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Legal Invoice Template
Bill legal work the way clients expect to read it: a matter reference at the top, time entries in tenths of an hour, and costs kept separate from fees.
- How do I make a legal invoice?
- Use Receipt Caker to add one line per time entry with the date, narrative, hours and timekeeper rate, then add disbursements as their own lines and let the totals calculate.
- What makes a legal invoice different from a normal invoice?
- It ties every charge to a named matter or case, describes the work in a narrative rather than a product name, and separates professional fees from advanced costs such as filing fees and court reporter charges.
- How small should the time increments be?
- Most firms bill in tenths of an hour, where 0.1 equals six minutes. Enter the decimal directly on each line so the arithmetic stays consistent across the whole invoice.
Create your legal invoice now
Build a clean, itemized document with automatic totals, add your logo, and export a PNG or PDF — free, no signup required.
Optional extra rows printed under the header — e.g. Store #, Terminal, Order type.
Add your own total lines — a discount (use a negative amount), service charge, deposit or rounding. They fold into the total.
What to include on a legal invoice
What you can do
- Add one line per time entry with hours and rate, totaled automatically
- Mix hourly fee lines and flat-amount cost lines in the same document
- Enter decimal hours such as 0.3 or 1.7 without rounding by hand
- Live preview so you can proof the narrative before you export
- Free watermarked PNG export with no signup or account
- Pro removes the watermark, adds PDF export and your firm logo
What belongs on a law firm invoice
A legal invoice is read differently from a standard sales invoice. The client is usually checking three things at once: whether the work was authorized, whether the time spent looks proportionate to the task, and whether the charge belongs to the matter they think it belongs to. Your layout should answer all three without anyone having to email you.
Start with the matter identifier. Put the matter or case name and your internal matter number near the invoice number, and state the billing period covered, such as the calendar month. Clients with several open matters file invoices by matter, not by date, so an invoice that only says the client's name creates work for whoever handles the payables.
Then separate fees from costs. Professional time is one block with its own subtotal, and advanced costs are a second block with theirs. Blending a court filing fee into a list of time entries makes the fee total look wrong and invites a query. Two subtotals feeding one grand total is easier to approve and easier to reconcile against your own ledger later.
Time entries, billing increments and narratives
The common unit in legal billing is a tenth of an hour, which is six minutes. Under that convention a quick call is 0.2, reviewing a short document might be 0.4, and a half-day of drafting is 4.0. Entering decimals directly keeps every line consistent, and it avoids the mistake of writing forty-five minutes on one line and 0.75 on the next. Some firms bill in quarter hours instead. Either convention is fine as long as you disclose it in the engagement letter and apply it the same way all month.
The narrative is the part clients actually read. A useful entry names the task, the document or person involved, and the purpose: "Draft and revise response to interrogatories; correspondence with client re: verification" tells a story. "Legal research" does not. Vague entries are the single most common reason an invoice gets cut, because a reviewer who cannot tell what was done has no basis for approving the time.
Avoid block billing where several tasks are lumped into one large entry. Six separate tasks under a single 6.4-hour line makes it impossible to see the effort behind any one of them, and many institutional clients and fee auditors reject or discount those entries on sight. Splitting them into individual dated lines costs you a few minutes and protects the whole invoice. In the generator each entry is its own line, so granular billing is the natural way to work rather than an extra chore.
Retainers, trust funds and advanced costs
If the client paid an advance fee that sits in a client trust account, the invoice is usually the document that authorizes you to move money out of it. The practical pattern is: issue the invoice showing the amount earned, then transfer that amount from trust into the operating account, and show the client both the amount applied and the remaining balance. A line reading "Retainer applied" followed by "Trust balance carried forward" removes any ambiguity about what is left.
Trust accounting rules are set by your state bar and they are strict about commingling, timing and record-keeping. This page describes the shape of a billing document, not the rules that govern your account. Confirm the current requirements with your jurisdiction's rules of professional conduct and your accountant before you set up a drawdown process. Nothing here is legal or accounting advice.
Advanced costs are money your firm paid out on the client's behalf: filing fees, service of process, deposition transcripts, expert fees, courier charges, certified copies. List each one on its own line with the date and payee where relevant, and keep them out of the fee subtotal. Be consistent about whether you pass costs through at exact value or apply a stated administrative charge, and say which in your engagement letter rather than leaving the client to work it out from the numbers.
Task codes, e-billing and building the document
Corporate clients and insurance carriers often require electronic billing in a structured format. The two names you will meet are LEDES, a file layout for transmitting invoice data, and UTBMS, a set of standardized task and activity codes that classify each entry, such as codes for case assessment, pretrial pleadings, discovery or trial preparation. If a client's billing guidelines call for them, they will tell you which code set and which file version they accept, and they usually require submission through their own e-billing portal rather than by email.
That format is only required when a client asks for it. Individual clients, small businesses and most consumer matters are billed with a readable PDF or printed statement, and adding codes there just clutters the page. If you do work for a carrier, get their billing guidelines in writing at the start of the matter, because they typically also set rules about block billing, travel time and staffing that affect how you write entries all year.
To build the document in Receipt Caker, add a line for each time entry with the hours and the timekeeper's rate, then add each disbursement as a flat-amount line with a quantity of one. The generator multiplies and totals as you type, and the live preview lets you proof the narratives before anything leaves your desk. Export a free watermarked PNG to check the layout, or use Pro for a clean PDF with your firm's logo. Receipt Caker creates the document only; it does not track your time, hold client funds or connect to any accounting or trust ledger.