6 Tips for Associate-Support Staff Collaboration to Enhance Your Firm’s Legal Billing Strategy

The partnership between support staff members and associates is intended to be the foundation of efficiency and productivity within any law firm. When partners and associates are focused on building the firm together it can be far more profitable. However, when it comes to your firm’s legal billing strategy and related procedures, there could very well be gaps and flaws that are adversely affecting the quality and overall success of this strategy. Here are six tips your law office should consider implementing to ensure that is not the case.

Get an Outside Opinion of Your Invoices

When was the last time that you analyzed the structure, formatting and overall content included within your invoice? One can easily become complacent with their billing documentation and accessible resources to the point where they are no longer paying attention to how these items are perceived or received by clients, vendors, etc. A major flaw in your legal billing strategy could very well be the complicated nature and design of your invoices.

If your invoice is either difficult to understand or easy to dispute, your firm will more than likely experience unnecessary complications and delays as a result. Make sure that your invoice is not only clear and simple, but that it is easy to understand and detailed enough to properly educate and inform your clients. Maintain a reasonable level of transparency by ensuring that your contact information is provided on each invoice along with a message encouraging clients to contact you directly with any questions or concerns that they may have.

When a law firm grows in size, it becomes more important to instill a level of consistency in terms of quality of work, legal correspondence, and documents. This is “Why Legal Templates and Legal Document Software are a Must For Law Firms”

Review Current Assignments Periodically

You more than likely already have a system in place that governs the tasks, projects and overall responsibilities assigned to each associate, partner and support staff member. Just because a certain arrangement may work now does not necessarily mean that it will maintain its efficiency and productivity level later. This is why it is highly recommended to periodically review the workflow within your law firm periodically to ensure that it is as efficient and well-structured as possible. Focus on the strengths and weaknesses of each employee included within the plan. For instance, a support staff member may be relatively weak at high-level administrative tasks – such as demand letters and other advanced forms of client-related correspondence.

Loading him or her with this as a primary assignment would be setting them (and the firm) up for failure. There is nothing wrong with cross-training and continuing education opportunities to strengthen areas of improvement over time. However, pay close attention to how your various tasks and projects are delegated to ensure that your procedures and protocol run as smoothly as possible.

Delegate Unbillable Tasks and Assignments

The key to enhancing the legal billing strategy of your law firm is to find effective ways to reduce the time spent on it while either maintaining or increasing the high-quality results generated. As you start to explore various ways to save time and reduce the typical workload involved with billing clients and collecting payments, you will see that the primary focus of the attorneys and partners should be on billable time and hours.

Therefore, it is essential to delegate all unbillable tasks and assignments (such as administrative work that is not client-specific) to your support staff. Make sure that they understand the purpose and process involved with each task before placing it on their shoulders. However, this type of “transitional hand-off” will play an integral role in the quality, timeliness and overall efficiency of your firm’s legal billing strategy.

Make the Process as Duplicable as Possible

Just because you may understand how your firm’s legal billing process works does not necessarily mean it is understandable to others. It is easy to sink into the mentality that it does not matter how others feel about your billing system as long as you are there to take care of it. That is where the problem lies: The success of the system should not be based on just one specific person.

What happens if you switch firms, transfer to a different location, get promoted or simply become reassigned to a different department? Placing the sole responsibility of your firm’s legal billing strategy on the shoulders of one specific employee or partner will not only hinder their individual growth and potential but also that of the firm as a whole. Your goal should be to make and maintain a legal billing system that is easily duplicable. Doing so will lighten the load of training new associates, partners and support staff members – allowing your existing team members to make themselves available for bigger and better opportunities.

Accounting is far easier when you have good practices and legal software in place. Read our article “6 Top Tips for Improving Your Billing Strategy”.

Create Opportunities for a Paperless Environment

As a law firm, it is nearly impossible to go completely paperless. Think about the case files, summonses, subpoenas, signed contracts and other documents that must be printed and stored within your office and/or submitted to various courts. However, there are still a substantial number of documents and files that could be saved and stored online – perhaps within a secured cloud storage solution – to reduce the amount of paper used and shared within your office.

The closer that you are able to get your legal billing system to a paperless system, the more money you will save on related overhead expenses (such as copy paper and ink cartridges) and the more efficient your overall legal correspondence handling procedures will become over time.  Associates and support staff members will be able to easily create, revise, access and share various documents and correspondence items within an online platform that is designed for efficient collaborative opportunities. This will save a substantial amount of payroll when you think of the vast amount of time spent when these tasks are done “traditionally” that you will now be able to reinvest into more profitable aspects of your business.

Thinking of making the switch to a paperless environment? Read our article: “6 Benefits of a Paperless Law Office”

Encourage Questions, Feedback and Suggestions

Perhaps the very best way to improve the efficiency of attorney-support staff communication and collaboration is to allow associates and support staff members to openly communicate with one another about their existing procedures. Encourage all involved parties to share constructive feedback and helpful suggestions along with asking key questions to possibly improve or replace your existing procedures for the better. This will not only improve the quality and efficiency of your firm’s legal billing strategy but your overall firm itself.

For more information on legal billing strategies, legal document software, and more, stay tuned to the Infoware blog.