specific questions on how our time and billing software can be used for your unique needs. In that case we suggest you attend one of our free training webinars. Every two weeks we offer a live online training session on Easy TimeBill and Easy Trust. These sessions are a great way to stay on top of the latest laws and how they might affect your practice, and are an opportunity for you to ask specific questions about the software.

Finally, you can always contact us directly with your questions. Our team of support professionals is happy to share their expert knowledge of any of our legal practice management software with you. We can help you install, configure and use our products in ways that will improve your practice’s efficiency and profits, and help you help your clients.

Posted by Rick Kabra on May 20, 2013 in Legal Billing, Legal Software, Legal Technologies | Leave a comment
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Are You Really Still Doing HUD Forms By Hand?

The 2010 RESPA Final Rule was designed to simplify HUD form processing as well as to ensure timely disclosure of full settlement costs. Simple is a relative term and real estate professionals should not be trying to complete the “simpler” HUD 1 settlement sheet by hand. Today’s real estate regulations are too strict to trust to fallible humans.

Inexpensive RESPA software protects real estate professionals and their clients by facilitating RESPA compliance. Agents can use the GFE-HUD comparison sheet to ensure the figures on each form make sense. Figures from the GFE and HUD are automatically copied over onto the comparison sheet so agents know the numbers in the summary are the same as the numbers on the actual forms.

There was mixed reaction to the 2010 RESPA Final Rule’s provisions on fee itemization. Although the rule was designed to prevent consumers from being buried under a laundry list of petty fees by presenting them with a lump sum total, many organizations–including the federal government that made the new rule!–want the fees broken out. Agents using real estate title software can present the lump sums to their clients while still retaining the itemized lists of charges to show to other interested parties.

Finally, monitoring all the setoff charges on a HUD-1 settlement statement can be a nightmare. Our software includes a setoff tracker that makes it easy to list each charge, attribute it to the buyer or seller as appropriate, and credit or debit the correct total on the first page of the statement.

HUD documents are too complicated to do by hand. Software helps you stay in compliance with RESPA laws, ensures your calculations are correct, minimizes the chance of data entry error by not forcing you to enter the same information multiple times, and greatly accelerates the time it takes to process a closing.

Take advantage of the technology at your fingertips. Contact us to find out more about how Easy HUD and our other law practice management software products simplify your life, speed up your work day, and protect your practice and your clients from unfortunate mistakes.

Posted by Rick Kabra on May 17, 2013 in Legal Software, Legal Technologies, Real Estate Closing | Leave a comment
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When Bad Hard Drives Happen To Good People

Settle in, boys and girls, for a little story. It’s a scary story but don’t worry–it has a happy ending. It’s a moralistic little tale about something that happened to one of our colleagues, but doesn’t have to happen to your lawyer billing software.

This gentleman has his vital computer files stored on a mirror drive–a mirror drive is an array of two hard drives. Every time the computer writes a file, it writes it to both drives. That way if one drive fails, the information is safe on the other drive. Recently he decided to update one of his drivers–a driver is a program that tells your computer how to operate equipment like printers, video cards and hard drives. When he rebooted his system, the hard drives had disappeared.

He spent the next two days trying to find the drives. The physical drives were in the computer of course, but Windows couldn’t see them. I’ll spare you the long story of restore points and updates and blue screens and lots and lots of profanity. In the end, he found both drives had been corrupted and all of the information was lost. Over ten years of financial records, work documents, correspondence, family photos and more were gone.

Fortunately, though the information was gone from his computer, it wasn’t gone from this world. He uses a backup utility that copies his data into the cloud. It will take him weeks to recover a hard drive full of information, but at least he has that option. Without it, he would have no way to get the data back.

So what does this story have to do with attorney time and billing software? Disasters like this can happen to any of us. A corrupted driver, a virus, a fire, a hurricane or a zombie apocalypse can destroy your computer and even your local backups. Data loss could drive a legal practice out of business so you need an offsite solution.

The cloud version of Easy Soft billing software for lawyers maintains your sensitive case files in our offsite servers. We use technologies such as mirror drives to ensure your data is protected from hardware failure as well as multiple periodic backups to keep your information safe even if the mirrors fail. Of course your data is encrypted and protected against unauthorized intrusion.

If you prefer to use the desktop version of Easy Soft time and billing software then we strongly recommend you also use a cloud-based backup solution to protect your data.

Strong backups are just one of the many advantages of cloud-based law practice management software. Contact us at 800-905-7638 to find out if the cloud is the right environment for your law firm.

Posted by Rick Kabra on May 15, 2013 in Legal Billing, Legal Software, Legal Technologies | Comments Off
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Are You Ready To Refinance?

Mortgage rates are plummeting. Just this week Freddie Mac reported the 15-year fixed rate hit a record low of 2.61% and the 30-year fixed rate is at 3.4%, less than 0.1% above its record low. Homeowners are rushing to refinance to take advantage of these low rates and real estate offices not using real estate title software are at a disadvantage over those who do.

When there is a rush of customers, you can’t afford to take as much time filling out the HUD closing statement as you used to. The faster you complete the forms, the more clients you can take in a typical workday. You don’t want to have to tell a potential client–or worse, an existing client–that you are too busy to get to them right now. Nor do you want to leave customers waiting long enough for you to fill out the forms that they start shopping around for another agent.

HUD settlement statement software like Easy HUD cuts your closing time by up to 70%. You can process the paperwork in a flash and move on to the next client. If the refinance is an existing customer, then all you have to do is pull in the information from the previous sale, verify it is up to date and click to print the refinance form. New clients are nearly as fast–you just enter a little information and let the software do the hard work.

We realize that when it comes to the HUD 1 settlement statement, accuracy is more important than speed and that’s another advantage of using software rather than filling the papers out by hand. Calculations are performed instantly and are correct. You can be sure you are completing your closing in full RESPA compliance.

Electronic 1099-S filing puts the crowning touch on fast, accurate closing. File the forms as you close rather than doing a year’s worth of forms in a rush. All data is verified before being securely transmitted to the IRS and you get immediate confirmation the form was received.

Use our legal software for attorneys and real estate agents to bring your practice into a new era of speed, efficiency and customer satisfaction.

Posted by Rick Kabra on May 13, 2013 in Legal Software, Legal Technologies, Real Estate Closing | Comments Off
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Trust Accounting In Large Law Firms: It’s Everybody’s Fault

The larger the firm, the more complicated trust fund management can be. It’s hard enough tracking multiple matters in one account, plus other matters each with their own accounts, but then you add multiple attorneys, paralegals and other staff members and it quickly becomes an administrative nightmare. Legal billing and accounting software simplifies, automates and centralizes the process but attorneys still need to be aware of the rules governing the accounts.

First let’s get the obligatory disclaimer out of the way. We aren’t lawyers; we merely develop and sell attorney practice management software. This article presents generic trust fund regulations. Check your state laws to find out how things work where you are. The information here isn’t legal advice–but you’re a lawyer so you should know that already.

In a large practice you have multiple attorneys handling cases with trust accounts. Although legal accounting software makes it easy for lawyers to handle their own trusts, is it permissible to centralize all trust accounting functions? Yes and no. Yes you could assign a single attorney to handle all trust matters and have the other attorneys delegate trust transactions to that one, however if a mistake is made then the attorney handling the case is ultimately the one who will be held responsible.

Is it permissible to have a non-attorney handle trust transactions? Again the answer is yes and no. A paralegal, accountant or bookkeeper could handle entering the daily transactions, generating reports, balancing accounts and so on but this person must be supervised by an attorney. Software makes oversight simple as the lawyer using time billing software reviews the work done by the staff to ensure all regulations are followed.

Remember that everyone needs to know the rules on trust account management. Even if attorneys aren’t entering their own transactions, they need to periodically use the trust accounting system to review and verify that their clients’ money is being handled correctly according to the law.

Centralized trust management and a 360-degree view of trust accounts are just two of the features that make Easy Trust an essential tool for today’s legal practice. Try the product free for 30 days and discover how much simpler escrow administration can be.

Posted by Rick Kabra on May 2, 2013 in Attorney Trust Accounting, Legal Software, Legal Technologies | Comments Off
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How To Hire A Staff Without Hiring A Staff

Large law firms can hire teams of specialists to handle everything from balancing the books to maintaining the office computers to making the coffee. Unfortunately small firms, especially single-attorney practices, can’t afford to bring on a host of employees. The good news is that these small businesses can get the skill they need from dedicated legal billing and accounting software like Easy TimeBill.

Time and billing software is like having a bookkeeper. The software makes it easy to record your billable hours and expenses, maintain separate billing for each matter and send out professional looking invoices to your clients. You can see at a glance the current payment status of each account, automatically calculate late fees and print checks for your vendors.

Add the Easy Trust trust accounting system to the mix and you have a dedicated escrow accountant at your fingertips. Maintain your trust accounts in full compliance with strict state and federal regulations, generate three-way reconciliation reports required by most bar associations and keep each matter’s funds separate even if they are in the same account.

Attorney practice management software acts as your personal assistant, checking for conflicts of interest that might jeopardize your case. Practice management tools like calendars, to-do lists and case notes keep you organized. Document management links electronic documents to each case file so you don’t have to worry about misplacing a key file when you need it.

Get the cloud version of our attorney time and billing software and you get your own IT department. You don’t need to concern yourself with software installation, updates, data security or backups. We handle all the technical details so you can focus on helping your clients.

With the right software tools, even a one-person practice can operate as though it was an elite team of specialized professionals. Get the skills you need at a fraction of the cost of hiring even one of these people much less all of them. Your virtual assistants work day and night, don’t take vacations and don’t need medical insurance.

But you’ll still have to make your own coffee.

Posted by Rick Kabra on April 26, 2013 in Legal Billing, Legal Software, Legal Technologies | Comments Off
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