Making a payment to an attorney on the consumer end seems very straight forward. At the beginning of an engagement the attorney requests a down payment. At the end of the engagement the attorney sends an invoice indicating that money is owed (if so how much), everything is paid, or you are owed a partial refund.
The back end is a little trickier. All attorneys have a ton of bank accounts. Everyone has an operating account which is a typical business checking account. Everyone also has a trust account which is where client funds are kept before they are earned. Most attorneys also have a bunch of merchant accounts (with Stripe, PayPal and others) to facilitate payments from clients whether they be to the trust account or to the operating account.
How to make a payment
In general, I take almost any method of payment. Most commonly, people pay with credit cards. The payment link is here: https://secure.lawpay.com/pages/law-office-of-michael-obrien/trust. You simply enter your information and how you want to make the payment. LawPay is a great payment processor that has incredible customer service and takes pretty much every kind of credit, debit and charge card. Whether you want to pay with Visa, Mastercard, Discover, American Express or many minor cards, LawPay will allow you to do that.
Sometimes, people want to use PayPal. I have previously discouraged this in favor of LawPay, because LawPay takes payment processing fees from the operating account and deposits 100% of unearned funds easily into trust. However, many clients enjoy using PayPal Goods and Services because they trust PayPal, so I work within that constraint and transfer 100% of the payment into trust. You can pay either mobrien@lawyer.com or mobrien@obrienpatents.com, both go to the same merchant account. I then manually move your funds into trust.
I do not get a whole lot of requests for peer-to-peer payment requests from clients. These are services like Quickbooks ACH, PayPal Friends & Family, Zelle, Venmo, Cash App, and many others. I do have infrastructure to take those because other attorneys and my vendors commonly use them, but it’s rare that a client would request one of these.
How to keep costs down
There are three general components of legal services I perform: 1) passthrough services that I am paying others for, these are things like drawings, searches and so forth. Drawings are pretty much a set cost depending on the drafter. Searches have a lot of flexibility in pricing that I discuss in another article. 2) Government fees – in general these are fixed and unavoidable. You have to pay these. 3) My fees. These are usually hourly.
The best way to keep costs down is to use fewer legal services. For instance, if you want to have a lot of phone calls and emails with me, no problem, but you pay for those. Sometimes people have fewer calls and that keeps costs down. Ironically, some people send a lot of emails about pricing of services… which results in billed time for responses. Efforts to lower your bills by badgering me, in fact, result in higher bills. Some clients are non-responsive to calls and emails to sign and return or otherwise review documents. This results in more time for me to track people down… and higher bills. Some clients are really good at providing detailed documents describing what they need. This keeps costs down as well.
For my part, the more efficiently I can complete services, the more time I can bill, so I try to have really efficient supply chains. For instance, documents are completed electronically, and can be signed on your mobile phone. This gets a lot of back and forth done quickly and efficiently and helps get documents filed.