Should Your Lawyer be Charging You so Much?
Legal Accounts
‘Cashier' is fully integrated to DPS's One Office Case Management solution to provide practice management software that can bill every minute a lawyer spends on your case to you!
This integration between the accounts and their case management system means as they do any work, send you a letter, an email, get a letter or emial from you it is automatically recorded and billed against the your case. In the words a famous supermarket, "every little bit helps" and of course it does not take long for the time to mount up into a decent size bill.
Just so you know exactly how fast the bill is racking up systems like Cashier publish the information to the web so you can track costs online 365/24/7. Like you wanted to know that thinking about the last email you sent cost you $50!
Seriously though this type of high level of information means that you get live information changes between accounts and case management systems.
It also means that if they are doing work for you that gets you close to credit or time limits they can stop and warn you which is where client accounts become very useful.
As they say time is money and recording the time so that it can become money is essential!
What is a client account you ask?
All lawyers have to run client accounts because money that they keep on your behalf is your money not their money and so it needs to be in a client account. It means that you are entitled to the interest on that money not them. It also means that when they run up a bit of a bill they can dip into the client account (your money) and make it their money by using it to pay the bills on your account.
Useful that having a stash of your money on hand to pay their bills when they need to. Clearly this all has to comply with a set of rules and guidelines and this is where legal accounts software becomes essential. Properly implemented, software like ‘Cashier' that meets the Law Society rules, Legal Aid Franchising Quality Assurance Standards (LAFQAS) and Lexel standards producing relevant reports for these standards is critical and your lawyer should be operating it.
Should they be charging you so much, well compare not having a lawyer to the cost. Now think is it worth it, probably!
A designer of software for the legal profession. The author has been involved in development and design of case management and legal accounts software for 20 years.Designs systems inside Outlook like Conveyancing and Crime system
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