How a Boutique Litigation Firm Fixed Its Revenue Recognition and Found $85K in Misbilled Time
Sam's List Editorial | 2026-06-06
How a Boutique Litigation Firm Fixed Its Revenue Recognition and Found $85K in Misbilled Time The work was done. The time was logged. The invoice was never sent. Featured firm Legal Ease Bookkeeping Brandy Derrick runs Legal Ease Bookkeeping — a Sam's List bookkeeper focused on law firms and property managers. Trust accounting, IOLTA compliance, three-way reconciliations, and owner statements that hold up under a bar or state audit. View profile on Sam's List → “They have made my life a lot easier. For attorneys, managing multiple accounts and especially an IOLTA trust account can be a lot of work. Working with Brandy and her team, it is easy to keep everything straight — every dollar that comes through my accounts is organized and accounted for every week.” — Andrew Deegan · ★★★★★ · Read on Sam's List For a three-partner litigation firm doing $1.8 million in annual billings, $85,000 in billable time was sitting in the time-tracking system with no corresponding invoice. Not written off. Not billed. Just sitting there, aging invisibly until the matters closed and the window to bill it passed. This is what it looked like when Legal Ease Bookkeeping ran a WIP reconciliation for the first time. The Client: $1.8M in Billings, No WIP Visibility Three litigation partners. Annual billings of $1.8 million. A billing platform for time tracking and invoice generation, and a separate general ledger system for bookkeeping. The firm's prior bookkeeper did the job as it had been defined: reconcile invoices to cash receipts. When money came in, it was recorded. When invoices went out, they were tracked. The books balanced. What the books didn't track was the step before the invoice — the work in progress. WIP is the accumulation of billable time that has been entered into the time-tracking system but hasn't yet been converted into an invoice. In a litigation practice, WIP is often substantial. Cases move slowly. Multiple attorneys record time on the same matter over months. Partner review of invoices adds another delay before the invoice hits the client. If no one is watching WIP — specifically, watching for time entries that are sitting unissued past a reasonable billing cycle — you get exactly the situation this firm was in. Time disappears. What Legal Ease Found: $85,000 in Unbilled Time, Some of It Years Old Legal Ease Bookkeeping's engagement started with a WIP reconciliation process. This meant pulling the full open WIP ledger from the billing platform — every time entry that had been logged but not...
