Clio This Month: Introducing Payment Plans

Who doesn’t like getting paid? This June, we introduced payment plans in Clio to help your law firm get paid faster, improve cash flow, and collect more—making it easy for clients to pay in instalments, without adding administrative work for you.

There’s also exciting news for our Canadian customers—Clio’s LawPay integration is now available in Canada! We’ve also got a new way to convert LEDES invoices in seconds, and a few more ways to view and export information in CSV format from Clio.

Read on for the latest from Clio this July.

Introducing payment plans

When clients can’t afford to pay a large lump sum for legal services, things can get sticky. Your firm might miss out on business if a client thinks they can’t afford to pay. Worse, a client may fail to pay you in full—or at all.

When we built payment plans for Clio, we wanted to create a solution that made it easy for clients to pay in multiple payments by credit card, while also making it easy for law firms to set up pre-scheduled payments. After all, according to the 2017 Legal Trends Report, lawyers spend the vast majority of their time on non-billable work, with 48% spent on administrative tasks like billing and collections.

Payment plans simplify and automate online credit card billing from within Clio, helping firms collect on their receivables, reduce overhead, and deliver a better client experience. Firms can easily schedule recurring client payments to pay down existing balances or to top up trust accounts, so that there’s always money on hand to work a matter.

In other words, you can set it, forget it, and get paid on time. That means you’ll:

• Reduce your firm’s collection times and increase cash flow.
• Make it easy for your clients to pay you on terms that work for them.
• Cut down on time spent on non-billable tasks, and spend more time practicing law.

Yvonne C. Stewart, a Research and Trial Assistant at Dove Law Group in South Carolina, had this to say about payment plans:

Using payment plans in Clio, I can set-up payment plans for each of my clients in just minutes, and not have to worry about it again. I barely think about billing anymore. The biggest benefits for our firm have been the significant time savings and ability to collect more—faster—on our receivables.

Learn more about payment plans.

LawPay Integration: Now available in Canada!

Good news—Canadian lawyers now have access to our LawPay integration, the simplest way to accept credit cards at a law firm. If you practice in Canada, you’ll now have access to all the benefits of a credit card payment system built directly into your practice management software, so you can:

• Get paid faster. Increase your cash flow with instant, online credit card payments. According to the 2017 Legal Trends Report, law firms that accept credit card payments get paid 39% faster.
• Get a free LawPay subscription. Clio will cover your $20 monthly LawPay fee and provide access to low credit card processing rates.
• Deliver better client service. Give clients the option to pay on terms that suit them best.
• Ensure compliance. LawPay is the ethical and compliant way to receive online credit card payments. LawPay has the validation of over 47 bar associations and is PCI compliant.

Learn more about setting up Clio Payments.

More CSV export updates

For modern law firms, being data-driven is becoming increasingly important. Looking at data in CSV format lets you analyze the data at hand and get answers. Here are the latest updates to CSV exports in Clio:

• You can now export transactions for specific matters in Clio.
• When you export data from the “Bills” tab in Clio, the export now includes “Matter” and “Type” columns to help you better track billing records, as well as which types of matters are most profitable.
• When you export data from the “Matters” tab in Clio, the “Matter Description” is included, in addition to the “Matter Number,” so you can quickly see which matter is which.

New app integration partner: LEDESConvert

LEDES are a set of file format specifications intended to facilitate electronic data transmission in the legal industry—a requirement for many electronically transmitted invoices, typically from a law firm to a corporate client. Handling this component of invoice management can be a hidden, costly time sink for law firms.

Clio’s latest integration with LEDESConvert takes away the manual component of managing LEDES codes and converting invoices—easily and securely converting invoices between different LEDES formats in seconds, not hours.

Learn more about LEDESConvert.

That’s it for this month. Stay tuned for more exciting updates from Clio as we get closer to the Clio Cloud Conference.

From sending bills to getting paid, Clio helps law firms get more done, more efficiently. See what Clio can do for your firm—try it for free today.

Try Clio for free.

We published this blog post in June 2018. Last updated: November 10, 2021.

Categorized in: Clio