Payment methods and their popularity have always changed over time. But with the advent of COVID-19, new concerns over safety, convenience and necessity have seen the world migrate towards online payments faster than ever before.
If people can pay for everything from their food shop to their gym membership online, then law firms have no excuse not to offer the same level of convenience. In our 2019 Consumer Trends report, 80% of law firm clients expected to be able to pay for legal services online, and UK Finance reported that more than 50% of all transactions in 2020 were made using cards – a number that is steadily rising. The fact of the matter is, the ways clients are paying has changed, even over the course of the past 2 years; Forrester reports that 49% of UK online adults started making online transactions for the first time since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In our 2022 Consumer Trends report, however, only 34% of those surveyed reported having had the option to pay using digital card payment methods with their law firm.
Consumers are now tied to their devices, not to a single place, so they may not be available to come into the office to pay. Phone payments, a common law firm offering, rely on having a member of staff available to take a payment, while even BACs transfers are prone to error and risk of fraud.
Why should online payment methods matter to your firm?
If you’re examining the current payment options available for your firm’s clients, it’s important to note a number of things:
- As soon as invoices are left unpaid, you’re pulling in more departments. Credit control processes come into play, and if you can’t get a client to pay an initial bill on time, you’re opening the firm to risk that they won’t pay following bills in a timely manner either, impacting your firm’s cash flow.
- Your firm can increase the likelihood that clients will pay, and pay more quickly, by providing convenience. Allow them to pay with payment methods of their choice, and give them a range of options, so that they can pay quickly and easily.
- Within the onboarding process, you already have their attention, so asking for payment there and then will increase the likelihood of paying quickly.
- By leveraging a legal payments solution, you can even automate bill pay reminders without having members of staff manually chase individual clients for payments.
How Legl can help
If you’d like to learn more, check out The Essential Guide to Online Payments for Law Firms. You’ll get a deeper dive into the state of online payments right now, the benefits of leveraging online payment methods for your clients, the latest trends in digital wallets and Pay by Bank, how to stay secure in the world of online payments, and more. Or, simply schedule a demo of Legl’s payment solution now!
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