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Tag Archives: attorney time and billing software
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.
May 15, 2013 in Legal Billing, Legal Software, Legal Technologies
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Technorati Tagged : attorney time and billing software, billing software for lawyers, law practice management software, lawyer billing software, time and billing software
Technorati Tagged : attorney time and billing software, billing software for lawyers, law practice management software, lawyer billing software, time and billing software
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.
How To Find The Best Legal Billing Software
Automating your law office allows you to serve more clients and generate more revenue. You have many choices in billing software for lawyers and of course we think that Easy Time Bill is the ideal option. But don’t take our word for it. Evaluate the products and decide which one best suits your practice’s needs.
A good place to start is by reading time billing software reviews. If you haven’t used billing software before you might not know what features to look for and the reviews can help you come up with your own system for evaluation. Consider the source when reading a review. An assessment done by an attorney or a bar association will be more valuable than an article written by some guy who reviewed recipe databases yesterday and will evaluate the best zombie apocalypse computer game tomorrow.
We recommend you look only at dedicated lawyer billing software rather than general business finance packages. Attorneys have unique needs such as trust accounting, multiple hourly rates and practice management. Trying to adapt generic software to a law practice requires extra work and creates more chance for billing and accounting errors.
Once you have an idea of what your practice needs, evaluate the different products. Download demos. Take them through their paces. Call the companies and ask questions. The right law practice management software will stay with you through your entire career so take the time to find the best product early on.
Consider the history of the company. You might find what seems like a great product, but if the developer has been around only a year, who know if they will still be there to offer support down the road? You would be better off dealing with a business that has over 20 years’ experience with attorney time and billing software-a business like Easy Soft.
If you should decide that a competing product is best for your practice, then do us a favor. Drop us a line at 800-905-7638 and let us know what factored into your final decision. Help us to develop better tools for attorneys so we can be your software of choice next time.
Billing Software That Is Simple But Not Simple-Minded
Computers are supposed to make our lives easier. Unfortunately they often don’t. Many software packages are confusing and hard to use. They have such steep learning curves that it’s faster to scribble a few notes on paper than spend an hour figuring out how to do it with a computer. But not with Easy Soft products. Our design philosophy is to create time and billing software for lawyers, not for Computer Science majors.
Easy TimeBill has been developed from the ground up with the end user in mind. You’re an attorney not a computer programmer. You just want to open up the lawyer billing software and enter your hours and expenses without a lot of fuss, complicated commands, or confusing menus. That’s exactly what you can do with our software. You’ll be up and running within minutes.
“Easy” doesn’t mean Easy TimeBill is dumbed down. This isn’t “baby’s first legal billing and accounting software“. It’s a robust and full-featured financial program tailored to the billing, reporting and trust accounting needs of the modern law practice. However the complexity is in the underlying program and not in the interface. Using the software is quick and easy, with plenty of help included in the program and lots of videos and articles on our website to help you get the most from the software.
We’ve even taken away most of the technical headaches innate in traditional software by offering our attorney time and billing software in a cloud version. You don’t have to worry about installation, updates, system compatibility, backups or any of those other details. We handle all of that. You can focus on running your practice rather than tearing your hair out trying to figure out why your computer hates you. This is a huge bonus for small practices that can’t afford to hire professional IT personnel but is also a great help to larger firms since they can operate with a smaller technical staff.
The role of law practice management software should be to make your job easier rather than harder. If your current software isn’t doing that–or if you aren’t using software at all–then it’s time for you to discover the software tools essential for today’s law firms. Try any of our titles free for 30 days and you’ll see how easy and valuable these products are.
Working From Anywhere: The Best And Worst Feature Of Cloud Software
We often tout the flexibility of the cloud versions of our software. You can get access to client and practice information from your office, your home, the courthouse, a coffee shop or anywhere else. However just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should!
Tools like cloud-based time and billing software for lawyers give attorneys the power to take control of their work-life balance. Unfortunately it can also utterly disrupt that balance by effectively putting attorneys in the office at all times.
It’s great to have the option to be available 24/7 when you need to be. It might be the type of practice you are in, a specific case that is changing rapidly, or just a client who brings a ton of money into your firm every year so requires extra attention. Cloud-based attorney practice management software gives you easy and secure access to case files from anywhere with an internet connection, and time and billing software ensures you record this out-of-the-office time accurately.
However you have to know when to turn the computer off. Have dinner with the family. Watch Junior’s softball game. Go to a movie. Relax. You are allowed to take time to yourself and you will be a better attorney for it.
Vacations can be especially tricky. You tell your clients to contact you only if it’s an emergency–but clients always think it’s an emergency! Yes, you should check your email while on vacation. No, you shouldn’t check it hourly. If possible filter all communication through another attorney who you can trust to pass on only the actual emergencies. If you do need to handle something, tools like attorney time and billing software give you the resources you need to practice, and also the option not to.
We’ve all heard the cliché: Nobody lies on his death bed wishing he’d spent more time at work. Contact us to find out more about how Easy Soft legal software for attorneys gives you choices in how you balance your practice and your personal responsibilities…but also learn to recognize when the right choice is to close the computer and have a life.
Add Another Pair Of Eyes To Protect Your Practice From Ethics Violations
It is the appearance of misconduct rather actual misconduct that can sink a legal practice. Attorneys have to be very careful how they conduct business since an innocent blunder can trigger at best a bad public image and at worst criminal charges or disbarment. Dedicated legal billing and accounting software protects law offices against many of the errors that can lead to unintentional ethics violations.
If nothing else, legal billing software protects you from arithmetic errors. You can be sure clients are never accidentally overcharged because a bookkeeper made a simple math mistake when adding up the bill. Audits go more smoothly because all the numbers total correctly. Of course any basic business financial package can do this but that’s not the only function lawyers need from accounting software.
Specialized billing software for attorneys includes functions to handle trusts. You can be sure to keep funds separate so you don’t unintentionally “borrow” from one client’s funds to pay another client’s expenses. Trust administration is even more fraught with peril than other legal financial operations so that extra layer of verification and protection is necessary to avoid complications.
Another source of ethics charges against attorneys is conflict of interest. However the complex web of social and business relationships we all have means it is very difficult to track all of the possible conflicts until it is too late. This is why we included automatic conflict checking in our attorney time and billing software. With the click of a mouse you can check a new client’s relationships against all the other relationships in the database, uncovering potential conflicts before they threaten the integrity of your practice.
Easy TimeBill provides powerful protection against inadvertent ethics breaches but it does something else: it shows intent. Even if your practice should mistakenly cross a line, you can show a judge that you have made a strong effort to avoid ethics problems by using specialized law practice management software.
Explore our website to find out more about how Easy Soft’s attorney time and billing software doesn’t just simplify your practice–it also protects it.
