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Accounting and Financial Planning for Law FirmsFeaturesLaw Firm FinancialsLaw Firm Management

Unbiased Thinking: A Blueprint for Your Law Firm Billing & Collections Transformation

By Dan Safran
May 01, 2024

In our experience, we find that law firms generally experience a similar set of common challenges and costs tied to inefficient billing and collections practices. These can be quite significant — at some firms, we have seen profitability drag exceeding 6%.

This is a cost no firm can afford; and to that end, the following offers a blueprint for transforming billing and collections consisting of four "Invoice to Cash" opportunity areas:

  1. Resource management and efficiency;
  2. Process consistency and accountability;
  3. Financial control and reporting; and,
  4. Technology tools, integrations, and automation.

Resource Management and Efficiency

Resource management and efficiency issues all relate to how firms allocate, coordinate and manage staff responsible for billing and collections. Problems and challenges that arise often include poor firm-wide recovery rates, resource-level issues where realization achieved by specific individuals is too low compared to firm benchmarks, or there is a skill or experience gap.

These issues spill over to other problems like over-resourcing and excessive compensation. Over-resourcing is very common. We often see situations in which headcount far exceeds typical industry practices, resulting in overspending. At one client law firm, we observed an astonishing 4X staff overage ratio, compared to comparable environments.

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