3 Ways that a VoIP Phone System Helps Law Firms Increase Client Billing

As law firms know, there are two fundamental ways to tip the practice’s balance sheet towards the profit side, and away from the losses side: reduce expenses and increase billing.

That basic formula has not changed in hundreds of years, and will not change in the future.

However, what has changed in recent years – and much to the delight of law firms of all sizes, from small solo practices to large multi-disciplinary organizations – is how a VoIP phone system helps achieve both of these goal: reduce expenses and increase billing.

In a subsequent article that will be posted in the near future, we will highlight how a VoIP phone system helps law firms significantly reduce costs. For now, we want to explore the other side of the equation -- increased billing -- because it is relatively less well-known advantage of VoIP phone systems, but one that law firms may ultimately find to be the most impressive and beneficial.

With this in mind, here are 3 ways that a VoIP phone system helps law firms increase client billing:

1. Automatic Time Logging Eliminates Under-Billing

As noted by the firm Legal Ease Bookkeeping: “Some attorneys I have talked to mentioned the fact that they are not that great at keeping track of their hours. You know you have worked on a client earlier in the week but you don’t know exactly how long you worked so you estimate your billable hours and to be fair to the client you make sure you underestimate. This means you are constantly under billing and it could be costing you thousands of dollars a month.”

A VoIP phone system helps law firms automatically track every second of billable time that all team members -- lawyers, paralegals, assistants, administrators, clerks and so on -- spend on the phone with clients (or on behalf of clients). This eliminates the risk of under-billing, and leaving revenue on the table that the law firm has justifiably earned.

2. Disaster Recovery Keeps Lines of Communication Open – and Billing On Target

With a conventional phone system, a local power outage caused by anything from a routine brownout to a severe natural disaster will typically take the entire phone system offline for minutes, hours, or in severe cases, even days. This disconnect means can lead to lost billing and soon-to-be-ex-clients.

However, a VoIP phone system uses multiple levels of redundancy to keep the system online in the event of a power outage (e.g. automatic failover, geographically dispersed cloud infrastructure, mobile apps, etc.). As such, there is no anxiety-causing disruption to clients – or drop off in projected billing.

3. Improve Efficiency by Establishing Best Practices

A VoIP phone system seamlessly integrates with other software in the ecosystem, including project management, billing, accounting, CRM, and so on. As such, law firms can track and monitor various metrics and KPIs (e.g. call lengths, time/day of calls, proportion of video calls, etc.) to identify best practices that ultimately increase billing.

For example, by analyzing their calling data, law firms may discover that the most profitable and efficient clients are those that are engaged with longer calls at the beginning of the relationship, and then receive shorter calls every week augmented by email updates and reports. Or they may discover that certain types of clients are better suited for video calls, while others should be supported primarily with voice calls (e.g. younger clients may be more open to the former, while older clients may prefer the latter).

Learn More

To learn more about how a VoIP phone system can help your law firm increase billing, contact the Votacall team today. We are the VoIP Solutions Provider that law firms trust, because we are proven experts who put our clients first -- just like you. Your consultation with us is free.

Looking for more information on how law firms can benefit from a hosted VoIP phone system? Look no further than our free eBook "Law Firms: 6 Clear Advantages of Switching to a Hosted VoIP Phone System". Download it today: