Just like any business, establishing clear and ethically compliant billing practices is crucial for law firms. Your billing practices directly affect not only your bottom line but also your firm’s commitment to transparency and the client experience. Clearly communicating your legal billing guidelines goes a long way in building client trust.
But creating your firm’s billing guidelines — and enforcing them — is a challenge of its own. Still, you don’t have to wear all these hats. Legal e-billing software can give you the tools to collect legal fees and manage your firm’s finances so you can skip the guesswork.
Whether you’re setting up your guidelines for the first time or revising existing templates and systems, keep in mind why clear billing guidelines matter. They can:
Set expectations for your client from the outset
Improve — or lower — client satisfaction
Determine whether your clients pay the bill
Impact your revenue
Reduce the risk of malpractice claims
When you have a clear legal billing policy, your law firm will run more efficiently — and you’ll see happier clients, too.
When your client gets their bill, they’re not just looking at a document. They see this as part of your firm’s communication. So, if they get a bill with charges they don’t understand or fees that seem to counter your original attorney-client agreement, they might view your firm as disorganized or untrustworthy. They could even look at those fees and think, I’m not paying for that.
Let your clients know what to expect from the start. They should know all the relevant details about your legal fees, the billing process, and who bears responsibility for each legal expense involved. When you’re transparent about fees, your clients are less likely to get frustrated by their bills — and more likely to appreciate your firm for delivering a smooth, efficient legal process.
Attorneys know that billing practices can have legal implications for their firms. Establishing a clear billing policy also ensures that you’re ethically compliant with American Bar Association (ABA) codes, like reducing the likelihood of double billing. In some states, double billing is illegal.
And you can also reduce your risk of legal malpractice claims when you have billing guidelines in place. When your clients understand what services you’ll render and at what cost, there’s less confusion regarding whether you delivered on your agreement.
Your legal billing guidelines help ensure that the client and everyone in your firm is on the same page about all things related to payment. Include these items in your guidelines:
Educate the client about what billing guidelines are for, delineating which financial responsibilities fall on the firm and the client. The client should also understand how your billing policy fulfills your attorney-client agreement.
Be sure to determine who is responsible for payment. Clarify when and if the law firm will cover certain expenses and when the client bears that responsibility.
If you charge at an hourly rate, explain what that means (e.g., by what increments, when hourly fees apply). If you work on contingency, tell them about your percentage rate and if other fees apply. The same goes for retainers and any other fees you charge.
Make sure clients understand how they’ll receive their invoices. For instance, explain how to access an e-billing platform if you use one.
Within your practice, be sure that your own firm has a process for billing and invoicing, such as when certain attorneys should review the invoice.
Be sure to detail when your clients will be billed and how often. Ensure that clients have a consistent billing experience.
Get a signature from your client to confirm their understanding of your fees and billing structure. Again, this can help protect your firm against claims of malpractice or other legal concerns. It will also help you enforce payment collection as detailed in the document.
Lawyers may see billing as cumbersome and tedious, but it’s foundational to your business and your relationship with your clients. To make billing simpler, try implementing these few best practices to communicate and enforce your guidelines.
Your communication with your clients impacts the relationship — and their satisfaction with your legal services. When communicating about payments:
Set expectations early. It bears repeating: Be clear about your legal billing guidelines as soon as you establish a working relationship with the client.
Send invoices on a consistent schedule. Stick to your terms in the billing timeline.
Clarify invoice questions — and don’t bill for it. You may need to take a few minutes to help clients understand their bills. Answer their questions without fees attached.
Send courteous reminders. Remind clients when they have an invoice and a payment deadline on the horizon.
Keep legal and finance aligned. Ensure that your attorneys and your accounting team are on the same page. This way, you can help reduce errors during the billing and invoicing process and ensure you get paid faster.
With everything that goes into establishing billing practices and enforcing payments, law firms have a lot to manage on the business side. One of the best ways to streamline your billing process is to automate it electronically with software tools.
Legal billing software simplifies how you invoice, bill, and organize documents for your payments. It can even help you increase your revenue by more efficiently tracking your time, making sure clients receive invoices promptly, and eliminating billing bottlenecks that prevent your firm from turning invoices into revenue.
This can be executed through cloud-based programs or software on your firm’s computers. You can even integrate outside accounting tools, such as Quickbooks so that you adopt the solution that fits best with your firm’s current systems.
When you start to think about introducing legal e-billing software to your practice, think about what your firm needs from the tool. Identify your billing bottlenecks, and look for software that helps you address them. Then, make sure that the software offers the features and benefits you need.
Every legal billing platform is different, but make sure that you search for solutions that offer a few essential features, like:
Document management and invoicing. You can create all the documents you need with good legal billing software. Depending on the product’s features, you can make branded invoice templates and check the bill’s status. You can also track your receipts and expenses to better manage your firm’s spend.
Online payment processing (and custom links). When clients have an easier way to pay and the option to use a credit card, they may be more likely to pay promptly. The best legal billing software includes features like client portals, which give your clients a digital place to review invoices and ePay.
Reporting. With all your invoices and expenses organized in one platform, you can get readily-accessible insights into your firm’s financials. You can review your payment history, productivity, and expenses, among other reports.
Legal CRM. Some legal billing software also offers a customer management system to help you keep track of your client profiles, communications, and more.
With legal billing software, rest assured that your time gets tracked, your clients get their bills, and your firm is getting paid promptly. But the benefits go beyond pure financials. Consider other ways legal billing tools can help your firm:
Improved productivity
Better in-house collaboration
Optimized onboarding for new staff
More satisfied clients
After all, the more streamlined your systems, the better for everyone who touches billing and invoicing in your firm. New staff will be better positioned to hit the ground running, and your customers will be happier to have the clarity and ease of digital payments.
Bringing in new software tools for your practice is a big investment. Think about a couple of key factors to decide if your firm should invest.
Internally: How much of your staff’s time and resources are dedicated to billing? And do you have an ongoing issue with unpaid invoices? Run reports if you’re not sure. If you’re seeing rates of 15 or 20% unpaid invoices, you might want help with optimizing your process.
Externally: Do your clients express confusion about their bills? Do they often ask for credit card payment or digital payment capability?
If the answer to most of these questions is yes, you may want to consider bringing in the billing software. Whether you’re a small or large law firm, you may not even realize just how much revenue you stand to capture by automating your payment systems.
Ultimately, using legal e-billing tools can help you pair your billing guidelines with the enforcement side. With an easy-to-use system to send and track invoices, you can ensure that your clients uphold their end of your fee agreement.
Because you can automate your billing and easily set payment deadlines, you can also help eliminate human error from the process.
Legal billing guidelines exist to help protect law firms and clients. They’re an essential tool that allows you to fulfill both sides of the attorney-client agreement. Plus, with billing policies in place, you can help your firm capture a significant number of payments that may have come too late or slipped through the cracks. And these guidelines also help your clients know what to expect—both from your firm and on their own end financially. More transparency for your clients means happier clients.
About this Author
Founded in 2006, Bill4Time’s cloud-based legal practice management software was created with the guidance of law and consulting firms. Now, Bill4Time is trusted by both small and large professional service firms to automate their daily tasks. Bill4Time has created simple to use, intuitive, and user-friendly software at a fraction of the cost of other legal practice management systems. With a strong focus on convenience, Bill4Time offers online access to your account and mobile apps anytime, anywhere. Bill4Time’s goal is to streamline the time tracking and billing aspect…
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Google today introduced Graph for Understanding Artifact Composition (GUAC), an open source tool for centralizing build, security, and dependency metadata.
Developed in collaboration with Kusari, Purdue University, and Citi, the new project is meant to help organizations better understand software supply chains.
GUAC aggregates metadata from different sources, including supply chain levels for software artifacts (SLSA) provenance, software bills of materials (SBOM), and vulnerabilities, to provide a more comprehensive view over them.
“Graph for Understanding Artifact Composition (GUAC) aggregates software security metadata into a high-fidelity graph database—normalizing entity identities and mapping standard relationships between them,” Google says.
By querying this graph, organizations can improve their audit processes and risk management, can better meet policy requirements, and even provide developer assistance.
GUAC, the internet giant explains, has four areas of functionality, including metadata collection (from public, first-person, and third-party sources), ingestion of data (on artifacts, resources, vulnerabilities, and more), data assembly into a coherent graph, and user query for metadata attached to entities within the graph.
By aggregating software security metadata and making it meaningful and actionable, GUAC can help identify risks, discover critical libraries within open source software, and gather information on software dependencies, to improve supply chain security.
The open source project is in its early stages, with a proof of concept (PoC) now available on GitHub, offering support for the ingestion of SLSA, SBOM, and Scorecard documents and for simple queries for software metadata.
“The next efforts will focus on scaling the current capabilities and adding new document types for ingestion. We welcome help and contributions of code or documentation,” Google says.
The internet giant has created a group of ‘Technical Advisory Members’ that includes SPDX, CycloneDX Anchore, Aquasec, IBM, Intel, and others, to help expand the project towards consuming data from many different sources and formats.
Related: Google Launches Bug Bounty Program for Open Source Projects
Related: Academics Devise Open Source Tool For Hunting Node.js Security Flaws
Related: Google Open Sources ‘Paranoid’ Crypto Testing Library
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Are you a fan of kanban-style task management features to visualize workflows and customer leads? If so, two project management tools lead the fray — Pipedrive and Trello. Both rely on kanban cards as their primary visualization tool, making them both incredibly user-friendly and approachable.
From assigning and monitoring task progress to customer relationship management, both Pipeline and Trello offer unique advantages for both. Yet, due to their inherent similarities, it can be a tad difficult to determine which project management software will best suit your company’s needs. Which you end up going with will depend on a few factors, including:
Key features
Pricing
Integrations
User experience
Automation capabilities
To help you with your decision, we’ve put together this comparison guide pitting Pipedrive vs. Trello. We’ll compare and contrast each deciding factor to help you determine which software you need to implement at your business.
While both programs have some inherent similarities, they are two different types of software that serve different functions. Trello is a project management software primarily used for task management, as it uses a kanban board and cards to represent projects, tasks, and assignees. Pipedrive is a CRM (customer relationship management) software aimed at directing leads through your sales pipeline. It uses a similar visualization style (kanban cards) as Trello, but its primary purpose is different.
Yet, Trello can also double as CRM software, and some companies use Pipedrive to manage projects, which is why the programs are often lumped together in the same category.
Without further ado, read on to discover who’s victorious in the matchup Pipedrive vs. Trello.
Pipedrive is an innovative cloud-based CRM software that allows you to visualize your entire sales process at a glance. The stages of the pipeline are visualized as cards (referred to as deals) on a kanban board. Users can import deals from their computers or build new deals from scratch.
The program uses a simple drag-and-drop interface to move deals around, update deals, and add new deals to the board. It’s a straightforward user interface, meaning anyone can pick up and start using it without much training.
Pipedrive also sends automatic alerts and reminders to keep you in the loop whenever there’s an update. Your sales forecasts will also update every time you move a deal down the funnel.
You can also segment your leads by using filtering, segmenting, and categorization tools. That way, your salespeople will know which leads are gaining the most traction with a single glance at the board. You can also create targeted lead lists to engage in personalized communications with clients.
To capture even more leads, Pipedrive has a lead generation toolset that includes the following:
A chatbot. Automatically engage with your leads 24/7. It also has the capability to route leads to sales reps, which is a plus.
Live chat. Besides the chatbot, you have the option of switching to live chat on the fly.
Prospector. This tool contains a database of 400 million profiles you can use to find new leads.
Embeddable web forms. You can easily embed surveys and other forms to increase lead generation on your web pages.
While these features are indeed impressive, they don’t come as part of any standard Pipedrive plan. Instead, you’ll need to pay an additional $32.50 a month per company — which may go over budget for some (especially small businesses and startups).
Yet, if you do have the extra money, there’s no denying that these extra features are helpful for generating more leads.
Another add-on offered by Pipedrive is web visitors — a tracker that will allow you to monitor the visitors to your website.
Besides letting you know who’s browsing your content, the add-on automatically ranks each lead based on their activity — so you’ll know which leads show the most potential. You can also customize how it ranks leads, including by:
Country
AdWords campaign
Webpage interaction
This additional flexibility ensures you’ll be able to rank your leads the way you want. For instance, you may want to only focus on leads from a specific geographic area, which is where the country filter comes into play.
Like the lead booster, this add-on isn’t free (although you can try it out free as part of your 14-day Pipedrive free trial).
The pricing is a tad different, as it’s based on the number of identifiable organizations that the app picks up on.
Here’s the breakdown:
200 identified organizations: $49 per month (0.25 per organization)
201 to 500 organizations: $99 per month (0.20 per organization)
501 to 2,000 organizations: $299 per month (0.15 per organization)
If your company has the additional funds, being able to track web users is a desirable feature — albeit an expensive one.
Trello is a dedicated project management software that uses a kanban board for projects, columns for phases, and cards to visualize projects and tasks. It’s a cloud-based platform, so your team can access it from anywhere. The Trello board allows for team collaboration, customizable task management, and superior time management.
While boards, columns, and cards are the bread and butter of the application, Trello also makes use of:
Task assignments
A timeline view for planning projects
Productivity metrics
A calendar view for better time management
Automation
A table view to connect work across multiple boards
Trello is a favorite amongst small businesses, startups, and freelancers. It’s the ideal tool for keeping track of projects handled by small teams. While it’s entirely possible to manage larger teams with Trello, many companies opt for other project management tools, such as Asana.
Yet, companies love Trello due to its simplicity, amazing customer support, and ease of use. You can pick up Trello and start using it without viewing a single tutorial, which is a testament to its intuitive user interface.
Trello cards are the heart and soul of the program, and their features and capabilities are pretty robust.
A Trello card is more akin to a living ecosystem than something static.
Each card can contain a wide variety of:
Checklists
Due dates
Attachments
Conversations
Cards are also quite versatile in what they can represent. Besides concrete tasks, cards can also represent ideas and policies. For instance, you could create a card for a blog post that needs writing, including the deadline, assignee, attachments (such as a style guide or other requirements), and more. Or you could create a card for crucial company policies that you don’t want anyone to forget. Both are perfectly viable uses for cards, so don’t limit them only to represent tasks.
While Pipedrive and Trello differ in their business functions, they do bear many similarities. Both platforms use kanban boards as their primary tool to visualize workflows, which is why they’re both so user-friendly.
They also both feature workflow automation capabilities that allow you to automate repetitive tasks. Both Trello and Pipedrive enable users to create custom fields to trigger numerous workflow tasks, such as setting up personalized emails to send whenever you create a new deal.
Their primary difference lies in the audiences they appeal to. Pipedrive is a favorite of sales teams, and Trello is favored by smaller teams and businesses (freelancers also). Sales managers will appreciate Pipedrive’s ability to create email marketing campaigns, while Trello freelancers love its calendar view to stay on top of their daily tasks.
Now let’s directly compare Pipedrive vs. Trello in terms of:
Features
Automation
Integrations
Pricing
By the end, you should know which platform best suits your needs.
First, let’s take an in-depth look at the primary features of both Pipedrive and Trello to see which platform provides the most value in their base plan.
Due to its nature, Pipedrive contains more features geared toward perfecting your sales cycle, including:
Visualized sales pipeline. You’ll get to see all your leads and deals in one convenient location. The simple drag-and-drop controls make it effortless to update deals and progress them further down the sales funnel.
Team collaboration. You can work on deals with colleagues straight from Pipedrive, whether you’re located in the same place or not. It’s a great way to share updates and wins with your coworkers.
Activity reminders. You can schedule automated reminders, so you never forget about your sales activities.
Lead segmentation. One of Pipedrive’s most helpful CRM features is the ability to segment leads based on a number of factors.
In-depth contact history. For each lead, you’ll be able to view your complete history of notes, calls, emails, and meetings in one convenient location. That makes it effortless for someone new to come in on a deal, as they can check the contact history to learn everything they need to know about a lead.
Revenue forecasting. Pipedrive will automatically forecast future revenue and sales volume based on your pipeline, saving you the trouble of having to do so yourself. Every time you update a deal, the forecasting will also update.
Detailed reporting and analytics. The Pipedrive Insightsdashboard contains many helpful sales reports that your team members can use to identify winning patterns.
As you can see, Pipedrive comes with a ton of helpful CRM features but doesn’t offer much in the way of sheer project management.
Yet, its Essential plan includes all these features, which is an incredible deal.
Trello is, by nature, a straightforward tool, which is part of its appeal to its user base. Here’s an overview of its main features:
Trello boards. In seconds, you can set up a Trello board (representing a project). Its columns represent the stages of the project, and Trello cards represent tasks or ideas. It’s a simple yet highly effective way to visualize workflows.
Multiple board views. With Trello, you can view your board in various ways. Besides the board view, there’s also a calendar view, table view, and timeline view for an efficiency boost.
No-code automation. Trello allows users to automate repetitive tasks with Butler, its built-in automation assistant.
Trello cards. Cards are especially versatile in Trello, as they can contain attachments, checklists, conversations, due dates, and more.
Templates. To make things even easier for new users, Trello offers templates that allow you to get started in seconds. Templates come from both Trello and third parties, so a wide variety of them are available.
Trello power-ups. Trello’s power-ups are a bit of a double-edged sword. They’re fantastic in that they add new capabilities to Trello, including Crmble, a CRM power-up. Yet, not all power-ups come from the Trello team, and the quality of third-party power-ups can be questionable at times.
Trello is by far the simpler tool of the two, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. If you want to manage projects amongst your team, Trello is the way to go.
Still, it’s hard to deny that Pipedrive offers more robust features in its base plan, so it takes this round.
Winner: Pipedrive
Now let’s take a closer look at the automation capabilities of both platforms.
Pipedrive allows users to set triggers and assign them to preset actions to automate tasks.
How does this work?
Let’s consider an example. Say that you want to notify your sales manager whenever a deal gets completed automatically. In this scenario, the trigger would be whenever a deal gets added to the ‘won’ section, and the action would be to notify the sales manager. By assigning the task to the trigger, emails will begin sending to your sales manager, notifying them of completed deals.
That’s how easy it is to automate tasks with Pipedrive, which is a plus.
Trello’s automated features work very much in the same way. You can also assign actions to triggers to automate mundane tasks to save time.
Yet, Trello takes things a bit further with its built-in automation assistant, Butler.
It’s an AI-driven assistant that observes your actions on Trello boards at all times. Along the way, it identifies repetitive tasks you could automate and notifies you. That’s especially handy because it can point out tasks you can automate that you may have missed otherwise.
For this reason alone, Trello takes the cake in terms of automation.
Winner: Trello
Next, let’s take a look at the applications and platforms that Pipedrive and Trello integrate with to see if they can mesh with your existing workflows.
Pipedrive undoubtedly leads the fray in this regard, as it integrates with over 350 apps, including:
Zoom
Asana
Zapier
Hubspot
Slack
Salesforce
Google Drive
Trello (that’s right, you can integrate Pipedrive with Trello for the best of both worlds)
Many others
With all the integrations, Pipedrive is bound to fit into your business workflows with ease.
While Trello can’t compare with Pipedrive’s 350+ integrations, it’s still no slouch — with over 200 of its own.
There are integrations for campaign management, email, internal collaboration, reporting, and document management.
Integrations include:
Microsoft Teams
Gmail
Slack
Mailchimp
Google Drive
Evernote
Still, there’s no denying that Pipedrive knocks this round out of the park.
Winner: Pipedrive
Now let’s take a look at the pricing plans of each. Right off the bat, Trello has a noticeable advantage since it has a totally free version you can use. Pipedrive has a 14-day free trial, but after it runs out, you’ll have to purchase the Essential plan at least.
Here’s an overview of the Pipedrive pricing plans:
Essential. Coming in at $14.90 per month (per user), Pipedrive’s essential plan yields you 3,000 active deals, 30 custom fields, and 15 reports.
Advanced. At $24.90 per month (per user), you get 10,000 active deals, 100 custom fields, and 30 reports.
Professional. At $49.90 per month (per user), you get 100,000 active deals, 1,000 custom fields, and 150 reports.
Enterprise. At $99 per month (billed annually), you get unlimited active deals, unlimited custom fields, and unlimited reports. You also get unlimited user permissions, making this an ideal choice for larger organizations.
While there’s no free version, the Essential plan is affordable and comes with an impressive number of features.
Here’s an overview of Trello’s pricing:
Free version. The free version still contains a ton of features, such as unlimited cards and unlimited storage.
Standard. At $5 a month, you get custom fields, advanced checklists, and 1,000 workspace commands per month.
Premium. At $10 a month, you get additional board views, unlimited workspace command runs, admin security features, and more.
Enterprise. At $17.50 a month, you get unlimited workspaces, multi-board guests, attachment permissions, and more.
In addition to its fantastic free version, nearly every Trello pricing plan is cheaper than Pipedrive, making it the clear winner for this round.
Winner: Trello
It’s been a long, complex comparison, but there must be a winner. While both programs are different in nature, they’re similar enough that comparison is just.
Considering all the factors we’ve gone over, the score stands at:
Trello: 2
Pipedrive: 2
The winner: A tie
Yes, it comes down to a tie between Pipedrive vs. Trello.
Both platforms offer unique advantages for different types of customers. If your primary focus is generating, tracking, and converting leads — Pipedrive reigns supreme.
Yet, if project management is your ultimate goal, Trello is the way to go without a doubt.
Our recommendation?
You can integrate Trello with Pipedrive to enjoy the best of both worlds.
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