Split billing

This feature is included in our financial management module It lets you distribute the work done on a matter among multiple clients. Your fees and costs are entered once and a separate bill is produced for each client showing his or her share.

Although quite a few software companies are now offering fee splitting, there are very significant differences among them. Legalmaster offers quite a few features that you will not find elsewhere.

• Each client sharing the billing is assigned his or her own receivable account. You don't have to photocopy bills or keep manual track of who paid and who didn't.
• Your split may be based either upon percentages or upon amounts. For example, you may wish to split a case among four clients at 10%, 20%, 30% and 40%, respectively, either at the same or at different billing rates. On the other hand, you may want one client (the insurance company, for example) to pay the first $125 per hour, while the other client pays the difference between $125 per hour and your normal $200 per hour billing rate; i.e., $75 per hour.
• The bill shows the unsplit hours and amounts with the client's respective share split in toto only. If, for example, you work a tenth of an hour to be split equally between two clients, neither client will see a meaningless .05 hours figure on his or her bill. Instead, each will see the full .1 value (assuming that you choose to show hours on this client's bill), the total value of all time at the non-shared rate and a calculation of that client's share of the dollar amount.
• Should you need to change the description associated with a split entry, you need only change it once. Legalmaster will reflect the change for every client.
• Let's say that you have a case which is split among four clients and have entered time all month. An attorney remembers to tell you on the 26th of the month that a fifth client was added to the split on the 10th. Legalmaster offers an easy way to address this annoyance without your having to reenter any transactions.
• You may charge one client for a non-split entry if you wish. Such transactions are shown separately immediately after the split entries so as to make it clear to the client which is which.

We have created a couple of terms that will be useful in describing this feature. If you wish to split the fees and/or costs among a number of clients, you must create one extra matter; we call that matter the Dummy. The clients actually being billed we call the Receptors.

A Dummy may have as many Receptors as you wish. Each Receptor is limited to one Dummy. Each receptor may be assigned a percentage value for fees and another for costs. Although it could be argued that the percentages should sum to 100, it is not a requirement of the software.

Gold StarThe receptors do not all have to be billed at the same rates. For example, let's say that you split a matter between two clients at 50% each. You work an hour on the matter and want one client billed at $100 per hour and the other client billed at $125 per hour. As a result, the clients would be billed $50 and $62.50 respectively.

Fees or costs may be entered directly against a Receptor if they are not to be shared.

Task Billing

Legalmaster accommodates the Price Waterhouse/American Bar Association Uniform Task Based Management System (UTBMS). This conventional method of classifying time entries has been adopted by a few dozen mid-sized insurance companies. Although the larger insurance companies are for the most part developing their own task coding schemes, these other systems are structured in similar ways to that of the UTBMS. You may read much more about this on our electronic billing page.

Legalmaster's task billing options may be tailored to address any of these systems' demands. This capability is included with any version of Legalmaster's billing software.