The Real Cost of Chasing Invoices: A Breakdown for Law Firms

You already know that chasing unpaid invoices is frustrating. What you might not realize is exactly how much it’s costing your firm—not just in lost revenue, but in time, opportunity, and emotional energy.

Let’s do the math.

The Hidden Time Tax

Consider what happens when an invoice goes 30 days past due. Someone at your firm—maybe you, maybe a paralegal, maybe an office manager—has to do something about it.

First, there’s the research: pulling up the matter, checking the billing history, reviewing the last communication with the client. That’s 10–15 minutes, minimum.

Then there’s the outreach itself. Drafting an email that’s firm but not aggressive. Maybe making a phone call, which requires psyching yourself up, finding a good time, and hoping the client answers. If they don’t, you’re leaving a voicemail and adding a follow-up task to your list.

Now multiply that by every overdue invoice in your system.

For a firm with even modest accounts receivable, this easily adds up to several hours per week. Hours that could be spent on billable work, business development, or simply going home on time.

The Opportunity Cost No One Calculates

Here’s where the math gets uncomfortable.

If you’re a solo practitioner billing $300 per hour, every hour you spend on collections is $300 you’re not billing. If you delegate to a $25/hour staff member who spends 10 hours a month on AR follow-up, that’s $250 in direct labor costs—plus the supervision time, plus the tasks that aren’t getting done while they’re on the phone with clients about money.

But the real cost isn’t the labor. It’s what economists call opportunity cost: the revenue you didn’t generate because you were doing something else.

According to Clio’s Legal Trends Report, the average law firm has significant revenue trapped in “lockup”—the period between when work is performed and when payment is actually received. We’ve written extensively about the 93-day lockup crisis and how it’s strangling law firm cash flow. That’s nearly three months of earned revenue sitting in limbo.

Every day that money sits uncollected is a day you can’t use it to hire help, invest in marketing, or simply pay your own bills without stress.

The Emotional Toll

This is the cost that never shows up on a spreadsheet, but every attorney knows it’s real.

Asking for money is uncomfortable. It doesn’t matter how justified the invoice is or how clearly the fee agreement was explained at intake. The conversation feels awkward. And for many attorneys, that discomfort leads to avoidance.

You tell yourself you’ll follow up tomorrow. Tomorrow becomes next week. Next week becomes next month. And suddenly you’re looking at a 90-day-old invoice that feels almost impossible to collect because so much time has passed.

This isn’t a character flaw. It’s human nature. You went to law school to practice law, not to become a collections agent. The skills that make you a good attorney—empathy, client focus, attention to complex problems—can actually work against you when it comes to asking for money.

The result? Invoices age. Write-offs increase. Cash flow suffers. And the stress compounds.

What Hiring In-House Actually Costs

Some firms try to solve this by hiring dedicated AR staff. It seems logical: bring someone in-house whose sole job is to manage collections.

But let’s look at the real numbers.

A full-time accounts receivable clerk costs $40,000–$60,000 annually in salary alone. Add benefits, payroll taxes, training, and management overhead, and you’re easily looking at $50,000–$75,000 per year.

That’s before you account for turnover, sick days, vacation, and the reality that even dedicated staff often feel uncomfortable making collection calls—especially to clients of the attorneys they work alongside every day.

For most small and mid-sized firms, this math simply doesn’t work.

The One-Fifth Solution

Here’s what we’ve learned from helping law firms recover over $100 million in outstanding receivables: the solution doesn’t require hiring full-time staff or spending hours on the phone yourself.

CollBox provides dedicated accounts receivable specialists—trained professionals who handle all past-due follow-up on your behalf—for roughly one-fifth to one-sixth the cost of an in-house hire.

The specialists make the calls, send the emails, and follow up consistently using proven approaches that preserve client relationships while getting invoices paid. Everything is tracked in a transparent dashboard so you always know what’s happening with your AR.

Firms using CollBox typically recover an average of $66,000 per month and get paid 40% faster than with traditional processes.

The Math That Matters

Let’s make this concrete.

If your firm has $50,000 in receivables over 30 days past due, and you’re currently recovering 60% of that through sporadic internal follow-up, you’re collecting $30,000 and writing off $20,000.

If professional, consistent follow-up increases your recovery rate to 85%, you’re now collecting $42,500—an additional $12,500 recovered.

Even accounting for the cost of the service, that’s money that was already earned, already owed, and would otherwise have been lost.

The question isn’t whether you can afford professional AR support. The question is whether you can afford not to have it.

What Actually Changes

When you stop chasing invoices yourself, several things happen:

Your time opens up. The hours you spent on follow-up calls and awkward emails become available for billable work, business development, or life outside the office.

Your cash flow stabilizes. Consistent follow-up means invoices get paid faster and more predictably. The feast-or-famine cycle that plagues so many firms starts to smooth out.

Your client relationships stay intact. Professional AR specialists know how to follow up firmly but respectfully. The conversations happen—but they’re handled by someone trained for exactly this work, not by you or your staff members who have to maintain ongoing relationships with these clients.

Your stress decreases. Knowing that every overdue invoice is being actively worked—without you having to think about it—creates peace of mind that’s hard to quantify but impossible to ignore.

The Bottom Line

Chasing invoices costs more than you think. The time, the opportunity cost, the emotional weight, and the revenue that slips through the cracks all add up to a significant drag on your firm’s success.

You’ve already done the work. You’ve already earned the money. The only question is whether you’ll collect it—and at what cost.

Learn how CollBox can help your firm stop chasing payments and start focusing on what you do best: practicing law.