McFarlane Law is an insurance litigation defense firm based in Florida. With over 300 years of combined insurance industry experience, the firm aims to provide results-oriented rates, accurate and detailed budgets, and cooperative and proactive defense strategies to every client.

This approach is reflected in the firm’s goals: they want to build a strong team and business that enables them to deliver the best case outcomes, ultimately driving client satisfaction and repeat business.

McFarlane Law needed an all-in-one solution that would keep their people and processes consistent while providing timely billing and reporting to clients. They found Litify.

Life before Litify

McFarlane Law was previously using two separate systems to manage the business, which caused delays in their billing process and made reporting difficult and inefficient.

“We were using Aderant for practice management, and we were using Timeslips for billing. This created a whole host of tracking issues and gave us no real control over what people were billing. We had 15 different cheat sheets out there to document what you can bill for, what you can’t, this needs to be billed at a paralegal rate, and it just got to be too much. It also meant we weren’t getting any of the billing information on time because it had to be transferred out of Aderant and into Timeslips. I didn’t get hold of the data until the first of the month, and we sometimes didn’t start billing until the second or third day of the month because I didn’t have any information,” said Cindy Halpern-Cohen, Controller at McFarlane Law.

As Controller, Cindy also looks at the financial performance of the firm — tracking hours for every single person in the firm, looking at billing, and watching what work wasn’t getting paid. But she was spending an enormous amount of time on building reports and pivot tables to get that information.

Evaluating Litify

While technology hadn’t always been a priority for the firm, it was finally time for a change — and time to invest in a solution that could enhance their operations.

“As I came into the role, my first task was to review all the processes in the billing department and get them cleaned up, but a long-term goal was to move everything into one solution to really alleviate these issues. At first, it was a hard sell. But when I found Litify, we saw that people won’t bill incorrectly because we can automate it, and the system could be set up to assign tasks to the right people so they can do their job better, so it became clear that it was finally time to become more technology-forward,” said Halpern-Cohen.

Life with Litify

In short, Cindy says that “life with Litify is wonderful.” While it used to take her and her team the entire month to bill all their clients, they now do it in just two weeks.

“We have much more control over the billing narratives that get entered into Litify. We’ve created templates, so as the team is working and creates a time entry, it will automatically generate the narrative and the time you can bill for it. And if you can’t bill for it, then you don’t record it. This has saved an enormous amount of time and decreased the amount of bad billing we had before. We’re also capturing more hours by having these automations there for them,” said Halpern-Cohen.

Cindy and the team can also easily create and run reports in real time, eliminating the manual effort to compile everything together. Plus, with all the data in one solution, they now trust that it’s correct and complete, as it’s no longer being transferred between separate systems.

Finally, as new staff are hired, they’re able to get to productivity quickly as the visual matter plan in Litify is a step-by-step guide to the claim management process at the firm, tasks are automatically assigned to the right person in the process, and automations are working in the background to adhere to the billing guidelines for every matter and client.

And the ongoing partnership with Litify? “I’m excited about the future and direction that Litify is headed in their development. One of the things I love is the openness of the group to listen to its users because that’s how the solution improves, and you don’t always get that in a partner,” said Halpern-Cohen.

The results

On top of a more efficient billing process and real-time reporting, McFarlane Law is achieving their goals of building a better business and strengthening client relationships.

“I know for a fact that our reduced time or completely denied time has dropped dramatically — by about 70-80%. And I would say that our collections on those dollars have increased as well. We went from about an 85% collection rate, where 85% of what we were billing was what we were getting paid for, and we were previously losing a good 15%. That number is now down to about 7-8%, which I believe is a definite result of having that control over what people bill for and billing more hours for the work we’re doing,” said Halpern-Cohen.

From a carrier standpoint, the attorneys and paralegals are also sending more case updates, which has helped those relationships. They’re now able to track and share updates on how much they’ve saved, what the settlement was, was it dismissed, and success rates — which the firm didn’t always have insight into before.

Ready to automate your time capture and increase your own collection rates? Schedule a free demo with our team to see how Litify can help. You can also explore the power of the platform in our guided product tour.