Blog · Law firms
A law firm from power of attorney to judgment: where deadlines and fees slip, and how to keep them
A missed appeal deadline, a lapsed power of attorney, client money booked as revenue — mistakes one system prevents by tying each matter to its dates.
A law firm runs on parallel threads: a client and their power of attorney, a case and its stage, a hearing and its date, a judgment and the deadline to challenge it, a fee agreement and its instalments, and money the client has deposited with the firm. When those threads are spread across spreadsheets, diaries and accounting software that knows nothing about cases, one broken thread can cost the client a right or the firm its fees.
Where do the costly mistakes usually happen?
- A statutory deadline counted by hand from the judgment date rather than the date of receipt, or whose last day falls on a holiday nobody notices.
- A power of attorney that expires before the next hearing, or does not cover the power the step requires.
- An undetected conflict of interest: today’s opponent was yesterday’s client.
- Hours and expenses spent on a matter that were never billed.
- Client money recorded as revenue, mixed with the firm’s own funds and hard to refund or settle.
The matter at the centre of everything
The answer is to make the matter the unit of work — whether a case, a consultation, drafting or a collection — with hearings, judgments, deadlines, pleadings, time, expenses and fees all branching from it. Record a judgment and its deadlines are generated from the date of receipt; adjourn a hearing and the next one is created on its date; accept a fee proposal and it becomes an agreement whose instalments are billed from the case’s own stages.
Client trust money is not revenue
What a client deposits for court fees, experts or on account of fees is a liability of the firm until it is spent, refunded or applied to an invoice. So it belongs in a separate account, each client’s balance is known at any moment, and nothing beyond the deposit can be paid out.
A weekly review for your firm
- Deadlines falling in the next ten days, and who is responsible for each.
- Powers of attorney that expire before the next hearing on their matters.
- Time and expenses recorded on matters and not yet billed.
- Fee instalments due and not yet collected.
- Client trust balances whose purpose has ended and that await a refund or settlement.
How Arttop 360 handles it
The «Law Firm Management» module builds this on top of the firm’s own accounting: the client is a customer in receivables, powers of attorney carry their expiry, conflicts are checked on every save, deadlines run from the date of receipt and roll to the next working day, fees come in every structure including per hearing, time and expenses go on one invoice, and trust money sits in its own account and can be applied to the fee invoice. A confidential matter can be read by its team only, with the barrier in the database itself.
Related pages
14 days free, starting from your first sign-in.