Matter Billing Types

LeanLaw supports a variety of ways to bill a matter: Hourly, Contingency, Fixed Fee, Pro Bono, and Internal.

Fred Willerup avatar
Written by Fred Willerup
Updated over a week ago

LeanLaw provides all the necessary flexibility to set up your clients and matters to support different ways of charging clients. This is primarily done by using different billing types for the matter.  

Hourly

Set the matter to "hourly" billing if you primarily bill the client hourly. New time entries are by default set to "billable" that way. You can still mark individual time entries as "non billable" to keep track of time spent with the client that is not supposed to be billed.

You can still add on-off fixed fee charges to matters even though it is marked hourly.

​​Contingency

Contingency matters don't typically involve billing in the form of monthly invoices. They involve transactions at the end of a case. The matter can involve tracking time and/or expenses that can be used in the final transaction. By default, the time tracked against a contingency matter, will be marked non-billable. Time can be marked as billable on individual entries, which would allow for invoicing.

Fixed Fee

A matter can be set to "fixed fee" which allows a number of different ways to charge the client that goes beyond the traditional hourly billing. The primary difference between a fixed fee matter and an hourly matter is whether time entries default to "billable" or "non billable". Fixed fee matters will default to non billable which means that the time recorded is considered part of the fixed fee.  Time entries can be changed to be hourly billed if necessary.

Fixed fees can be either one off, or recurring monthly, quarterly or yearly. Also, an hourly limit can be set for fixed fees. Time up until the hourly limit will be considered non-billable, but any time that exceeds the hourly limit will be marked as billed hourly at a certain rate.

Pro Bono

Pro bono matters do by default not involve billing. All time entries are marked as non-billable by default, but can be changed to be billed hourly if necessary. Also pro bono cases can be charged fixed fees or expenses.

Internal

Internal matters are for internal timekeeping and do not involve clients. Internal matters are kept out of the accounting system, and time entries are never billable.


How to set or change the billing type

When you first create a matter, the billing type is available to choose from a dropdown called "Billing". 

Once created, the billing type can be found and changed under the "Billing & Rates" tab within the Matter.


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