Attorney Billing Software Reduce Stress and Increase Productivity

As the number of clients increase, the stress levels and time consumed in keeping track of billable hours and back office accounting increases in proportion and some lawyers might very well find themselves spending as much time on accounting and billing as they do on their cases. This situation causes stress; stress because they have to account rigorously in order to keep perfect accounts that stand up to any future audits and also stress because they worry that they are not being as productive as they would want. Attorney billing software helps lawyers drastically cut down on the time they spend on keeping track of billable hours and accounts, leaving more than enough time to either relax or take on more cases. Stress, as a result, vanishes.

The right legal billing and accounting software takes on complete responsibilities and carries out all functions in respect of billing and accounting, particularly from a lawyer's view point in conformity with federal and state laws. Comprehensively designed, structured and easy to use lawyer billing software covers all aspects of billing and keeping track of each client. This includes:

• Keeping track of billable hours for each client and maintaining a separate record for each case for each client and a separate record of the expenses incurred against each case.
• Where cases are handled on fixed fee basis the attorney billing software automatically issues a bill when notified of a completion, showing the fees amount and the expenses separately, posting these amounts to account heads by itself.
• In the same way, cases handled on contingency basis will be handled by the legal billing and accounting software accordingly, issuing a bill for the fees once the case is shown as complete and won.
• In cases of retainer plus hourly basis cases, lawyers can set the limit below which a billing alert will be issued by the lawyer billing software . Again, in this case, the advance, hours billed and expenses are accounted separately for each case, even though a lawyer may handle several cases on behalf of a single client.

A comprehensive and well designed legal billing and accounting software considers billing and matter based record keeping as integrated aspects of the software. With such software, it is easy for attorneys to maintain separate accounts for each case even though he may be handling several cases for one client on different billing basis. There is no confusion and distinct records are maintained according to each matter in hand.
Since a lawyer's accounts are subject to audit and query at any time, leading to severe penalties if there are discrepancies, the attorney billing software should as a matter of course include a provision for compiling complete records and accounts of a case under one single head that can be accessed at any later date. Useful features like outputting to Word, Excel or PDF files and portability to mobile phones improves functionality.
In the main, by reducing the work load on an attorney, the lawyer billing software frees attorneys of stress in this direction and helps them utilize the time freed up to concentrate on present cases or take on more cases and generate more revenue.