Maintaining client/matter attorney assignments in your ERP is vital to supporting proper billing practices. Jennifer Webster, Client Advocate, recently presented the Practice Pointers webinar “Changing Client/Matter Attorney Assignments” where she shared best practices on updating regular and split attorney assignment designations to current and historical data in LMS.
Entering and Maintaining Regular Attorneys
LMS offers various options for attributing attorney type designation. This allows your team to easily differentiate between the various roles: Originating Attorney, Billing Attorney, Responsible Attorney, Reporting Attorney, and Other Attorney in the same record. By updating your attorney types, your system is prepared to roll the new attorney information into the current Billing Invoice Memo (BIM) and ensure future BIMs remain current. These designations tie to your firm’s postings including time entries, cost entries, billing and cash receipts.
Entering and Maintaining Additional (Split) Attorneys
To ensure your reports reflect the proper assortment of attorneys, LMS provides fields for additional/split attorney entry. By assigning these additional roles to the proper team members, you can easily leverage the tools inside of LMS to designate the agreed upon payment percentages.
Updating split attorneys for a previous period is also available to ensure your records are in sync for every client, on every matter. When prior period split attorney percentages have been updated, contact the LMS Helpdesk at https://info.rippe.com/helpdesk to have the LMS files and data warehouse rebuilt to apply the changes. When you submit this request, make sure to provide the beginning period/year and ending period/year where you want the split attorney changes made and the split attorney type (e.g, Originating, Billing, Responsible, etc.).
Taking the Next Step
Members of the SurePoint Community can view Jennifer Webster’s webinar in its entirety here. If you have any questions related to changing client/matter attorney assignments in LMS, please visit the SurePoint Helpdesk.
Interested in learning more about what the SurePoint Legal Management System can do for your firm? Schedule a demo with one of our experts today!