Easily Offer Flexible Billing to Your Clients

As a lawyer serving many different legal clients, it’s important to offer flexibility in how you bill all of them. We get asked a lot about how to charge different hourly rates for different clients. Luckily, TimeNet Law has you covered, no matter how you need to bill. Whether it’s a discounted rate, pro bono work, or an expedited case that requires special handling and extra work. Let’s go over the different ways to customize your rates.

Client-Specific Billing Rates

The first option is to simply set a custom rate for a client. This is a good option if you want to charge that client the same hourly rate regardless of who is performing the work:

Keep in mind that setting a client’s custom rate will override all other timekeeper rate settings. New entries will default to the Client Rate, but can be changed manually.

Timekeeper-Specific Billing Rates

Often, you’ll want to offer different hourly rates for every timekeeper in your office. TimeNet Law lets you assign hourly billing rates to each timekeeper, and timekeepers can have as many as they need:

1. Go to Preferences > Timekeepers, and then double-click a timekeeper to edit their rates.
2. From here, you can select one of their rates and click Set Selected Rate as Default to set this rate as the default for all clients and matters. Only do this if you want to use the selected rate for every client and matter.

But what if you want to charge different rates for different clients? No problem. After you’ve created billing rates for your timekeepers, you can assign those rates to specific clients or matters as well:

1. Edit a client, or open a specific matter and click the Matter Settings button in the toolbar, then click Timekeeper Settings.
2. From here, you can choose a default billing rate for each timekeeper individually. After that, any new entry for that timekeeper will default to the chosen rate, either for that specific matter, or for any matter under the entire client.

Now you can offer flexible billing rates for all of your clients, and all types of work. Just set up and assign your billing rates once, and TimeNet Law handles everything for you.

Contingency Billing

You can also offer your clients contingency billing. Simply set a matter to use Contingency Billing under Matter Settings, and TimeNet Law will take care of the rest.

1. Open a matter and click the Matter Settings button in the toolbar.
2. Click the Billing tab and enable the Contingency Fee Billing option.
3. Enter the percentage of the earnings/recovery you will charge your client, and then enter the recovery amount. If you do not know the recovery amount yet, you can come back here and add it when the case is finished.
4. If you want to charge normally (full price) for specific entries, such as expenses, you can set that as well.
5. Choose whether to calculate your fee based off of the full recovery amount, or the recovery amount less the entries you already charged the client for.

Split Billing

Sometimes you may wish to split a client’s bill between two or more parties. TimeNet Law makes this easy.

1. Open a matter and click the Matter Settings button in the toolbar.
2. Click the Parties tab and add each party that will be responsible for paying the invoice.
3. Set each party’s percentage responsible.

Now when you create invoices from this matter, TimeNet Law will automatically create multiple invoices addressed to each party, showing their individual balance due. Payments can be applied and assigned to each party (using the From field in Payment Center).

TimeNet Law also handles evergreen retainers, automatic payments, late fees, automated invoice emailing, automated payment reminders, and much more.