You should never have to guess what you're paying for

In 2023 I took every invoice the firm had sent in the previous year, 3,100 of them, and read them as a client would. It was not a comfortable afternoon. Entries like 'Review and analysis re: same, 0.8' appeared hundreds of times. Task codes nobody outside the firm could decode. Three lawyers' time rolled into one line. We were asking people to pay for things we had not explained, and then wondering why they called to ask.

The redesign had one rule, and everything else followed from it: a client should be able to read any line of the invoice and know what was done, by whom, and why it mattered to their matter. No codes. No 're: same.' The name of the person who did the work on every entry. A one-paragraph summary at the top, in plain English, of what happened on the matter that month.

That rule turned out to be a rule about lawyers, not invoices. If your time entry has to say what you did in words a client can read, you write it at the end of the task, not the end of the week, and you write it honestly. Entries got shorter and more specific. A few got embarrassing and were quietly rethought before they were ever billed. The invoice became a management tool before it became a client one.

The numbers after three years: billing disputes down 67%. Average days to payment down from 54 to 31. Write-offs down by about a third. The clients who used to call to ask what a line meant now call, occasionally, to say that a line was more than they expected, which is a conversation we can have, because they understood it.

There were costs. The first quarter took real effort from every timekeeper, and a few of our more senior lawyers felt, reasonably, that they had been writing time entries for thirty years without complaint. I showed them the invoice they would receive from their own dentist. Most came round.

The principle generalises beyond law firms. People pay for what they understand, and they pay faster and with less friction when the explanation arrives with the bill rather than after a phone call. Any professional, any firm, any trade. If your customers have to guess what they are paying for, that is not their confusion. It is your failure, and it is a fixable one.

My father prepared tax returns at our kitchen table in Skokie for thirty-one years. Every client got a one-page sheet in his handwriting explaining what he had done and what it cost. I did not understand, at twelve, that I was watching a billing system. I do now.