Overview
Product discovery insights from Accesspoint Legal
Market insights
Legal Tech challenges of 2025 are vastly different from those that shaped the development of much of today’s software. Despite this, law firms seeking to upgrade their technology often default to like-for-like replacements, swapping one Practice Management System (PMS) for another. However, the modern tech stack is evolving into a collection of best-in-breed applications, each designed to solve specific problems with outstanding efficiency.
Amongst all Legal Tech applications, time recording, cost management, and billing are the most critical to a law firm’s profitability. However, for many SME law firms, these operations have not evolved as quickly as other areas, such as client onboarding. The urgency bias of recent years, driven by the pandemic and the deep integration of billing systems within legacy PMS platforms has contributed to this lag.
Product insights
Legal Aid lawyers operate under intense financial pressure, they manage the highest cost and billing overheads in legal services yet receive the lowest fee income. A Law Society survey revealed that 50% of the cost to run a Legal Aid case are unrecoverable, exposing a systemic challenge. Accesspoint are building software to solve that challenge. Throughout our discovery phase we examined the root causes behind inefficiencies, identifying gaps in matter setup, time recording, funding management, and collaboration that prevent lawyers from being paid what a case is worth.
Our findings reinforce an urgent need for specialised matter cost management, time capture and billing tools. It is an unknown path for an SME law firm to navigate, this article explores our key learnings and lays out a blueprint for next-generation Legal Aid SaaS solutions.
Key Learnings from Product Discovery
1. Revenue Loss from Incorrect Matter Setup
We started our exploration with costs written off, either known and captured through accounts or offline at billing and asked ourselves why? All paths led us back to the start of the matter, where most billing errors originate. At thematter set up stage fee earners inadvertently miss the opportunity to consider enhancements or apply incorrect funding arrangements. When the case progresses, amendments are not made. Mistakes in setting up the correct tracking led to underbilling, often without lawyers realising it until a Cost draftsperson highlights what could have been!
Current Problem
Matter setup in PMS relies on extensive manual knowledge of complex fee structures, rates, and Legal Aid Agency (LAA) rules. Even with conditional logic and automation in PMS, incorrect configurations at the outset lead to compounding financial losses. When observing incorrect matter set up, fee earners questioned replied “I knew it was wrong, but not how to put it right”!
Solution
A guided matter journey that ensures fee earners assign the right funding structure, cost categories, and recoverable fees from the beginning. Intuitive user experiences identifying clear optionality with validations anticipating and correcting common errors, while coaching lawyers to consider guidance that could justify enhancements of up to 100% right from the start.
2. Incomplete Time Recording
We learned that time recording remains a universal pain point for Legal Aid and private funded B2C/B2B transactions alike. Whilst time recording apps are used widely, they fail to enhance usability so that lawyers still struggle to record time correctly and contemporaneously. Without accurate time, fixed fees and WIP are incorrect and attempts at manage costs ineffective, leaving WIP to be calculated with manual manipulation and adjustment at the billing stage.
Current Problem
Lawyers risk losing recoverable time because time recording tools don’t prevent misallocation. Many systems treat time capture as a passive data entry task rather than an intelligent billing assistant.
Increasing cost limits at the billing stage to account for missed time is nearly always impossible. If time is mis-recorded, whether under the wrong scope, matter, or omitted entirely, it is typically written off. And if a claim is submitted incorrectly, the process of recovering and resubmitting those costs can be both time-consuming and complex.
Solution
Smart time capture tools that:
- Provide real-time validation against LAA rates and fees
- Differentiate the different scope and levels of a matter to prevent mis-posting
- Enable time to be deleted, re-allocated or moved where necessary
- Offer simple, intuitive interfaces significantly reducing errors
3. Complexity of cost control for multi-level Funding
Legal Aid cost control and billing is notoriously complex, spanning different contract types (criminal, civil, family), each with its own funding rules. One matter can have multiple levels and fixed fees running concurrently. Many existing software solutions passively accept data input without validating if it aligns with funding criteria.
Current Problem
Lawyers struggle to manage matter costs effectively because they often lack clear visibility into what a case is worth, both at each individual funding level and in aggregate across scopes and limits. This lack of insight leads to lost revenue, as firms fail to anticipate the need for cost limit or scope extensions before incurring costs.
Solution
Matter cost monitor: A simple source of truth for consolidated matter costs that:
- Manages costs against budget with both WIP and anticipated costs budgeted
- Associates the correct funding scheme based on matter type
- Displays all funding and WIP in an intuitive dashboard with calls to action
- Alerts lawyers when funding thresholds are likely to be reached, enabling them to submit proactive applications for cost increases, creating tasks and tracking completion
4. Lack of Collaboration
Cost budgeting and billing requires input not just from individual lawyers but also from finance teams, external counsel, and lawyers. Without dedicated collaboration tools, billing communications happen via email chains, spreadsheets, annotated reports and disconnected databases, increasing the risk of lost or duplicated information.
Current Problem
Key stakeholders (fee earners, accounts teams, internal and external billers) lack a shared space to collaborate on case billing. This leads to ineffective communication, billing delays, billing insight gaps and inaccurate or disputed claims.
Solution
- A centralised billing workspace where all stakeholders can review costs, leave notes, share tasks and flag issues in real time
- A billing tracker that tracks WIP all the way through the billing process, from draft to payment for all claims across all departments.
- Insight updates identifying trends in good and bad practice, WIP lock up and benchmarks for internal stakeholders comparable to the market.
- Integration with existing PMS to ensure seamless transition between casework and billing
Conclusion: breaking the mould to innovate
The discovery phase reinforced a clear reality: Legal Aid lawyers are systematically underpaid due to outdated technology and inefficient processes. The current Tech landscape often forces practitioners to fit their workflows into generic PMS tools, instead of providing purpose-built solutions that align with Legal Aid’s unique complexity.
By rethinking matter setup, time recording, funding management, and collaboration, we are designing a system that removes barriers to making a profit. This isn’t just about improving billing, it’s about providing Legal Aid practices with a route to financial sustainability. As we move forward, we stay committed to one goal:
Delivering precise, intelligent software that enables lawyers to do the work, get paid and build a practice where Legal Aid has a future.
Whether you want to be first in line to benefit from our Legal Aid Module, or need some advice on how to formulate your plans for a best in bread tech stack, contact us for advice, support or just a catch up!
