Prebilling, the process of generating invoice drafts and circulating them for annotation/adjustment, is one of the most important monthly tasks a law firm conducts. Since prebilling involves bringing money into the firm, the more efficient the process becomes, the better off the law firm is financially.
Information governance and the protection of corporate data are top concerns for law firms. To ensure standards are met, some clients are now tying payment to compliance with Outside Counsel Guidelines (OCG). OCG have moved from guidelines to actual contracts that provide for indemnification of the client for cyber breach and violation of privacy laws.
Rethinking Sales As an Act of Service
Lawyers are one of only a handful of professionals whose job requires them both to do the work and generate the business. This “Doer-Seller” Dilemma is particularly vexing for lawyers because of a long-held belief that sales is somehow beneath the legal profession and because lawyers have a limited view of what successful selling looks like.
Being asked to join the partnership of a firm is a measure of success as a legal professional. With that achievement comes tax and financial responsibilities that, surprisingly, few attorneys are fully prepared to deal with. These responsibilities include the unexpected individual federal and state and local tax filing and payments.
With the cost of doing business consistently on the rise combined with the increasing difficulty to find/retain great employees, there is no better time to pursue employment-based tax credits. There are both federal and state employment-based credits available that can help businesses offset income tax liability.
Orion's ePrebill Manager allows corrections to prebills to be tracked and applied in real time, with a one-click acceptance and approval process. Further, by distributing prebills electronically, attorneys can see the edits made by others, the overall net effect of write-downs, and how these affect the realization of both the working timekeepers and the client overall, in real time.
An Astute Lawyer-Manager Must Achieve the Appropriate Balance of Building Consensus Among the Partners Applying management techniques to practice areas may introduce to the firm a new take on methods for enhancing profitability.
As the volume of litigation continues to grow and the ability to manage it as a defendant or add to it as a plaintiff grows increasingly complex, legal costs will continue to rise in 2019 — and funding advocacy on both sides will remain a lingering challenge.
What Lawyers Can Learn From Dentists Attorneys have historically let the client lead the payment dance. Lawyers do the work and hope/expect to be paid without waiting too long or discounting the invoice too steeply. Yet, here we are at the beginning of another year with many law firms still waiting anxiously for overdue checks to arrive. Shame on us for letting this happen. What can we do differently?
When the Tax Cut and Jobs Act became law in December of 2017 there was a question whether some of the highest salaried employees at non-profit organizations would be exempt from the $1M remuneration tax. In the majority of states, the highest salaried employees are athletic coaches.
