It’s no secret that immigration court cases are often complicated, protracted affairs. In early 2024, asylum seekers, on average, waited for roughly 3.9 years — or more than 1,400 days per data compiled by Docketwise — before having their cases heard. And considering that the immigration court backlog includes nearly 3.5 million pending cases (as of June 2025), those delays aren’t going anywhere.
Unfortunately, as these timelines extend, associated legal costs also grow, placing increased financial strain on immigrants and asylum seekers and limiting which of them can afford counsel. By offering lawyer payment plans, however, your firm could make its services much more accessible to the immigrant community. In this article, we’ll explore payment plans in more detail, including what benefits they provide and how you can more easily offer them to your clients.
Why payment plans matter in immigration law
Immigrants and asylum seekers often struggle financially, making it difficult for them to pull together the initial capital for an up-front retainer — one of the more common billing strategies for law firms. However, when you offer payment plans, you allow your clients to break up these costs into more reasonable installments, spread over a longer period. Not only does this strategy broaden your potential client base, but it also delivers greater financial flexibility to your clients, encouraging them to stay with your firm throughout the multi-year naturalization process.
Of course, effectively invoicing, managing, and collecting these distributed payments can make accounts receivable (A/R) for your law firm rather complex. Still, when you implement the right online payment system, you can easily compensate for this burden.
5 common challenges immigration lawyers face with payments
According to its annual Legal Trends Reports, Clio notes that among the US legal firms it reviewed, lawyers tend to collect on 91% of their billed hours, meaning that 9% of these are written off as bad debt. Uncollected funds have a direct impact on cash flow, limiting the flexibility, growth potential, and overall value of your organization. Meanwhile, other A/R challenges can further undermine the profitability and performance of your firm.
1. Complex billing drags out invoice creation and payment timelines
Your clients expect detailed billing records that outline every action your firm has taken throughout their immigration case. And since these activities might be performed by different personnel or be billed at different rates over multiple quarters, creating consolidated records can prove difficult and time-consuming — especially if you have manual A/R processes in place.
2. Billing delays invite late payments, disputes, and bad debt
The less time that passes between a client receiving a legal service and receiving the corresponding invoice, the more likely they are to pay on time, or at all. Similarly, disputes occur more frequently when your client can’t easily recall the direct impact of your billable hours. Unfortunately, given the extended nature of immigration cases, many firms will hold onto their payment requests for extended periods or send out their invoices sporadically, introducing unnecessary complications to their collections efforts.
3. Disjointed processes offer poor financial visibility
When your various billing and client tracking systems aren’t well integrated, much of the critical data you need to assess your financial health and performance will end up siloed into isolated data pools. As such, you’ll have to access each of these systems individually, slowly compiling their details into comprehensive reports, making it incredibly difficult to get a complete and accurate picture of your real-time financial standing.
4. Cross-border payments bring increased tax and reporting complexity
The very nature of immigration law means that you’ll frequently be working with clients who reside abroad either before or during their case. And these clients likely won’t have their assets held in US dollars. Instead, you’ll be working with a variety of currencies. If these payments are crossing borders, you’ll also need to operate within the tax and reporting guidelines of the originating region.
5. Unattractive payment terms discourage business growth
Many law firms, not just those focused on immigration, offer very few payment options, artificially restricting their available client base. But when you provide more choices, you can often encourage smoother payment cycles. Returning to the previously mentioned Clio reports, we find that 71% of clients would prefer paying a flat fee for their entire case. Among firms that have employed this model, they are twice as likely to receive immediate payment as those that rely on hourly billing.
Of course, given the extended timelines and overall complexity of immigration cases, that strategy might not be feasible for your practice. But Clio also found that those firms that offered payment plans tended to collect 49% more monthly revenue than their counterparts. Similarly, organizations that used online payment systems received payment more than twice as quickly as those that didn’t.
Benefits of automating payment plans for immigration lawyers
Rather than throwing staff, energy, and money at these challenges, you can instead opt for a more streamlined, cost-effective solution — technology that delivers A/R automation for law firms. With the right platform in place, you can stabilize cash flows and offer more attractive, flexible payment options to the immigrant community.
Accelerate invoice creation with integrated, automated workflows
When your billing system can seamlessly draw data from throughout your enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and leverage this information to create highly detailed invoices without direct human intervention, you’ll be able to get your payment requests out the door much faster. At the same time, automated workflows allow you to cut out unnecessary process delays to further shorten the invoice-to-cash (I2C) cycle.
Reduce bad debt with a consistent communication strategy
As time drags on for your immigration cases, it can be very easy to let billing cycles slide and grow inconsistent in your dunning efforts — especially if these messages are initiated manually. But when you automate these touches, you can create consistent cadences that make it more likely for your clients to remember and act on their current account balances. Even better, many platforms employ a multi-touch strategy that will send out dunning notices across several communication channels (e.g., phone, text, email) simultaneously.
Boost client interest, satisfaction, and retention with convenient payment options
When it comes to paying their bills, clients prefer a frictionless experience. And when you empower them to choose the method and schedule of how they pay, you’ll be able to build stronger, longer-lasting relationships — a clear advantage in multiphase immigration cases. At the same time, with recurring billing and payment terms made possible through an automated platform, you can work with immigrants and asylum seekers who may not have access to a great deal of capital at any given time.
Navigate the challenges of cross-border payments more easily
Admittedly, this benefit will depend on the automation solution you choose. Still, there are products available — like our platform, backed by Flywire software — that are built to comply with established tax withholding and reporting guidelines for markets across the globe. Commonly, these payment systems will also provide access to favorable exchange rates that cut out administrative costs, meaning you’ll keep more of your incoming revenue.
Improve decision-making with real-time access to billing data
Given the centralized data and metadata made available by automated invoice workflows, many platforms provide real-time access to this information via integrated monitoring dashboards. Even better, your practice can capture these snapshots to build comprehensive historical records that map out your performance and financial health over time. And some solutions even leverage predictive analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), or other capabilities to create highly accurate financial forecasts. Armed with this insight, stakeholders and other key decision makers can then make more informed choices regarding budgeting and planning efforts.
How to streamline payment plans with automation
There is no set strategy for improving the management of your payment plans through automation. Instead, the measures you’ll want to take will vary depending on many factors, including the maturity of your IT infrastructure, current legislation, and the size of your business and caseloads.
That being said, you’ll probably want to:
- Evaluate available platforms: Look for billing software that can accommodate recurring invoices and work seamlessly with your existing back office systems.
- Draft flexible plans: Not every case will proceed at the same pace. Rather than creating a one-size-fits-all payment structure, work with individual clients to create a timeline that works for them.
- Set up payment reminders: You’ll want a consistent follow-up cadence in place that activates every time you send an invoice. Commonly, you should set your dunning notices to begin slightly before any established due dates.
- Account for failed payments: Sometimes transactions won’t complete, so establish clear policies dictating how often and how many retry attempts should be made. Ideally, these actions will be handled directly by your billing software, only being escalated to staff in the event of repeated failure.
- Promote compliance: Proactively review any tax collection, reporting, and accounting rules that apply to your regular transactions, both domestic and international. And subsequently ensure that your automated billing systems are set up to operate within these standards.
Key features to look for in A/R automation tools
When it comes to A/R automation for your law firm, there are quite a few critical features the solution you choose should have, such as:
- Automated workflows: Given the complex nature of your billing, choose software that can proactively handle disputes, prorations, payment plans, and other complications.
- Intuitive cash application: Expect your incoming payments to be equally complex. Look for systems that can accurately route collected funds to the appropriate accounts, invoices, and balances—even when receiving only a partial payment or covering multiple bills in a single transaction.
- Recurring billing: If you’re going to support payment plans, you’ll want to invest in an A/R platform that can generate iterative invoices based on predefined schedules and triggers.
- Multi-touch dunning: Don’t just communicate via email. Opt for a solution that can follow up on outstanding invoices via multiple channels simultaneously.
- Self-service tools: Your clients will typically be more prompt and satisfied in their payments when they can manage the process on their own terms. Look for client-facing payment portals or similar self-service features when choosing your billing software.
- Broad integration: Go with a solution that can readily access, manipulate, and share data across all of your current back office systems. Ideally, you’ll want one that can work with most major platforms, as you may want to switch to a different ERP provider in the future.
- Global payments: You’ll obviously be working with clients from multiple geographies, so you’ll want software that can operate in multiple currencies and seamlessly accommodate international transactions.
Simplify payment plans with Invoiced’s A/R automation software
Suppose you’re looking to set up payment plans for your immigration lawyers or simply want to accelerate billing cycles for your firm. In that case, our Accounts Receivable Automation platform delivers flexible workflows that can easily accommodate even the most complex of invoices. In addition, our CashMatch AI feature will help ensure that any incoming payments are correctly routed to the appropriate invoices, accounts, and balances. And our software offers broad integration support, working with the most popular ERP and sales platforms.
We also deliver a self-serve customer portal that empowers users to easily set up recurring payments without requiring any assistance from your staff. And our Smart Chasing feature lets you build automated outreach cadences with the branding, messaging, and frequency you desire. Finally, we’ve augmented our platform with the global payment capabilities of Flywire software, enabling you to support transactions from immigrants and asylum seekers in 140 currencies across 240 countries and territories.
Explore the value of payment plans and schedule a demo today.
