A New Way to Get Paid — Announcing Bill4Time Payments!

Get paid faster with Bill4Time Payments and enjoy the convenience of an all-in-one solution. 

Over the past year, we’ve watched our customers and their firms adapt to the many challenges that COVID-19 has presented. As we enter into a potentially brighter future, we at Bill4Time are honored to continue building new features to help our customers in the new normal and next normal. 

Today we are beyond excited to introduce Bill4Time Payments! Whether a firm is staying remote, returning to the office, or operating in a hybrid capacity, getting paid is paramount. The reliance on clumsy paper checks and outdated billing habits are major challenges for law firms as they try to grow.

Bill4Time Payments allows you to streamline your payments process, collect more on the dollar, and gain financial clarity right within Bill4Time, all with 100% ABA and IOLTA compliance. To celebrate the launch of this game-changing feature, we’re offering a $150 cashback bonus when you sign up now. The cashback bonus will be transferred to your connected operating account after you accumulate $150 in transaction fees for payments received using the new Bill4Time Payments, so there is no risk to give it a try. Here’s how the new Bill4Time Payments works, and why you should enable your free payments account today. 

Get Paid Faster, Collect More, Delight Your Clients

With Bill4Time Payments, you can let clients pay you the way they pay for everything these days — virtually. Your clients prefer a digital payment option, in fact, 78% of them want to pay you online! If you’re still waiting on paper checks, you’re missing out on the speed and financial freedom you get when collecting fees instantly online.   

Get started on your clients’ case quickly by accepting fees instantly, upfront. Providing a “Pay Now” button on your invoices allows your client to pay up to 70% faster than the industry average of 94 days. Providing multiple options such as credit card or eCheck gives your client the freedom of using their preferred payment method.

Needing an attorney comes with its own load of stresses, paying them should be the easiest part of all. The fewer administrative tasks you give your clients, the happier they will be. Clients can save their payment information right within Bill4Time Payments, giving you the flexibility to request instant payment from their account, whenever necessary. No more repetitive forms to fill out and keep tabs on. Even better, giving clients an online payment option results in faster payments, which means you and your team can spend less time tracking collection efforts and following up on overdue invoices. 

Streamline Payments and Get Financial Clarity 

Humans make mistakes, don’t let them make one with your money. Reduce the risk of human error from cash or check deposit data entry, and reduce or eliminate the time spent doing manual payments data entry altogether. Allow Bill4Time Payments to speed up and handle the bookkeeping for you.  

With Bill4Time Payments, you can easily access a clean set of payments data which you can use to stay informed about your firm’s financial health. Receive live insights and track every step of the payments process from the initial invoice to final payment receipt. Does your mailbox send you those analytics?  

Save with Industry-Low Pricing

Every penny counts when it comes to collecting your invoices and with Bill4Time Payments you’ll save tons each month. We offer the industry’s lowest pricing on compliant payments with zero monthly membership fees, only a 1% eCheck transaction fee, and transparent 2.9% pricing on all credit cards regardless of card type. 

Think you know what you’re paying to another processor? You may be surprised as many processors have additional fees or bracketed rates for different card types. If you would like to see if Bill4Time Payments will provide savings to your firm, we are happy to provide a rate comparison free of charge. The majority of the time we find that our rates beat other processors and our customers are often surprised to learn what they are really paying to process payments. 

Enjoy the Convenience of a Compliant, All-In-One Solution 

If you’ve already placed your trust in Bill4Time, why hand your payments data over to a third party? We take data security seriously, that’s why Bill4Time uses 256-Bit encryption and has around-the-clock security monitoring.   

When choosing a payment processor, it’s important to keep compliance in mind. Using a payments processor designed specifically for the legal professional is the best way to ensure both Trust and PCI compliance. Bill4Time Payments is 100% compliant with IOLTA, the ABA, and lawyers’ online payment rules in all 50 states. Operating account payments are available now and trust account payments will be available in June!

Trust account funds are always protected from third-party access and trust and operating funds are never commingled. All processing fees are taken out of your default operating account even for trust payments. Should your client ever initiate a dispute on a transaction, all chargeback access is also directed to the operating account even for trust payments, ensuring that you are always 100% compliant with the ABA Rules of Professional Conduct and the trust payment rules promulgated by all 50 state bar associations. Our team also provides chargeback assistance at no additional cost so you will always feel supported by the Bill4Time team you trust.  

Activate your account today 

Ready to start accepting payments online using Bill4Time Payments?  If you’re already enjoying the benefits of Bill4Time and would like to activate Bill4Time Payments, you may begin your application. Sign up now and a $150 cashback bonus will be transferred to your connected operating account after you accumulate $150 in transaction fees for payments received using the new Bill4Time Payments. If you’re not currently a Bill4Time customer, sign up below to schedule a free customized demo.

Like most organizations across the world, our entire business infrastructure was upended overnight in March of 2020. With teams spread out across the country, we sent everyone home in the name of safety and equipped them to work from home within 48 hours. While 2020 was full of many challenges for our organization, we learned a lot about our team and how we work well together. 

Though there was a steep learning curve for all teams at Paradigm, which Bill4Time is a part of, we’ve since come to embrace our remote environment. In fact, it’s worked out so well that Paradigm has just been officially designated as a Great Place to Work! This recognition is important to us as it comes directly from our colleagues, with 94% of them stating that we are indeed, a great place to work! 

So here we are, after an entire year of constantly testing, learning, and growing as an organization, we’ve come to the conclusion that Paradigm will remain a remote-hybrid company, indefinitely. 

To read more about the factors that went into this decision, and tips on how we’ve been able to make remote work happen effectively, visit the Paradigm blog.

The idea of a remote law firm or hybrid work environment no longer fell on deaf ears when the pandemic hit. As many firms transitioned to remote work, silos and barriers that once flourished in the traditional office setting were no longer prevalent. Silos, often linked to employees feeling unvalued, overworked or a general lack of company morale.

Here are a few reasons why silos fester in traditional law firm settings and how remote work can help improve or diminish them.

Many traditional law firms have a hidden class structure

Equity partners receive a greater share of the rewards and are treated differently (better) than non-equity (service) partners. What exactly is a non-equity service partner? Here’s how Toby Brown at Geeks and a Law Blog defines it.

“I define service partner as a partner with sufficient legal skills, but not one with a sufficient book of business. These are typically very good lawyers, and their role is focused on overseeing major client work, but not as the one who brings the client and work in the door.”

Like service partners and associates, support staff are treated as second class citizens, each tier working against the tiers above and below their position in the firm. It’s a chronic problem that leads to silos, politics, and turf wars inside the firm. This turns colleagues into competitors.

The impact on law firms and their employees:

• Employees don’t feel safe when they’re replaceable
• According to Gallup, unsafe employees become mercenaries who look out for themselves
• Mercenaries are employees who are not engaged or disengaged 

How remote work improves law firms

With remote work, law firms are forced to acknowledge their co-worker’s output (or lack thereof). If firm leadership is reliant on practice management software, they’re far more likely to look at performance data to get a true sense of who’s doing what and when.

This data provides you with answers to crucial questions, like:

• Are employees losing time to non-billable work?
• What do attorneys spend most of their time doing?
• What is the utilization rate for your partners, associates, and support staff?
• How does this affect firm realization rates?
• Which employees are underperforming? Which employees simply need help?
• Who are your superstar employees?

With remote work and the right practice management tools, your firm is forced to take a look at the data that really matters.

How remote work serves law firms

Altman Weil’s survey on underperformers exposes a common law firm response when dealing with underperformers. Many law firms reduce underperformers’ compensation, which makes the problem dramatically worse.

According to Dr. Bradford Smart, creator of Topgrading, “the average cost of a mis-hire can be six times base salary for a sales rep, 15 times base salary for a manager, and as much as 27 times base salary for an executive.” (Note: Calculate the cost of a mis-hire for your firm with his mis-hire calculator). With the right practice management tools:

• You won’t mistake an overworked top performer with an underperformer
• You’ll know why top performers are failing to perform
• Using data, you can identify chronic underperformers, and you can remove or redeploy them

Data and outcomes are all you have in a remote work environment. You’ll need to depend on your team to produce the results you need. With the right data, you can identify:

• Whether you’re meeting billable targets (or not)
• Your utilization and realization rates at the firm, partner, associate, and support level
• Which employees rely on reconstructive vs. contemporaneous (as-it-happens) billing
• The employees that are most productive (and why)

This also means you’ll be able to:

• Minimize (or eliminate) billable leakage due to poor timekeeping habits
• Avoid paying 6x to 27x an employee’s salary due to poor hiring or retention decisions
• Systematically increase your firm’s utilization rate and profitability, producing more billable work in less time
• Retain top A player talent in your firm

According to the 2019 Altman Weil’s Law Firm in Transition survey, “84 percent of firms still say they have chronically underperforming lawyers and 56 percent report that overcapacity is hindering overall profitability (74 percent of large firms).”

Remote work, combined with a strong practice management solution, may be the firm power-up you need.

Applying remote work in your law firm

It’s a good idea to test remote work with a phased approach. Here are some options you can use to deploy remote work in your firm:

1. Allow top performers to work remotely, on a trial basis
2. Permit specific practice groups or employee types (freelance) to work remotely during the vetting process
3. Apply specific iterations of remote work (telecommute, flex work) where employees have specific parameters governing remote work
4. Go 100 percent remote and convert your traditional law firm to a virtual one
5. Go 100 percent remote, switch to a virtual law firm; focus on building a results-only-work-environment (ROWE)
6. This is very good news.

When it comes to applying remote work in your organization, you have lots of options. Regardless of the remote work option you choose, it’s essential that you select a practice management solution that provides you with the data you need to achieve results.

A senior associate at a large law firm shared an anonymous snapshot of her day on Quora, outlining the stark reality of life in a busy law firm and lack of time management for attorneys.

“Documents begin to come back and a junior associate dumps work on me from outside of my practice group. I try to tell him to shove it, but I can’t because he has CC’d a powerful partner. I ignore the deals that I’m trying to close and deal with the junior associate’s query.” 

A brief scan of her day shows work is dumped on her by those above and below her.  This is the reason why time management is such a struggle for attorneys.

How poor time management costs law firms money

Time management is a problem for small law firms as well. The 2019 State of U.S. Small Law Firms states that small law firms often have to choose between the practice of law and the essential tasks required to keep their law firm running. 

“Nearly 40 percent of their day goes into activities other than the actual practice of law. Much of this is time for which the lawyer will never be paid.”

Forty percent doesn’t sound too bad until you realize that an attorney working 12-hours per day spends approximately five hours on non-billable work. This means they have seven hours to work with. Here’s the problem. These billable hours are battered by billable leakage, poor realization rates, discounts, and write-downs.   

Other sources state the loss is much higher. According to the Legal Trends Report, the majority of attorneys collect pay for only 2.3 hours of the work in their day. 

Why time management is a juggling act for most attorneys

Attorneys experience significant demand for their time. Whether it’s a client or new associates on the team, there are a variety of people, circumstances, and tasks competing for your time and attention: 

• Partners and associates who want to unburden themselves by giving you extra work 
• Non-billable work that requires a consistent investment of time (e.g., business development, accounting, rainmaking) 
• Crises to deal with —  external crises like client emergencies and complaints, internal crises like covering for a particular practice group, or peripheral crises like advertising fraud 
• A sudden change — an increase or decrease in client demand for a practice group or a loss of several key associates in your firm 

Adopt new processes and boundaries

Taking control of your time boils down to creating best practices and setting boundaries within your work. Adopting legal practice management software, setting calendar restrictions for when you’re available or simply saying, ‘no,’ when you don’t have the bandwidth.

The pandemic has disrupted the legal industry and many are looking for ways to increase law firm revenue. According to a recent survey by Martindale-Avvo, 81 percent of law firms have experienced a significant decrease in revenue, and 27 percent of firms have seen their revenues decrease by half.

Additional data shows firms are experiencing a 40 percent decrease in the number of new legal matters being opened each week. Approximately 20 percent of firms have been forced to lay off employees as firms struggle to survive.

How law firms can survive a downturn

Your firm needs revenue. This is an obvious but difficult proposition for firms. Research from McKinsey confirms these trends and recommends planning for the current trend to increase law firm growth in the long term.

Plan for continued pressure on pricing and on shifts to alternative delivery models. In the last downturn, standard rates continued to rise by 3 percent per year, on average, but pressure on collections did too. From 2007 to 2012, the fraction of standard rates not collected more than doubled (to 16.4 percent, from 8 percent) because of increases in discounts, write-downs, and write-offs, which left net prices relatively flat. This time around, expect that procurement teams will play an even larger role and that there will be a greater focus on commercial arrangements that provide clients with greater cost certainty, either through a fixed or capped arrangement or through one that more closely aligns fees to the outcomes achieved. Client demands and competition from alternative legal-service providers will also likely pressure high-cost real estate, staffing pyramids, and other elements of the traditional service-delivery model.”

How can your firm generate more revenue at a time when clients, who are also feeling the pressure of an economic downturn, want to decrease the amount they spend on legal matters?

There are several opportunities to increase law firm growth during a downturn.

Step #1: Maintain financial discipline

Law firms may be more motivated to use discounts, write-downs, and write-offs as a client retention tool. It helps to retain clients in the short term, but it’s destructive in the long term if it locks your firm into discounted arrangements. McKinsey agrees:

Leaders will be creative in providing pricing or volume relief. Rather than reflexively locking into long-term, highly discounted arrangements, explore ways to offer strategic investments, flexible payment terms, credits toward future services, and the broader panoply of alternative fee arrangements. Strategically show strength through extending the firm balance sheet for clients rather than gradually losing ground through a lack of pricing discipline.”

Use various tactics, like alternative fee arrangements to show your client that you are flexible and empathetic while remaining committed to the value of your work. Use realization optimization to keep realization rates high. Follow financial best practices to ensure that your firm stays in the black.

• Maintain accurate timekeeping habits
• Verify attorneys are recording their time as-it-happens instead of reconstructing their timesheets
• Follow client billing guidelines to avoid disputes
• Send invoices to the right parties (e.g., decision-makers, points-of-contact, accounting, etc.)
• Follow up with clients to ensure prompt payment

Financial discipline means financial stability. The better you are at maintaining your firm’s financial health, the greater your odds of surviving and thriving during the downturn.

Step #2: Increase law firm revenue streams

Here are six ways your law firm can generate more revenue while decreasing the amount of billable work you take on.

1. Earned revenue: This encompasses the services your law firm provides to clients. If you’re a shareholder or owner of a law firm, this is typically your primary source of income.
2. Interest revenue: These are interest payments you receive as a result of lending money to third parties, which could be from excess cash in your corporate savings account, investments, or money loaned to crowdfunding platforms like Prosper.
3. Dividend income: Revenue received from your ownership interest in a business (whether it’s an independent or client-owned business) or stock.
4. Rental income: If you own your office building, your firm could take advantage of rental income from real estate. If the space has gone unused during the pandemic, you could lease smaller units to individuals who are looking for office space.
5. Capital gains: This is income derived from the sale of investments like real estate, stocks, bonds, etc. It can also come from the sale of a business you own (e.g., your own business or equity received in lieu of payment for services).
6. Royalties and licensing: You could create an asset, service, product, process, or idea — like a paywalled guide with advice to help other lawyers run their business — then you rent it to third parties who are willing to pay you a fee whenever they use your assets.

Alternatives to increase law firm revenue streams:

• Trademark monitoring services: Monitor and manage your client’s intellectual property in exchange for a monthly or annual fee. This service can be automated or semi-automated, depending on your client’s needs.
• Legal search services: You can use software to provide clients (or other law firms) with the legal search requirements they need. Add a set number of consulting hours to the plan; provide clients with summaries, warnings, changes, reports, and disclosures.
• Subscription products and services: Providing clients with ongoing legal support for odds and ends or minor legal work via a recurring subscription.
• Annual or quarterly events: You can create your own in-person or digital conferences or meetups. Create an event around a topic, problem, desire, or goal your clients have (that you can solve), then provide them with a valuable solution. Capture a percentage of the value you create via ticket sales, product sales, or bonus offers.
• Workshops and seminars: Paid workshops and seminars that provide clients with the information they need to solve a specific legal problem.
• Affiliate marketing programs: You can promote complementary products and services on your website and marketing to generate a substantial income (e.g., identity theft protection or credit monitoring services recommended by bankruptcy attorneys).
• Employee monitoring: Monitoring employees on behalf of their employers to minimize data loss and confirm company policies compliance.
• Transactional data and analysis monitoring: This varies depending on your practice area; it can be as simple as monitoring static data (i.e., home/land sales in the last six months) or dynamic data (i.e., changing market conditions).
• Optimized origination credit plans: Motivating employees to pursue new clients and mine their professional connections to attract new business.
• Outsourcing work to low-cost, freelance attorneys: If you’ve already had to deal with layoffs, you can use freelance attorneys to maximize revenues and bounce back. This increases cash flow and minimizes the amount you’ll need to spend (salary, health insurance, bonuses, 401K, etc.) to service clients.
• Digital publishing: This category is broad — ebooks, podcasts, audiobooks, videos, blog posts; these digital products can be monetized in various ways (e.g., advertising, sponsorships, paid subscriptions, paid products, add-on services, etc.).
• Collecting capital gains:  Acquire ownership interest in corporations that are big on potential but short on cash flow and investment.

With a bit of upfront preparation, these ideas can provide you with reliable  revenue you can use to grow your firm while your competitors continue to struggle.

Step #3: Iterate and expand to increase law firm revenue

You’ll want to identify a list of three to seven ideas that work best for you.

Choose one idea at a time. Develop an idea, so it’s profitable and will increase law firm revenue at the levels you need. Then, move on to your next idea once your current revenue stream is stable and self-sufficient. Iterate and expand continuously.

Scrap the ideas that fail and focus on the ideas that are successful for your law firm.

Law firms have been hit hard by the downturn

The vast majority of firms have experienced a sharp decrease in revenue, but there’s good news.

Law firms all over the country are losing revenue. They’re struggling to survive as the pandemic and downturn continue. Alternative services can provide you with the cash flow you need to survive a downturn. With upfront planning, your law firm can thrive and find ways to increase revenue.

With a little bit of ingenuity, your firm can increase revenue while decreasing billable work. This is achieved by providing clients with the services they need to grow during the downturn, boost your revenue in the process.

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