Financially Legal

Wire transfers are a common method of accepting payment for law firms, but they can be risky for both your firm and your clients. This article outlines the dangers and downsides associated with accepting wire transfers and best practices for avoiding these traps. 

The two most controversial topics for law firms related to client payments and collections are:

1. Should law firms charge credit card fees to clients?
2. Should law firms hire a collections agency to recoup long outstanding accounts receivable?

We have published substantial information to help you make a decision on on whether to charge card fees to clients but very little on navigating the collections agency conundrum.

We at Confido Legal strongly believe that firms and clients benefit most when firms offer clients a variety of options to pay. Firms invest significant dollars to get clients in the door. It’s a waste of those resources to have a would-be paying client walk out the door simply because the firm doesn’t offer payment plans (i.e. doesn’t want to be the client’s bank), the client doesn’t have a credit card, or because the firm won’t offer third-party funding.

Over the last few years there’s been an explosion of third-party commercial financing options. Familiarly known as “Buy Now, Pay Later” and offered by companies like Klarna, Affirm, and Sunbit, these services provide short-term loans to consumers to purchase everything from furniture to event tickets.

The decision to hire a collections agency is a difficult one, and although most law firms are collections curious, the majority of firms we talk to have not hired one. That said, the feedback from law firms who have hired an agency is pretty darn positive. 

How, if at all, do compensation, diversity, and transparency overlap? How can these competing priorities be reconciled? Jim Meadows from Culhane Meadows doesn’t have the perfect answer. But he’s giving it a solid try.

Plaintiffs' lawyers are often bold, brash, larger-than-life characters with billboards, regular TV ads, and ambition to match.

But they're also visionary creatives. They excel at building something from nothing and carving out a new and unique path for legal professionals - often where no path existed before. But that creativity needs to be leavened with stability and more strategic thinking. 

If you don't know who Dan Kennedy is, you should. Here's just a quick recap of the impact he's had on the business world in his 30+ year career:

Immigration law firms have unique billing practices. Most immigration firms we encounter either predominantly or exclusively put clients on payments plans. These plans involve the client entering their payment information so they can be automatically billed on a regular schedule until a specified dollar amount is reached.

One of our most popular features at Confido Legal is our compliant surcharging, enabling firms to shift credit card processing fees to their clients. When we talk with firms, many are surprised to learn that it's against some state laws and the card brand rules for businesses, including law firms, to surcharge on debit cards. A smaller group is not just surprised but a bit concerned because they've been shifting card fees on debit cards unknowingly.

In this blog post, we break down the reasons why surcharging on debit card transactions is impermissible and the implications of these restrictions for law firms.

One of our most popular blog posts is a post about how lawyers can realize the benefits of a retainer without a trust account.  By storing a client payment method and subsequently charging the payment method in accordance with the attorney/client engagement agreement, firms can get the benefits of having access to funds on hand without the burden of trust account compliance.

Do you have practice management or accounting software that does your trust accounting? Great. This post is NOT for you.

Let's face it. Most bankers have no idea what an IOLTA account is. These types of accounts are an afterthought - one of those banking products that gets little attention. We hear horror stories of banks regularly debiting fees from IOLTA accounts or sending erroneous overdraft notifications to the Bar. We recently spoke to a firm that had to call their bank to speak with a real live human being every time they wanted to check their IOLTA balance. 

We believe lawyers and law firms have the power to change the world. Every day we interact with lawyers making positive change, sticking up for the underdog and expanding access to the justice system. But we recognize there can be tradeoffs between pursuing these aims and paying the bills. 

Millions of business use QuickBooks as their accounting platform. From sole proprietors to large corporations, from cobblers to manufacturing firms, QuickBooks users come from all corners of the business world. With QuickBooks serving such a diverse set of clients, there are certain industries and business types with unique accounting needs that QuickBooks doesn't fully support out-of-the-box. Law firms fit into this category.  

Trust or IOLTA accounts evoke feelings of fear and frustration. Untangling trust accounting mistakes can devour precious hours, and the risk of running afoul of the rules of professional conduct is constant. Yet for all the bad, retainers (in particular evergreen retainers) are one of the top ways to improve your firm’s collection rate. With collection rates averaging around 85% according to the 2021 Clio Trends Report, collections is a major financial drain on the legal industry.  

Whether a client unilaterally decided not to pay your firm, or you made a legitimate mistake in your billing process, disputes or chargebacks on credit card transactions do occur. The card brands have processes in place for settling these disputes, and this article outlines the actions your firm can take after receiving notice of a chargeback. For information on how to avoid chargebacks, see How to Protect Your Law Firm from Chargebacks.

Vetting, deploying, and managing new technology takes a lot of time and can be expensive. More to the point, while much of today’s cloud computing technology uses some common technologies, the implementation can vary significantly even in the cloud. This can be a real headache for law firms who not only often deal with sensitive information but have specific rules and heightened standards regarding how confidential and privileged information must be protected. 

You can’t really blame consumer bankruptcy attorneys for being finicky about how they get paid. After all, would-be clients wouldn’t be knocking on the door if the those debtors had managed their money well and been able to regularly pay their debts. As a result, many bankruptcy attorneys do way more gymnastics than other lawyers to ensure they get paid. For example, insisting upon upfront payment, payment by the debtor’s friends or family, automated payments that fall on a debtor-client’s payday, or even the development of a new type of bankruptcy, bifurcated bankruptcy, that changes how clients pay in order to improve their odds of getting paid (we won’t get into bifurcated bankruptcy here but watch this space for a subsequent post on the topic). You’ve got to hand it to them.

Listen, we here at Confido Legal work hard for the money we get paid. Payments isn’t as mentally straining as rocket science or physically demanding as coal mining but it is a fairly complex regulated business and we work really hard to try and make things great for our law firm customers. And while there are still a handful of bar associations that want to make it harder for law firms to accept electronic payments (we’re looking at you Indiana, Iowa, Mississippi, Nebraska, West Virginia, Alabama, and Michigan), today most law firms are largely free to take advantage of the collections and convenience benefits that accepting electronic payments offers.  

Small law firms live or die by cash flow. A few extra percentage points on revenue can help a firm make payroll or pay rent (hopefully not, but “gulp!”), buy software, hire, experiment with a new practice area, or even innovate on a new product or service. But extra revenue rarely comes easy. What if you had a way—using existing systems—to immediately find additional revenue for your law firm?

Though lawyers are a solitary profession - they spend a surprising amount of time in their own heads - they’re also remarkably social. We made a cursory count recently and came up with 103 state, regional, local, and specialty bar associations. And we feel fairly confident that the total number is certainly double or even triple that. Feels like as long as there have been lawyers, there have been bar associations.

Although electronic payments are not relevant for every firm, most law firms do at least a portion of their business by issuing ongoing invoices. For these firms, the data is clear: Electronic payments matter.

Here's our nearly 20 page white paper on law firms shifting processing credit card processing fees to clients.

Every year, to much fanfare, The American Lawyer releases a list of the largest law firms in the world, also known as the AmLaw 100. 

I recently joined another attorney Dan, Dan Jaffe, from LawLytics for a great conversation that, yes, touched on Confido Legal and on Dan's business, LawLytics, but was mostly focused on a favorite topic of mine, legal technology. On the Confido Legal side we covered Confido Legal's credit card fee shifting technology and integrated ACH features, the Confido Legal Zapier integration, and the forthcoming Confido Legal Quickbooks integration. 

I’ve been working in legal technology for a while. I’ve been thinking about it for even longer than that. And I worked at Microsoft before that. And, if there’s one thing that I know about lawyers - even today - it’s that Lawyers. Love. Microsoft Office. Practice management systems come and go, accounting software ebbs and flows, some lawyers try document automation. But just about every lawyer and law firm uses Office.

Subscriptions were the name of the game when Dan Lear recently chatted with Houston Estate Planning attorney John Strohmeyer, the namesake of Strohmeyer Law, on John's podcast, Five Star Counsel.