Legal Fee Financing With Pay Later

Legal fee financing is an alternative payment solution that allows your firm to receive full payments upfront while your clients pay their legal fees in installments. Clients make these smaller regular payments to a third-party lender.

With legal fee financing, you are paid 100% of your fees upfront. With a scheduled payment plan, payments are spaced out over a period of time. Additionally, if a payment fails, you must rerun a new form of payment or recharge your client. With fee financing, a third-party creditor handles all of the transactions on the client’s end and removes you from the process.

Pay Later may be a good option for you and your firm for the following reasons:

• Get paid 100% upfront, improving your cash flow in comparison to a traditional scheduled payment plan and mitigating the risk of non-payment

• Reduce the amount of time spent following up on client payments

• Expand your client base to those who wish to have additional payment options

• Minimize your outstanding accounts receivable and the need for discounted payment options

Please note that Affirm financing is only available to individual customers and is not available to entity customers who would use Affirm financing for business or commercial purposes.

Consumers will apply for a loan through Affirm, and if approved, Pay Later/Affinipay will send 100% of the funds directly to your law firm. Pay Later/Affinipay is not the lender*.

Your law firm is unaffected if the borrower doesn’t make their loan repayments. The collection of unpaid funds is between the borrower and the lender. However, borrowers who fail to make their repayments may be ineligible for future loans through Affirm.

The funds settle in your bank account via ACH transfer within 3-5 business days of each transaction.

No! ClientCredit is now known as Pay Later, but they are the same solution.

Your clients will see an option to “Pay Later” on your firm’s payment page. Selecting this option will take them to an online application. To apply for Pay Later, your clients will be asked to enter a few pieces of information, and they’ll receive a real-time decision.

Affirm financing via Pay Later currently supports transactions from $150 to $25,000, but a client’s credit limit will depend on their eligibility. Affirm offers closed-end consumer loans and does not offer a line of credit. Each loan will have its own application process.

Yes, Pay Later can be used for payments into trust or operating accounts. Just as with accepting cards and eChecks in LawPay, we will never debit any fees from the trust account.

Yes. 4.95% of the transaction value. You may not pass on this cost to the client.

Refunds with loans for legal fees work as they normally do. Your firm can refund the entire amount, or a partial amount pertaining to the original transaction. The funds will be deposited to the client’s account and debited from the firm in the amount of the refund.

Yes, fee financing is allowed by the ABA. Please refer to ABA Formal Opinion 484 for more details.

You may mention that you offer Affirm financing via Pay Later upon your in-office consultation or intake. This is a great way to let your clients know that they have options when it comes to paying their bills.

Additionally, you can consider an email or other communication educating your clients about this new payment option. Whenever communicating with your client about Affirm financing, you must use pre-approved messaging and material provided by Affirm.

Refer to Affirm’s sample marketing tools and requirements here, share our Affirm landing page with clients, which includes FAQs, or share more information using our marketing toolkit to help answer any questions they may have and give them more insight into the application process.

If you are an existing LawPay customer, please contact support@lawpay.com to activate Pay Later on your account. If you are not a LawPay customer, you can open an account at lawpay.com/sign-up.

No. Clients applying for an Affirm loan through Pay Later must do so on their own personal device. It is against Affirm’s terms to use a shared device—a shared device refers to a piece of hardware such as a computer, tablet, or smartphone that is used by multiple individuals.