Following Billing Guidelines and Firm Policies

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Hey everyone, Scott Benton here. How are you? I’m the host of the classroom 2 courtroom podcast where we help you easily transition from law school student into your professional career as an attorney and where we like to make the practice of law fun. Now today we’re going to take a look at following billing guidelines and firm policies.

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Today, in order to help assist your overall use of the success cycle, as far as the logging time portion goes, we’re going to take a look at following billing guidelines and firm policies.

So what is the role of billing guidelines at a law firm? Now there’s a critical role that billing guidelines and firm policies play in running an efficient legal practice, and they’re all pretty important to know and practice as quickly as you can when you first join a law firm.

Now keep in mind that the billing guidelines and the firm policies are likely going to be different from firm to firm, so you’ll need to learn new guidelines and policies If you go from one firm to another. In any case, you really want to adhere to the firm’s specific rules on billing, including the use of proper terminology, [00:02:00] billing discounts, and clear time entries and how those are all written.

The billing guidelines for the firm that you’re working at ensure uniformity in time entries across the firm. So, since you’re probably not the only person entering time entries, it means that you want to find a way to make them all consistent and fairly uniform.

So for clients looking at several time entries on their invoice that were written by different people, it may bring up confusion for them if consistency or uniformity in style is just not present. And when it comes to billing, your goal is to provide clarity and billing entries your clients can really read and understand.

So you want to omit any legal jargon or ambiguity or anything that might be difficult for them to understand. Most people have not been to law school or really have a command of legal terminology. Now some do, but most probably don’t. So you want to make sure that the words that you’re choosing are words that are going to be [00:03:00] understood by the largest amount of people.

The standardization that each firm implements and that you need to have control of helps to avoid confusion, especially again, when multiple attorneys or multiple people are working on the same case. Now it’s important to use the correct legal terms when describing the legal work that’s been completed and when it comes to your billing entries.

So you want to make sure to use accuracy in titles to reflect the proper level of service provided, which means you want to be able to differentiate between junior attorneys and senior attorneys.

When it comes to discounts and fee adjustments, you want to make sure to apply them appropriately, and you want to document them in accordance, again, with the firm’s policies.

When applying those discounts, they really need to be consistently written, which will look like the standardized billing entries for the firm that you’re at. And they need to be consistent with the appearance of discounts on all of the invoices for all of the clients across the board. That way when a client looks at their bill and they see the [00:04:00] discounts that have been included, they’ll look the same so that they can scan their eye down the page and see how many discounts were included on this particular bill.

And trust me, whenever a new bill comes along, the first thing they’re going to do is they’re going to look for the standardized discounts before they look at the rest of the charges. So these are important to include, and they’re important to clarify, because discounts help to avoid misunderstandings and disputes later on down the road. Now, when it comes to adhering to firm policies and billing, you really have to ask yourself why these policies matter. Billing policies, they’re not just rules, they’re legal protections for both the firm and for the clients. Policies are going to prevent errors and disputes, and they can serve as solid defense in a fee arbitration case. So it’s important to write your billing entries immediately after completing a task. And you want to make sure that they’re accurate billing entries in order to prevent lost revenue.

Now, you really want to make sure that your billing entries are done timely. And on this podcast, we like to say that they need to be done [00:05:00] immediately after the legal services completed according to the success cycle. And you want to make sure that they’re accurate. Now this helps prevent lost revenue and keep in mind that revenue is the lifeblood of any firm or any business and a firm is another business. So you want to protect the firm’s ability to generate revenue as much as possible. Firms often have rules on how to categorize tasks, which is something that you also want to pay attention to.

What I mean by that, for instance, is that there’s probably going to be a difference in the rules between categorizing billable hours versus non billable hours. So you want to know what those rules are and you want to follow them accurately. Because misclassifying time can lead to future issues with clients and it could have an impact on the firm’s functionality.

Following guidelines ensures transparency, which is key to building long term trust with clients. And long term trust with clients, building that relationship, is absolutely everything. Clients can more easily understand their bills when time entries follow that consistent and clear [00:06:00] guideline.

Consistency in billing reduces the likelihood of fee disputes. So proper documentation of work through detailed entries gives clients confidence in what they’re paying for. They want to be able to trust that you’re doing the work that you’re doing for them in a way that they can see and read and understand on that billing entry, which you will be able to control by writing them in a clear manner.

So you want to make sure the way that you document your legal services and your time entries matches what’s reflected in the firm’s guidelines, which is only going to enhance the clarity and it’s going to reduce errors. Precise logging of time spent performing legal services based on the firm’s policies helps provide a clear record for both billing and future reference. Without that, you might see some clients who are just, they’re unhappy with their billing.

They might come back and complain. They may decide to file a grievance with the state bar and take it to a fee arbitration hearing. And the problem with fee arbitration hearings is that even if you have all the documentation, [00:07:00] even if you’re set up properly to win the argument, it means that you still lost an entire day of productivity, which means that your billing is down, which means that you’re not able to reach your minimum billable hourly requirement for that week, which means that you just might not possibly get your bonus down the road.

So you can see how important it is just for everyone to make sure that your billing entries are always clear, precise, and on point. So to recap, you always want to follow the firm’s billing guidelines and their policies. You want to learn about and remain consistent with your formatting style to help ensure smooth operations.

Remember, you’re not the only one that’s creating billing entries. Even on one particular case, there could be multiple billing entries from multiple people. Adhering to the policies not only protects the firm, but it also builds trust with you and your clients by ensuring that they’re billed fairly and transparently and that they can understand the work that was done on their cases.

I’m Scott Benton. I’m the host of the Classroom 2 Courtroom podcast. Thank you so much for hanging out with us on this [00:08:00] episode. I hope it helps you understand the billing part of the success cycle a little bit better once you’ve started your first job as an attorney. Now, if you like this podcast and you’d like to get more information about us, you can always go to our website, which is classroom2courtroom.

com. That’s classroom, the number two, Courtroom. com where you can send us a message to keep in touch with us. You can even inquire about our seasonal associate programs that we have available for law school students and you can come and work with us. And as always don’t forget to share like and subscribe to stay on top of all of our newest episodes And until next time we hope you’ll join us in making the world a better place one client at a time

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