Given the complexity of billing and accounting in a lawyer's operations, the more clients he takes on, the more time he has to spend on maintaining accounts. This can become drudgery, eating into his time and preventing him from devoting more time for the cases in hand. Legal billing and accounting software take drudgery out of a lawyer's life. If an attorney chooses wisely and goes in for lawyer billing software that does all that he has been doing manually, he saves a lot of time and energy handling routine billing and accounting tasks. Computerized and automated, these tasks can be done fast. Though expensive, the investment in such attorney billing software is easily recouped considering that the lawyer now becomes more efficient and has more time to devote to existing as well as new clients. Almost all lawyers using the right lawyer billing software report an increase in productivity and revenues.

There is a huge market for attorney billing software and in their rush to capture a market share developers usually leave out features, make the software cumbersome or heavy code-wise, making it slow and prone to errors. The user interface is complicated and not easy to navigate with features commonly required hidden behind menus and sub-menus. Incomplete and buggy software can hamper rather than help lawyers in their billing and accounting functions and for this reason alone lawyers have become cautious in selecting a software that actually works the way they want it to. The perfect legal billing and accounting software for most lawyers is the one that does all that they used to do manually, smoothly and flawlessly. The right attorney billing software has a very intuitively designed interface and navigation structure plus additional features that prove quite helpful such as compiling all relevant documents pertinent to a case in one folder for archiving and retrieval at any time in the future.

A well planned and integrated legal billing software would have these features and naturally include what is expected of it such as keeping track of each client and his billable hours plus expenses separately, issuing bills when the amount of advance amount falls below a pre set level. The lawyer billing software would naturally handle billable hours where no advance is received and bills are issued periodically in respect of billable hours and expenses. In cases where lawyers work on contingency basis and an account is created on this basis, the software would keep track of expenses and the percentage of amount to be billed when the lawyer inputs “completed” against the case. Attorney billing software lawyers appreciate usually has these features in addition to keeping track of retainers and trust accounts and matter based record keeping that is extremely important to avoid confusion and mix-ups and importantly, comply with federal and state laws in that regard. These are the basic minimum required to work flawlessly regardless of the number of cases and time period.