Chief Financial Officer, Hale & Mercer LLP · Plain-language invoices · Treasurer of two non-profits
Chicago · Hale & Mercer LLP · 911+ connections
I am the CFO at Hale & Mercer. My job is to make sure every invoice is fair, every number is right, and every client knows where their money went. You should never have to guess what you are paying for; if you do, that is my failure.
I grew up in Skokie helping my father, a tax accountant, do half the neighbourhood's returns from the kitchen table. Data entry at twelve, simple returns at sixteen, two accountancy degrees from Illinois, controller here in 2017, CFO in 2021. In 2023 I redesigned the firm's invoices so that every entry is in plain language with the name of the person who did the work. Billing disputes fell by two-thirds.
Birds (412 species), 2,000-piece puzzles, and six loaves of challah every Friday.
Three years since we redesigned the invoice: every entry in plain language, the name of the person who did the work, no codes. Billing disputes are down 67%. Collections are faster. The lesson is not about invoices. It's that people pay for what they understand.
Trust accounting is not glamorous and it is the single most important thing a law firm's finance team does. Client money is client money. We reconcile it monthly to the penny and I sign the reconciliation myself.
Budget note for anyone running a professional-services firm: fund pro bono the way you fund rent. A line item, not a leftover. Ours is about $900,000 a year in forgone time and we have never missed it.
Finance, billing, trust accounting, budgets. The 2023 plain-language invoice redesign.
Rebuilt the general ledger and the trust-account reconciliation. Found three things that needed finding.
Audited law firms for nine years. Learned exactly where the numbers hide.
My father's practice. Half the neighbourhood, every spring.
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, M.S. Accountancy, 2008
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, B.S. Accountancy, 2007
It also made our lawyers write better time entries, which made them better lawyers. Side effect, not an accident.
I send our invoice to clients as an example of what to demand from every professional. Including me.