Should Your Law Firm Hire Someone to Chase Unpaid Invoices?

For most small and mid-sized law firms, no. A dedicated accounts receivable clerk in the United States costs roughly $50,000 to $60,000 a year in salary before benefits, and at a firm billing 20 to 200 clients a month the work does not fill a full-time role. The bigger problem is the one firms discover after they hire: the person who is good at getting accurate invoices out the door is usually the wrong person to make collection calls. Those are two different skill sets, and combining them into one job description is why so many firms end up with clean billing and no follow-up.

Here is how to think through the decision before you post the job.

What does it actually cost to hire someone for law firm collections?

Start with the fully loaded number, not the salary.

An accounts receivable clerk runs about $50,000 to $60,000 annually in base pay. Add payroll taxes, benefits, software seats, and physical or virtual workspace, and the real cost lands meaningfully higher. Then add the costs that never make it into the budget conversation: the weeks of hiring, the training on your practice management system, the ramp before they are productive, and the risk that the role turns over in eighteen months and you do it all again.

Against that, ask what the role would actually recover. If your firm carries $80,000 in aging receivables and a consistent follow-up process recovers a meaningful share of it, the hire can pay for itself. If your firm carries $15,000 in aging and the person would spend six hours a week on collections and the rest on general admin, you are not solving a collections problem. You are hiring an admin and calling it collections.

That second scenario is the common one, and it is why the work usually gets absorbed by someone who already has a full job.

Who ends up doing collections at most law firms?

Almost always one of three people, and none of them are a good answer.

The attorney. The owner or the responsible attorney picks up the phone because nobody else will. This is the most expensive labor in the building doing the least leveraged work, and it puts the person who owes the client legal judgment in the position of asking that same client for money.

The paralegal or legal assistant. Capable people with no accounts receivable training, whose actual job is case work, absorbing a task that is nobody’s priority. Follow-up happens when there is a gap in the calendar, which means it happens irregularly or not at all.

The billing coordinator. This one looks like the obvious answer, and it is the one most likely to backfire.

Why is your billing coordinator usually the wrong person for collection calls?

Because billing and collections reward opposite temperaments.

Speaking at 8am’s Integrations in Action webinar in August 2026, CollBox co-founder and CEO Matt Darner put it plainly:

“Be careful if you’re having your billing coordinator make those calls. Someone who’s really good at getting bills out the door, being accurate and methodical, is often not the personality type that’s persuasive, thick-skinned, and willing to make a lot of dials and stay on top of things. Just think about who inside of your firm is that right personality type.”

A great billing coordinator is precise, process-driven, and detail-obsessed. Those traits produce invoices clients cannot argue with. Collections asks for something else entirely: comfort with awkward conversations, tolerance for being told no repeatedly, and the persistence to make the eleventh call after ten went nowhere.

Asking one person to be both is not a training problem. It is a fit problem, and it usually resolves the way fit problems do. The calls quietly stop getting made, the invoices keep going out, and the aging report grows while everyone assumes someone is handling it.

What does effective follow-up actually require?

Consistency, not intensity. The firms that recover the most are not the ones with the toughest approach. They are the ones with a cadence that runs whether or not anyone feels like running it.

A working baseline for most law firms looks like this:

• Weekly email reminders with escalating language tied to how far past due the balance is, and the invoice resent with a live payment link each time.
• Biweekly outbound phone calls from the same person, so the client is dealing with a familiar voice rather than a rotating cast.
• Dynamic response to whatever the client says. If they never received the bill, resend it. If they do not know how to pay, walk them through it. If they ask for a call next Tuesday, call next Tuesday.
• Fast escalation of anything that is not a payment problem. A service complaint, a clerical error, or a genuine dispute needs to reach the responsible attorney immediately, not surface three months later.
• A hard focus on the first 90 days. Based on CollBox recovery data, an invoice that reaches 90 days past due can lose as much as 47% of its collectibility. The work you do in month one is worth several times the work you do in month six.

Look at that list and ask honestly whether it survives a busy trial month at your firm. For most firms, it does not, and that is the real argument against absorbing collections internally.

What are the alternatives to hiring?

There are three realistic paths, and they are not interchangeable.

Automate reminders only. Your practice management platform can send automated payment reminders, and you should have them turned on. But automation cannot handle non-response. When a client ignores four emails, the software sends a fifth. Nobody finds out why they stopped paying.

Send it to a collection agency. Agencies work on contingency, typically taking a substantial percentage of what they recover, and they generally take over the relationship in a way that is hard to reverse. For genuinely uncollectible, deeply aged balances that is sometimes the right call. For a client at 60 days who is simply disorganized, it is a relationship you did not need to spend.

Use a dedicated accounts receivable service. CollBox is a tech-enabled accounts receivable service built specifically for small and mid-sized law firms, integrating with Clio, MyCase, and Smokeball. CollBox syncs your invoices, detects past-due balances automatically, and assigns a dedicated North America-based accounts receivable specialist who runs the email and phone cadence for you. Firms keep full control over who gets contacted and can exclude individual clients or entire practice areas.

The pricing model is the part that matters for this comparison. CollBox charges a flat monthly subscription rather than a contingency fee, so firms keep 100% of what is recovered and payments run through existing methods including LawPay. To date, CollBox has recovered more than $140 million for law firms.

The distinction Matt drew at the same webinar is the one to hold onto:

“Our job is to get you paid where we can and nudge those folks professionally. And if they’re not going to pay, figure out why they’re not paying and bubble that up to the right person inside the firm, so you can jump on it quickly.”

That is the function a firm is actually trying to buy when it considers a hire. Not a person to send emails. A process that runs on schedule and tells you what it learned.

Frequently asked questions

How much does it cost to hire someone to handle collections at a law firm? An accounts receivable clerk in the United States costs roughly $50,000 to $60,000 a year in base salary, before payroll taxes, benefits, software, and the time it takes to hire and train. For firms billing under a few hundred clients a month, the role rarely justifies a full-time hire on collections work alone.

Can my paralegal or billing coordinator just handle collections? They can, but it usually does not hold. Billing rewards accuracy and process discipline, while collections rewards persistence and comfort with awkward conversations. Firms that combine the two typically end up with excellent invoices and inconsistent follow-up, because the calls are the part that gets dropped first.

Is a collection agency the same thing as an accounts receivable service? No. A collection agency generally works on contingency, taking a percentage of recovery, and is designed for balances that have already gone bad. An accounts receivable service like CollBox works on a flat subscription and handles routine follow-up much earlier, while the client relationship is still intact and the balance is still highly collectible.

When should a law firm escalate a past-due invoice? Sooner than most firms do. Collectibility declines steeply with age, and an invoice at 90 days past due can be worth as little as half of face value. If a client has missed two follow-ups without responding, that is the point to escalate rather than the point to wait another month.

Will outsourcing collections damage my client relationships? It depends entirely on how the outreach is done. Professional, consistent follow-up from a trained specialist who resends invoices and answers payment questions is usually a better client experience than sporadic, uncomfortable calls from the attorney handling the matter. Firms using CollBox choose exactly who is contacted and can hold back VIP clients or entire practice areas.

Figure out what the follow-up is worth before you post the job

The hiring question is really a math question, and you can answer it in one conversation. Schedule a call with Matt Darner to walk through your aging report and what a consistent cadence would recover from it, or get started with CollBox.