• Software Procurement.
• Complete Training for your attorneys and staff.
• Ongoing Educational Support geared towards your practice.
• Technical Support—crucial in the event of outages, breakdowns, data loss, etc.
• Personalized Service. During business hours, a human being always picks up the phone.
• One Nominal Yearly Fee, so that you can plan your annual budget accordingly.
• No Hidden Fees.

Today, we wanted to mention a few extras that add to the value behind Easy Soft’s legal software packages.

One. Although Easy Soft specializes in making life easy for lawyers, our Technical Support Team and Business Analysts can introduce you to further administrative efficiencies you haven’t thought of—and won’t immediately discover. Our Business Analysts live and breathe not just technology—but the art and science of increasing the efficiencies behind your specific practice and small business.

For example, for optimum utilization of Easy Time Bill (ETB) Software, straight hourly billing differs from retainer or fixed fee billing, and both differ greatly from contingency billing. ETB contains special features to be used in tandem with our Easy Trust Software. We set you up right the first time, so there are no errors—only ease, efficiency, and incredible convenience.

Two. We absolutely practice what we preach. Our company aims to create efficiencies for our customers—not just for the first three months after you give us your business, but for the entire life cycle of your software. Take our training webinars.

At the outset, we live-host weekly software training webinars for all products of Easy Soft. During each live hosting, there might be a few dozen participants. Typically, a recorded copy of the webinar is also available online—at your convenience, and the convenience of each of your attorneys and staff members. What could be easier than that?

Three. We don’t believe in off-shore outsourcing. All of our programmers and technical support personals are located in the same Easy Soft headquarters—right here in New Jersey. If a question arises that our skilled and able Tech Support Team doesn’t have answers for, they can turn immediately to our Business Analysts for more complete information. In other words, your call goes right to the source.  One way or the other, we are likely to have a speedy answer for you—with full comprehension of your issue, and without messy language barriers.

Most legal time and billing software companies offer you email only or limited # of phone calls type technical support. When this runs out, you procure your own—or use their—additional training and setup through a subcontractor typically charging $125/hour and up.

You might say this sounds adequate. But even if you yourself are technically savvy, consider:

1.       Your fellow attorneys, paralegals, assistants, and any new hires—an unknown factor—might need additional handholding.

2.       You’ll need to explore your new software extensively—through time-consuming trial and error—to figure out its particular efficiencies and special features. But why reinvent the wheel?

3.       You’ll never be in complete control of your PC. Machines go down, and when they do, you’ll need expensive contractors to recover systems and data—unless you have an all-inclusive software package.

In contrast to the standard legal time and billing software package, all of Easy Soft’s software packages are all-inclusive. For one low yearly cost, Easy Soft provides all of the technical support, educational support, and setup advice that you need for every piece of legal software you purchase from us.

We believe we are the only major legal software company in the U.S. whose prices include:

• Software License.
• Complete Unlimited Training for your attorneys and staff
• Unlimited US Based Phone/Email Technical Support—crucial in the event of outages, breakdowns, data loss, etc.
• Personalized Service. During business hours, a human being always answers the phone.
• One Nominal Yearly Fee, so that you can plan your annual budget accordingly.
• No Add-On Fees—ever for these services.

In total, your software costs for the year will probably add up to less than one (1) billable hour for a single attorney in your firm.

So you get a) the incredible price, and b) worry-free technology geared specifically toward making your legal practice the most easy and effective it can be. Click here to view our complete software catalog.

Regardless of the ease and purpose of the legal software you’re choosing, or your own skill with technology, it’s important to grasp the price of ad hoc services, charges and other add-ons that make what sounded like a bargain a very bad deal indeed.

First, consider that all law office software requires the following:

• Software Training. Training teaches you, your fellow lawyers, and your staff a) the major features, b) how to adapt technology for your particular need c) the bells and whistles of your new legal software.

Say its legal time and billing software. Everyone that will use this software to enter their time tracking, setup matters, billing, payments, special rates and discounts, and the like (we’ll refer to them collectively as “administrators”) must be newly trained. Cumulative and repetitive training can be both time-consuming and expensive.

• Software Setup. You’ll need to set up your new legal billing software on all employee workstations. Again, cumulative setups—for new workstations, new attorneys, etc.—can get time-consuming and expensive.
• Practice Customization. Customizing your new software to the needs of your specific law office, practice, and state bar requirements is essential. We will cover attorney billing software customization specifically in another post this month.

In our next post, we’ll talk about the hidden costs of the above services.

So what are your options for time management systems?

Option A. You can bill manually, i.e. with calculator or pencil. But it isn’t just that this is slow and laborious. If you find a mistake, fixing the mistake becomes no less than a nightmare. You need a more specialized law office billing system.

Option B. You can use a spreadsheet or a generic accounting program. Because they are generic, they do not take into account legal-specific challenges. Using these systems is like improvising as a chef in front of a campfire, or using a baseball bat as a golf club: not impossible, but exhausting. Perceived advantages include “free” software that you already own, without a learning curve. But the disadvantages are too many to list—and all include failed efficiencies. Again, specific legal time tracking software is not only helpful: once you learn its ease of use, you’ll wonder how you did without.

Option C. You can purchase legal time & billing software. To learn more Click here.

Today, we’ll discuss the reasons for this that are specific to the law.

REASON #3: Disputes. Legal fees come under scrutiny more than with any other industry. You can find your fees being examined for any variety of reasons, between:

1.      Parties to an action, especially when one party bears partial or all legal costs

2.      You and your client

3.      You and the ethics department of your state bar.

Ask any lawyer who’s been through it: under the bright floodlights, the pen-and-paper or crowded-spreadsheet model simply doesn’t work to substantiate your fees. But the specificity of Easy Soft’s Easy Time & Billing Software will.

REASON #4: Collections. It’s been documented: legal fees are harder to collect than fees for most other industries. With fees commonly climbing into the six- and seven-figure ranges, it’s not uncommon for clients to be either unable or unwilling to pay.

The most effective attorney billing software incorporates simple invoice and payment reminders. Not only is this seamless—it adds clarity, easy of understanding, and professionalism.

Send out clear, easy-to-understand, timely bills, and your firm is more likely to receive timely payments. Send out reminders, and accounts in arrears are more likely to get paid.

Easy Soft’s Easy Time Bill Software does all of this and more.

In our next post, we’ll talk about the options for various Legal billing software systems.

The more generic reasons for this are listed below.

REASON #1: It’s Just Good Business. Efficient billing tightens processes and introduces natural efficiencies into your business model. More than with any other industry, your legal time and billing software must be able to handle a variety of billing and fee arrangements.

For example, it should know the difference between straight and retainer hourly billing. It should also be capable of recording time by matter-not simply by client. In law, ‘matter’ informs everything: from billable rates (with premiums or discounts built into certain matters) to billing frequency, to staffing and type of case. It should have an easy repository for tracking and allocating expenses such as court fees, witness fees, couriers, and travel-as soon as they are incurred.

Carefully developed with a team of seasoned lawyers and other legal experts, Easy Soft’s Easy Time Bill Software does both these things and much more.

REASON #2: Time Is Money. This isn’t just true for you – but true for your client, too. Less time spent billing-and fixing complicated billing errors-isn’t just time in your pocket, its money in the pocket for your client. In one fell stroke, you can use effective legal billing software-such as Easy Time Bill-to dispel an important fiduciary duty-and spend less time on administrative matters.

If you are at the Conference, we invite you to see a demo of Easy TimeBill, one of our flagship products.

A few of the program’s great features include:

• Intuitive user interface that provides a 360 degree view, showing a matter’s unbilled, unpaid and retainer balances at all times.
• Flexible timekeeper billing rates
• Customizable invoices and reminder letters that you can send via email.
• Built in conflict of interest checking system
• Add-on trust bookkeeping module

We look forward to seeing you at the Conference and showing you how Easy Soft products come to the rescue of busy legal practices nationwide.

Finally, the most common and the most dangerous legal billing pitfall —failure to protect data integrity and implement secure measures.

Law firms generally aren’t tech savvy. In small to medium-sized firms, it’s common to find a hodge-podge of bookkeeping procedures. No matter how your legal billing is setup, the biggest threats to your system are data integrity and security. At a minimum, you must ensure that:

• Billing software requires password protected logins to prevent unauthorized access.
• Your software allows you to customize user permissions to limit access to different aspects of your billing operations.
• Your firm performs comprehensive data back-up daily.

Many firms do back-up data routinely, only to find out later that they were not backing up all the files they really needed. Keep your file structure organized. Perform back-ups daily and test your back-ups periodically by “retrieving” the data and checking to see that you have all the critical files.

Find out more about Easy TimeBill, software designed to help you avoid all the top ten legal billing pitfalls. Download a free trial today.

Law firms often select a billing system without adequately analyzing their trust bookkeeping requirements. While attorneys understand the importance of complying with stringent trust account bookkeeping rules, they frequently don’t grasp that many billing and trust activities function like a bicycle built for two.

A standard practice for most law firms is collecting client payments in advance (retainers) for legal services. Depending on the nature of your cases, types of fees and relevant state laws, retainers might be deposited in a firm’s operating account or in a trust account.

As you weigh the advantages of an integrated billing & trust accounting system, do not forget that it’s not enough for the system to track retainer funds in trust accounts. Trust funds are strictly client funds that follow special accounting rules. Thus, the billing-trust accounting system must also provide required trust bookkeeping safeguards.

Trust accounting is a fundamentally different bookkeeping concept that must support monthly bank statement reconciliation, produce three-way reconciliation statements, general ledger balances with details about the portion of funds that have cleared/not cleared the bank, prevent common trust bookkeeping mistakes such as, co-mingling with other ledger cards, duplicate check numbers, etc.

If your legal billing and trust accounting software are integrated, you will notice a significant increase in operating efficiency and you can avoid Pitfall # 2.

Download and try Easy TimeBill. Add the optional Easy Trust module for seamless integration and manage all aspects of your time tracking, billing and trust accounting in one easy to use program. No need for a separate installation.

For law firms, the first step in reducing professional liability risk involves completing a conflict of interest checklist before you take on a new client.

Every law firm, no matter how small or how limited the practice area, must have computerized conflict database and a procedure to check and log a conflict review.

If your firm is still using a manual checklist to screen for conflict of interest or if you are relying on your memory, think again! We’re beyond the days where it’s okay to have a manual conflict checking system. Do you know how well software with a built in conflict checker mitigates risk and simplifies this tedious, but very critical task?

While developing a bullet-proof conflict of interest system is challenging, today’s computer software makes it easy to build an integrated database that quickly identifies conflicts of interest. All you have to do is keep the database up to date with clients, former clients, relationships, witnesses, interested parties and transactions.

To make it even easier, use legal billing software with a built in conflict checker. Because all your client details are already entered in your billing software, you only have to add other related client relationships, such as spouse, witness, etc. and then, run a conflict check as you take on new clients. It’s that easy with the right software.

Easy Soft to the Rescue

To avoid Pitfall # 3, make a conflict of interest check standard practice, before your firm establishes an attorney-client relationship. Conflict checking is simple. Easy TimeBill and Easy Trust have a built in conflict check utility-all you have to do is use it!

Download software today. Try it free.