Law Firm Financial Management

General Ledger for Law Firms

The General Ledger System provides sophisticated financial reporting on both a cash and accrual basis.  Automatic journal entries through the Integration of LMS modules directly to the General Ledger system allows for seamless monthly processing and analysis of the firm’s financial reporting.  Reporting formats are user-defined, providing you with a variety of summary and detailed reports to assist in financial planning.  General Ledger also handles multiple office locations and allows on-line inquiries by department, profit center and account.  You have the ability to perform the comparison of income statements and balance sheets to both prior periods and budgets.   

Benefits Include

• Simultaneous Cash and Accrual Financial Statements
• Timely financial statements
• Accurate posting from Accounts Payable and Time & Billing
• Reduced administrative posting procedures
• Concise financial analysis management
• Reduced accounting fees
• Improved financial analysis of practice
• Integrated with graphical reporting, charting and detail drill down
• Law Firm Profitability planning and analysis
• Financial Statement Notes

Billing - Accounts/Receivable for Law Firms

The Time and Billing System offers a variety of tools focused on improving the billing processes for your accounting and administrative staff by consolidating many tasks into a single integrated solution.  These tools streamline the processing of timesheets, expenses, disbursements, billing, editing and invoicing to reduce the billing cycle and improve the firm’s cash flow position. True integration means your accounting and administrative staff can more easily work together. 

 

Task-based Budgeting and Billing for Law Firms

This approach is rapidly becoming an industry requirement, as many large corporations or insurance carriers are demanding increased accountability from outside counsel firms.  Insurance companies have set standards for repetitive types of legal cases, i.e. automobile accidents, slip and fall, etc.  How much time should be allowed for discovery, reading a letter, or completing a deposition?   Task-based time recording requires the timekeeper to enter time by task / activity code so that the various elements of the case can be measured by category and compared against national standards.  Task-based time recording has now become an important requirement for many law firms.   Task-based budgeting and billing also allows the firm to offer its clients improved reporting on work performed.  Budgets can be established with the clients at the initiation of a new case, and invoices can detail or summarize the time and fees allocated to each of the various categories on a matter.   The Legal Management System is especially functional in bill formatting, allowing task-based summaries to be printed on the invoice.  The Bill Wizard capabilities that are built into the law firm billing software allow task bills to be easily re-formatted to fit the most stringent requirements of a client.

Electronic Billing for Law Firms

One of the biggest challenges facing law firms today is electronic billing. Many law firm clients are not only requesting Task-based billing, but also electronic billing. Compounding this challenge is the fact that each client also has different requirements that must be met, which creates administrative burdens on firm management and accounting. The LMS Electronic Billing Interface (EBI) is incorporated into the Legal Management System for Billing Software. It allows for customized electronic invoice formats to meet a law firm’s client's requirements. The firm may chose to set up as many formats as needed and has the ability to make changes to the formats when required. EBI provides the ability to deliver invoices in virtually any standard electronic format, meeting both current and future requirements.

Cost Recovery Law Firms

The Legal Management System (LMS ) cost recovery tools streamline your accounting operations by importing data from office equipment, legal research, delivery services and others into the financial management system for proper cost billing. You no longer have to manually enter your data—Cost Recovery does it for you.

 

Automatically:

• Recoup and allocate costs to Client/Matters
• Ensure accurate accounting and eliminate errors due to manual entries
• Electronic Workflow Automation (EWA) will streamline operations with scheduled imports to LMS 
• Accounts Payable Interface for cost recovery for Vendor invoices

Cost Recovery Features:

• Use Cost Recovery to import data generated by Equitrac, Copitrak, nQueue or any other (Legal Research, Phone Logs, Delivery Services, Taxi Services) system that can produce interface data
• Schedule cost recovery imports through EWA to completely automate the process
• Manage exceptions and invalid entries – standardize error processing by Cost Recovery type
• Ability to create Client/Matter specific charges per transaction type

Financial Center for Law Firms "Paperless Reporting"

The Financial Center is your Law Firm’s “browser based” Portal for all of its financial reporting and publications.  The Law Firm Financial Center allows users to access standard LMS reports, as well as, reports created by the LMS Business Intelligence reporting.  The firm may also use the dynamic folder capability to publish any file to the secured Law Firm Financial Center for user access.    With the Financial Center you create custom menus, secured by user profile, to organize reports into useful and logical categories such as month/year, practice group, asset management, billing attorney, profitability statistics, revenue enhancements, or any category you might need.   The Law Firm Financial Center is incredibly flexible and user friendly.  The Financial Center can include reports published in various formats, PDF files, Excel workbooks, and Word documents.  Users can have a repository for reports that have been designed specifically for them - "My Reports".  You can even launch URLs from the Law Firm Financial Center to access client specific web sites or other firm web based applications.

 

 

Benefits Include

• Integrated Portal Technology
• Eliminate report distribution by paper and email
• Real time reporting with drill down capability
• Storage / retrieval of historical reports
• Reduced administrative time
• Utilize LMS security profiles

Inquiry

With LMS, members of the Law Firm now have point and click access to ten levels of real time information relating to the work-in-process and financial data of the Firm, their clients and matters.    Executive Inquiry allows the secured user to see work-in-process and financial information in various views based on firm-wide, branch office, departmental, client, attorney, and client/matter totals.  Attorney statistics can be viewed by billing attorney, originating attorney, responsible attorney, and working attorney.  Firm statistics are broken-down by Firm, branch office, and departments.  Client information can be viewed by individual client or client/matter totals.   Inquiry capability includes information by period, balance comparisons, balance trends, activity comparisons and activity trends.  Statistics can be presented year-to-date or life-to-date. Information is displayed in a data window or using graphs and charts.

Time Recording and Management for Law Firms

The Time Recording System for Law Firms is the most advanced Time Tracking System in the Legal Industry today. Based on Java technology, this is a 100% web based solution. Web Time recording and Management enables your timekeepers to plan, manage and service law firm clients more effectively and efficiently ... for a real competitive advantage. Web Time allows timekeepers to enter and track their time while working on client activities using only a Web browser. Using the My Clients and My Day features along with Timer capability and Real Time System access makes Web Time the most sophisticated business tool for managing the Law Firm’s most precious resource: Time.

 

Benefits Include

• Full Day Time Accounting
• Improved profitability of law firm timekeepers
• Access from anywhere, anytime and almost any device
• Proactive management of staff
• Speed of time entry
• Reduced law firm administrative time
• Timekeeper Dashboard
• Real Time Access to Client and Case Financial Statistics
• Budgeting and Missing Time Features

Trust Accounting for Law Firms

The Trust Accounting System for Law Firms provides an automated, effective method to handle trust receipts and disbursements.  The system is integrated with the LMS client/matter files, providing streamlined application of trust funds.  Trust monies may be segregated into multiple accounts per client/matter.  In addition, funds may be disbursed via check-writing from the system or internal transfer.  Complete audit history records are maintained for all receipts and disbursements.  The Firm receives improved monitoring of trusts and the amount of law firm administrative staff time is reduced.

 

Benefits Include

• Unlimited Bank Accounts
• Accurate and separate accounting records
• Detailed transaction history immediately available
• Offsite backup of trust records
• Improved attorney monitoring of trusts
• Easy application of trust funds
• Reduced law firm administrative time