How Sprunger & Sprunger Doubled Their Billable Hours with Clio
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Sprunger & Sprunger
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2014
Year Founded
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11-50
Number of Staff
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2018
Started Using Clio
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Indiana, USA
Location
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Contingency
Flat Fee
Hourly
Fee Types
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Business
Criminal Defence
Family
Health
Immigration
Personal Injury
Real Estate
Wills and Estates
Practice Areas
Building profitability on better technology
When Cory Sprunger first opened Sprunger & Sprunger (then, just Sprunger) in Indiana, he was the only person to answer phones, handle the bookkeeping, and take out the trash—on top of all the client work. Since then, he’s managed to grow Sprunger & Sprunger to six locations statewide.
Along the way, Cory and his team realized that it would be more efficient to centralize all of the administrative functions across all of its offices into one system, which they were able to do with Clio. In fact, the business management at Sprunger & Sprunger has been so effective, they’ve doubled the firm’s billable hours—and started outsourcing its administrative functions to other law firms statewide via Sprunger’s second business, Sprunger PEO.
“The big firms don’t have ten floors, each with its own IT person. They don’t do that because it would be such a waste. So what’s the difference for small firms in ten counties?”
“Technology is at the point where we can be in Angola, Fort Wayne, Indianapolis, Evansville—and there’s no reason we can’t have the same bookkeeper, IT person, and phone receptionist. And there’s no reason we can’t offer these to other firms as well.”
How Sprunger and Sprunger is closing the access to justice gap in rural Indiana
For many people living in small towns across the United States, it can be difficult to access professional legal services. It’s a problem of supply, and it’s one that Cory and his team at Sprunger & Sprunger are set on fixing.
“In Indiana, the ratio of attorneys to population in the four biggest counties is 300% higher. That means our rural areas are incredibly underserved. There is so much more demand than there is supply of attorneys.”
Sprunger & Sprunger is solving the problem by creating efficient processes and giving more time to their clients by standardizing their system with Clio.
“Clio’s Legal Trends Report shows that attorneys statewide average 2.5 billable hours per day. But getting clients is not the issue. Most of the attorneys in rural areas don’t have to advertise. They don’t spend marketing dollars. The problem is the time constraint.”
“We’ve doubled our billable hours and lowered expenses, making the firm remarkably more profitable. At the same time, these underserved communities get twice the amount of legal service.”
Sprunger & Sprunger has reduced costs and created a more centralized system for managing their business. It worked so well, they started another firm called Sprunger PEO to help other firms benefit from their system.
“Our client law firms are way more profitable because their expenses are much lower. They don’t have to pay a full-time assistant to sit at the front desk and answer the phone 12 times a day. We share legal receptionists who answer the phone and it ends up being a lot cheaper. They earn more revenue with less expense.”
How Sprunger & Sprunger centralized their business administration to double their billable income
With Clio, Sprunger & Sprunger has been able to consolidate overhead between all their offices. They’ve streamlined financial workflows and given staff—between offices—access to firm information in real-time.
The firm has reduced administrative burdens so that their lawyers can focus more on actually helping their clients, which has been incredibly lucrative for their business.
“We chose Clio because, honestly, it’s been around the longest, and it’s the most developed solution available.”
1. Better billing for better cash flow
Clio has automated the billing, payment, and accounting workflows at Sprunger & Sprunger—keeping their monthly financial operations on track, while ensuring more steady revenues.
“Our accounts receivables were getting big and we created a quarterly process where our admin team will reach out to each attorney and ask them what they want from their clients. Just by doing that we’ve seen our accounts receivables drop by half.”
They’ve also made it easier for clients to pay their bills—making it more likely for them to pay.
“A lot of people aren’t trying to not pay you. They just forget about it. By being intentional about it, it just gets dealt with. You can’t forget to send the bill at the end of the month or your client gets a huge bill later on that they can’t really afford.”
2. Streamlining payment processing through Clio
Sprunger & Sprunger has long offered clients the ability to pay the firm through online payment transactions. When the opportunity came up to process payments through Clio, they jumped on it.
“We used to use a third-party payment processor with Clio. When Clio rolled out Clio Payments we made the switch because it just simplified things. Less vendors means less room for error.”
3. Automated trust deposits keep funds on hand for payment
For many of their clients, Sprunger & Sprunger maintains trust accounts to ensure that there is money on hand to work their matters.
To avoid the headache of reviewing each trust account and manually requesting payments to keep them topped up, Clio does this automatically for the firm.
4. Integrated accounting for automated data entry and simplified reconciliation
Sprunger & Sprunger has integrated Clio with QuickBooks Online, which they use to manage all of their business’s accounting data.
Having the two softwares synced together means that as bills go out and invoices come in, all of that data gets automatically logged into QuickBooks, saving them having to input it manually.
5. Creating a system that works for everyone
Clio has given Sprunger & Sprunger a more efficient and intuitive system for everyone to work with, helping keep everyone connected and up-to-date with everything they need to know.
“We’ve used a lot of different softwares over the years, and people don’t like change. We always hear a lot about it. But since we switched to Clio, I’ve never had a complaint. It’s always positive. Clio’s been very easy to use and it’s made my life better.”
“Without Clio, we’d be back in the old days of using Excel and Word, and all the myriad of softwares to try and do the same thing that Clio does—and wasting huge amounts of time.
An investment in future profitability
For Cory and his team at Sprunger & Sprunger, the move to Clio was an investment in the firm’s future—and it’s one that’s paid off substantially.
“It’s worth the effort. For a couple weeks of change, you end up with years of additional profitability. To reap that benefit for the years to come, that’s why firms need to make the switch.”
Clio is a trusted platform for building businesses
Cory and his team built an administrative function that has been so valuable and efficient, he’s offering the service to other law firms. They offer this service through their second business, Sprunger PEO. Part of the service includes setting up a requisite Clio account, which serves as the central system for managing all firm information.
“We started finding ways to operate more efficiently, and Clio was key. When we go to these other firms to do their admin, we basically say, we’re setting up your Clio subscription, and we package it all up.”