If you’ve been a lawyer for some time, you may have considered starting your own law firm. If that is the case, you need to not only learn how to market yourself, but you also need to learn about the operations side of a business. One often overlooked aspect of starting your own law firm is how you are going to bill clients. Typically, you’ll want to either use a retainer-based price structure or charge by the hour. However, if you are going into personal injury law, you will most likely end up taking a case upfront and then charging based on a percentage of the money you win for your client. Whatever pricing structure you end up choosing, you’re going to need a merchant services provider to help you with all of your legal transactions.
Choosing How To Bill as a Lawyer
Choosing the best merchant account for your law firm is largely dependent on how you bill your clients. If you are processing hourly transactions based on client invoices, then you will likely want a merchant services provider with a flat-fee pricing structure. This ensures that you do not get slapped with any hidden fees every time you process a transaction. On the other hand, if you are processing payments less often, you may want to go for a merchant account that has a more dynamic processing fee. This ensures that you do not end up paying a higher percentage of your revenue toward your payment processing fee than necessary. This would be the preferred method of payment processing if you are working on corporate contracts or are getting big windfalls from personal injury cases.
Finding a Payment Processor with Experience in the Legal Field
When working with lawyers, clients often expect to be able to pay in various ways. This not only includes debit and credit cards, but also virtual payment methods. This method is typically used by companies that send frequent payments, and is very important to have a part of your payment processing structure if you often work with other businesses. Most importantly, you need to make sure that the credit card processing fees that you are taking on are not cutting into your overhead. If you know that you’ll be processing a wide variety of transactions, you want to make sure to find an experienced merchant services provider who has specific experience in the legal field.
When running a law firm, you don’t want to run into a situation where a client turn’s down your services because your payment processing options do not fit with what they were looking for. As a lawyer, you’ll often run into different types of clients who are looking to hire a lawyer for various reasons. Even if you have a clear specializations – such as corporate law or personal injury law – you still have a variety of clients of various income levels, who will want different payment options. Keeping this in mind when you are looking into different merchant accounts will save you a lot of headaches down the road – both legal, and otherwise.
