Why Every Small Firm Needs a Billing Assistant—ASAP

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🧾 Are you still chasing down invoices, discounting your fees out of guilt, or retroactively guessing your billable hours? In this eye-opening episode, Brett Trembly explains how hiring a billing assistant changed everything for his law firm—and why it might be the smartest move a small firm owner can make. From underbilling to burnout, this conversation uncovers the real cost of doing it all yourself.

📌 Key Takeaways:

• Why delayed invoicing leads to guilt, discounts, and lost revenue.
• The surprisingly low billable hours most solo lawyers actually collect.
• How a billing assistant can break your revenue ceiling and buy back your time.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
One of the just consistently tragic failures and
I don't mean failure as in afatal failure, because we can
fail every day and just learnfrom them, but if we're honest
with ourselves, that the failureis getting our invoices out on
time, asking our clients to payus what we've actually billed,
asking in a timely fashion anddoing it with transparency and

(00:22):
honesty, not like, oh crap, Ineed money.
I got to get my bills out,which is the first, the only
place I work.
That's how it was.
It was like a bill this personand bill this person and like
what the heck?
It's not like there's no actualrecord of the time, which was,
I felt was just, you know,dishonest.
But like the studies that Cleodoes, they show that, lawyers,

(00:43):
we lose like like 30% of ourtime when we like, retroactively
, try to remember what we did,and then when we don't get the
bills out on time, we feel bad.
So we give big discounts and thenumber is usually higher.
So, instead of billing someoneevery month or every two weeks,
you send an invoice like threemonths later and you're like, oh

(01:03):
, that's a big chunk of money,so maybe you delay more.
Or you just like, screw it, payme like 75 of this.
So then we truly only collect,like the true solo attorney,
only like collects 1.2 hours perday of legal work or something
like, which is just insanely low.

(01:23):
And that is like my directexperience.
When I said I worked for myselfand I just hit the ceiling, I
couldn't get over about $9,000 amonth.
And when you do the math youknow I said it just goes back to
the numbers.
It just makes so much sensebecause it's about one to 1.2
hours per day and like that'sall I had time to do.
And, by the way, a lot of thatlegal work was nights and
weekends, because you'remiserable, because all day long

(01:45):
fires happen and you'reconstantly putting fires.

Speaker 2 (01:48):
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