CASE STUDY
Effortless billing in half the time
Solo family law attorney automates expense tracking and simplifies client invoicing with InfoTrack and LEAP
Firm
The Law Office of Kara Schacher
Practice area
Family law
Employees
1
Location
Monterey, CA
Kara Schacher wears a lot of hats running a small family law practice on her own. That includes taking care of all her clients’ court filing and process serving tasks herself.
To manage cases across several Central California counties without any full-time support, Schacher has to work efficiently. And to do that, she relies on InfoTrack’s integration with LEAP—the practice management software where she stores all her client and case information.
Kara Schacher
Founding Partner
Warming up to technology use
Schacher said she was a little hesitant when her LEAP account manager first introduced her to InfoTrack, mentioning it would allow her to order state court filings anywhere in California directly from any LEAP matter. Connecting two legal softwares sounded a bit complicated, Schacher recalled, “and I’m not very tech-savvy.”
But after a few minutes on Zoom with her account manager, the transition to a new eFiling provider was already complete.
Schacher was relieved to find a filing workflow that was familiar from her experience with Odyssey eFileCA. But by drawing information from the relevant LEAP matter, InfoTrack pre-filled some fields automatically and allowed her to skip certain tasks altogether.
“[InfoTrack is] much more user-friendly,” Schacher said.
KEY RESULT
50% faster filing process
By automatically capturing all court filing expenses to the correct LEAP matter, Schacher estimates that InfoTrack is reducing the total time she spends on each court filing by 50 percent.
I don't have to be responsible for remembering to do all the accounting work for each filing. It's automatic.
'One step, instead of two'
According to Schacher, the expense tracking automation has been the biggest benefit, providing huge time and cost savings for her law firm. In the eight months since The Law Office of Kara Schacher started using InfoTrack, Schacher has been able to entirely skip a crucial part of the court filing process she rarely had time for.
“With Odyssey, my first step was to go in and eFile,” Schacher explained. “My second step was to pull up my billing program… to write down [each fee], and then transfer that information over into my billing program. So it was time consuming.”
Manually tracking expenses is a common challenge for law firms. It becomes particularly difficult when receipts don’t clearly list all of the related fees, such as transaction fees from the court, the eFiling system, and credit card companies. When it’s not easy to tell which fees are eligible to be passed on to clients, many attorneys like Schacher decide it’s safer to absorb all the fees themselves.
“I can imagine that there were multiple, probably dozens, if not hundreds of times where I just blew it off,” Schacher recalls. “And so, you know, that added up to hundreds of dollars, if not thousands.”
Now that InfoTrack automatically logs these fees as expense entries in the correct LEAP matter, Schacher has been able to confidently and easily pass through all eligible costs to her clients.
Simplicity beyond eFiling
LEAP’s time-tracking capabilities already gave Schacher instant insight into how much clients owed for her time. Now, with court filing expenses automatically added to each matter, the puzzle is complete. LEAP’s billing analytics show her a current, total picture of what should be billed to each client.
Schacher says it’s cut down the time it takes to file cases by “about 50 percent.”
“I used to stress out thinking, ‘Did I bill my client for that big filing fee? Or how much time am I wasting by not paying attention to all these little filing fees?’ Schacher said.
“Now, I don’t have to worry about it. Because it’s automatic.”
Having [InfoTrack] take care of the billing has just been such a great time saver for me.