You may have Legalmaster distribute the work done on a matter among multiple clients. You need enter your fees (time entries) and costs (expenses) only one time; Legalmaster produces a separate bill for each client showing as much detail as you wish along with a calculation of his or her share.
We offer quite a few split billing features, many of which 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. 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 parties sharing a matter do not have to be billed at the same rate. For example, perhaps one of your clients accepts fees at $400 per hour, while another won't pay more than $300. You could tell Legalmaster to bill accordingly. Let's say that the matter is to be split 50-50 between the two clients; an hour for this matter would cost one of the clients $200 (his half of $400), and cost the other client $150 (his half of $300).
Here are examples of two split bills at different billing rates.
We excerpted only the fees section and limited ourselves to two entries to make the difference obvious.
The important point is that the fees were entered just once!
On the first case JSLR charges $275 per hour; on the second, $300 per hour.
LL's rates are respectively $125 and $150 per hour.
Atty Services Rendered Hours
02/11/07 LL Conference with opposing attorney
regarding scheduling of next conference
with opposing attorney 2.50 312.50
02/12/07 JSLR Appear for no-show deposition of witness,
left after finishing every magazine in the
waiting room 4.50 1,237.50
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Total shared fees 7.00 $1,550.00
Your share of the fees at 50% $775.00
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Atty Services Rendered Hours
02/11/07 LL Conference with opposing attorney
regarding scheduling of next conference
with opposing attorney 2.50 375.00
02/12/07 JSLR Appear for no-show deposition of witness,
left after finishing every magazine in the
waiting room 4.50 1,350.00
------- -------------
Total shared fees 7.00 $1,725.00
Your share of the fees at 50% $862.50
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The bill generally 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 total dollar amount.
If you prefer, you may show the split shares of hours and dollars transaction by transaction.
Should you need to change the description associated with a split entry, you need only change it once. Legalmaster reflects the change for every client.
You may split your data retroactively. Let's say that you have a case that is split among four clients and you have already supplied the time entries to Legalmaster. An attorney tells you after the fact that a fifth client was added to the split weeks ago. Legalmaster offers an easy way to address this "retroactive redistribution" annoyance without your having to reenter any transactions. This feature also lets you convert a non-split matter into a split matter after the fact.
Conversely, if after setting up a split case and entering scores of fees and costs, you're informed that the matter was not to have been split after all, you may easily convert the split entries back to non-split status without having to delete and reenter anything.
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.
A matter may be split to as many clients as you wish. We have users with matters split to hundreds of clients. Each client may be assigned a percentage value for fees and another, which may differ, for costs. Although it could be argued that the percentages should sum to 100, it is not a requirement of the software.
If a matter's share for either fees or costs is zero, you may on a case-by-case basis choose to show or not to show the zero-charge items on his bill.
You may make on-the-fly decisions to split a specific time entry to a subset of your clients. If, for example, a matter is normally split to seven clients, you may select any number among those seven clients to share a particular entry. Legalmaster can automatically recalculate each client's share for you or you can change it in any way at that moment.
If you have a typical arrangement with a set of clients, you may get Legalmaster to create new split matters for you automatically. For example, if you have a set of matters that are split among five clients, you may create a new matter to be split among the same five clients without having to create all five matters yourself. We call this concept family modeling.