Law firm software
- Fee on the bill
- $10,819.20
- Recorded value of the time
- $11,760
- Written off
- $940.80
Every figure printed on this site is arithmetic on the worked example we publish: 6 fee earners, a blended charge-out rate of $280 an hour, 5.2 recorded hours each per working day, 21 working days a month. Change any of those on the worksheet and the numbers change with them. Nothing here is a market statistic and nothing is quoted from a third party.
Law firm software is a category that covers everything from case management to court filing, and most of it is sold to firms far bigger than yours. What a two-to-forty-person firm usually needs first is narrower: a record of which matters are open and who is on them, the time recorded against each, the bill that comes off that time, and the client money held separately. This page sets out what that shorter list actually costs you to get wrong, and what to ask of any system before you move a firm onto it.
Open the Law firm invoicing software Free to use. No account, no card, no trial clock.
Start from the matter, not the feature list
A matter is the unit a firm's work, time, billing and client money all hang off. A system that treats it as a project or a ticket will fight you at every handover, and no amount of configuration fixes that.
Price the problem before you price the system
Run the work-in-progress worksheet on this site with your own fee earners, rate and recorded hours. Whatever a vendor quotes you is either small or large against that number, and until you have it you cannot tell which.
Move one thing at a time
Firms that move matters, time, billing and trust in one weekend spend the following month reconciling. Move the matter list first, then time, then billing, and keep the old system readable until the first full billing cycle has closed.
Will it do what you need for Law firm software?
Tell us how your firm bills and what is not working, and we will tell you plainly whether this is the right shape of tool for it.
Law firm software: common questions
Is this case management software? No. Case and document assembly, legal research, e-discovery and court filing are separate products, several with their own regulators, and this is not one of them. This is the matter, the time, the bill and the client money.
Does it work for a firm that is not a law firm? Yes, if the firm bills time against matters for clients: consultancies, agencies and advisory practices run the same shape. The trust-account handling is the part that is specific to law, and it is optional.
How big does a firm have to be for this to be worth it? The arithmetic starts to matter at about three fee earners. Below that the spreadsheet usually still works, and we would rather say so than sell you a subscription you do not need.
Partnro Pro
Keeping what you make
Keep this month's answer, and every month after it, without rebuilding the spreadsheet each time.
- Download the finished sheet as a file
- Send it without the Partnro line on it
- Save a matter's bill and reopen it next month
- Put your firm's name and logo on it
- Export every matter, timesheet and bill at once
- Bills emailed to the client from the matter they came off
- Connect your own Stripe account and get paid online
- Connect your QuickBooks Online or Xero
$79per month, whole team
Start Partnro Pro PricingThe plan renews monthly on the day you started it, at the same price you signed up at. We tell you by email before any price change, and a change never applies to a term already paid for.