Every lawyer can benefit from legal billing software to save time and accurately track time and payments from multiple clients. For Mac users, it's even more critical that the software is easily configured into their existing systems and tools.
Even if you like the features of another tool, it's not worth waiting until the company rolls out a Mac-friendly version. Otherwise, you'll find yourself frustrated or constantly submitting bug reports. Legal billing software should save you time and make life easier.
Finding legal billing software that at least works with Mac or, ideally, is built to run on Mac products rather than Windows will make your life easier.
Learn what you must consider when selecting legal billing software and some of the most popular Mac legal billing programs available today.
Choosing the Right Legal Billing Software for Mac
If you and your entire team already use Mac products, keep it simple and set up a legal billing software that will automatically plug into that setup. Reading reviews from other users can help you determine if there are any downsides you should know about before signing up for the software.
In general, you'll look at a few things when trying to find the right billing software for your law firm:
- Ease of use
- Cost
- Integrations with other tools, such as document management
- Available payment options to make things simple for clients
- Other features that would replace existing software or provide new benefits to your firm
The Importance of Legal Billing Software for Mac Users
The average hourly billable rate for lawyers in the US is $300, yet only a few hours of each day are associated with billable work. That's a problem.
Suppose you struggle to hit a decent number of client work hours daily. In that case, you can address that by creating a strategic marketing plan, handing off many tasks to an outside partner or expert, and delegating other things in your practice, like admin and intake.
The right legal billing software will:
- Automate billing to make invoicing and payment easier
- Improve your confidence in the bills you send to clients
- Reduce reliance on pen and paper or other bill-tracking methods
- Help you see snapshots of your performance and that of your other lawyers
With a plan to maximize your billable hours, you want to capture all of them accurately. Getting paid promptly protects your cash flow and helps your law firm grow sustainably. With the right tool in place, you don't need to set aside entire days to handle billing or track down payments from overdue clients.
Whether you use flat fees, a percentage system, or some other billing model, automated payment plans can relieve the pressure by grabbing this information and setting it up to be sent to clients on a schedule.
In some cases, as you'll note through the examples named below, a more full-service suite may incorporate legal billing as a feature. Other programs focus mostly on legal billing as the primary offering. Knowing what you already have in place and what you need in your law office will help point you in the right direction.
How to Make an Informed Decision
To make the best decision for your firm, you must know the required and ideal feature set for any software you choose. That includes thinking through your priorities as it relates to things like:
- How the price impacts your budget (including if there's a cost-per-seat model that will get more expensive over time)
- Extra features that make a program more expensive that you might not use
- User-friendly interfaces and how intuitive it is to set up
- How well the tool integrates with your current software
- What customer support the company offers
- What problems have others noted in online reviews
- Room for growth, such as how often the company makes updates to the software
Once you know what's most important to you, narrowing down your shortlist of billing software options for attorneys is simpler.
Exploring Top Mac Legal Billing Software Options
Many solutions are on the market, but these are five of the most popular and highly reviewed by users. This is a great starting point for looking into programs trusted by other practicing attorneys.
1. Clio: Your Comprehensive Legal Billing Solution
Clio is an industry-leading provider for many reasons, including the fact that it's a full legal practice management software. Clio was built for the legal industry, and developers have taken the needs of the modern law firm into consideration. If you want a one-stop shop to run many things inside your law firm, Clio is an excellent candidate.
Here are some of the billing features available with Clio:
- You can securely bill clients from anywhere at any time
- Time billing
- It's easy to set up automated payment plans
- Use their card processing function to take online payments
- Sync your transactions to other programs, like accounting software
- Write off bills or discount bills
- Offer grace periods or special discounts as needed
- Add time entries from your phone or your inbox
- Set customized rates
- Adjust reports as needed
- Categorize your time to achieve goals or see where you can improve
Clio users love that the software has so many features they can use to run their entire law firm, and the time tracking and billing options get high marks for significantly reducing lawyer time spent sending out reports.
2. QuickBooks Online: Seamless Accounting and Billing for Mac
QuickBooks Online is an industry standard across small and medium-sized businesses. It's a popular accounting system that can be as simple or as complex as you need, with customizations available. Although it wasn't built specifically for law firms, it functions well with that niche. QuickBooks is mainly meant for accounting purposes, but you can also use it for billing.
QuickBooks is compatible with many other programs lawyers might use, so it can help communicate between those different programs to save you time with reporting.
Some of the best features in QuickBooks for lawyers include:
- Reporting
- Expense tracking
- Keeping your finger on the pulse of cash flow and profit/loss
- Making things simpler come tax time
- Accept credit cards for payment processing
- Set it and forget it billing (such as for subscription legal services)
- Sync your bank account
Note: if you have Clio, you can integrate QuickBooks Online with it and use that integration to print checks, so you probably need one tool or the other, not necessarily both.
3. InvoiceTracker: Simplify Billing with Automation
If you put accounting software in motion in your firm, look for all possible ways to speed things up and automate your legal operations where possible. InvoiceTracker syncs with your accounting tool and offers benefits like:
- Cloud-based access and secure backups
- Automated payment reminders
- Invoice customization
- Reporting insights
This tool is most appropriate for someone already using another accounting program who doesn't see the need for a full-service software solution like Clio. This tool integrates With QuickBooks and Xero accounting programs.
4. InvoiceSherpa: Automate Invoicing for Mac Legal Professionals
Another option for automating invoicing with a decent amount of integrations for law firms is InvoiceSherpa. It is a simple-to-use software with a lot of features that could streamline things for your legal practice, such as:
- Customized billing
- Customer portals
- Automatic payments
- Real-time adjustments and invoices
- A dashboard for a quick snapshot of overall accounts receivable
This is a great solution if you need a basic way to create professional-looking invoices, especially if you plan to hand this over to someone else in your firm. Customers give this one big points for being accessible for anyone to use and for their fast customer service response time.
5. BillerAssist: Boosting Productivity in Mac Legal Billing
Do billing errors stress you out, and do you need a way to simplify your billing process? Look no further. BillerAssist is a robust software for both those purposes, and it uses some AI features to automate things for you, too.
This tool, built for the legal industry, offers the following features:
- Can speed up bill review by as much as five times
- Good security and data protection
- Flags potential errors for you
- Integrates with your existing billing system
- Uses predictive descriptions based on previous billing
As you can see from the features, this one is more of an add-on than a comprehensive solution for legal billing. But if you find yourself buried in monthly mistakes that take hours to sort out, this could be a good use of your money.
Effective Law Firm Billing Practices for Mac Users
Legal billing software improves your law firm's operational efficiency only when you have a solid foundation. To do that, you need to review existing billing practices and look for ways to improve things.
The most successful law firms using legal billing software also have:
- Clear billing policies across the team
- Firmwide expectations on timekeeping strategies
- Outlined procedures for best practices in trust account management
- Strategies for minimizing and also responding to client billing disputes
- Plans to regularly evaluate and update billing for regulation compliance changes
Making the Right Choice
What kind of legal billing software you should use depends on what programs you already have in place in your firm and what you need to operate productively. Legal software like Clio is an obvious choice if you need case management, document management, and time tracking. However, if you need something to reduce errors, an add-on like BillerAssist should do the trick.
Remember to think about how much you may or may not need something customizable. If you prefer to set it and forget it, read reviews of any software to ensure you can get up and running quickly with templates. If you need something more robust where you can build your workflows and won't find it stressful to put in the upfront work, take on something with more personalization available.
Pay attention to all software features and price points, too, so you feel confident about your final decision.
