A law firm protects its right to its fees when it writes the agreement in full from day one: the two parties, the scope of work tied to a specific case or service, the total value divided into instalments with due dates, and how expenses are to be borne. It then links the agreement to its files and reviews overdue and upcoming instalments every week, so a late payment is not discovered months later. This guide is a practical way of organising those steps, not legal advice on drafting contracts.
9-minute readLast updated: The Murafe team
Key takeaways
Write the scope of work precisely: the case number, court, capacity, opponent and claims, and which appeals the fees do not cover.
Divide the value into instalments, each with an amount, a due date and a description, and make them add up to the agreement’s value.
Link the agreement to the cases or services it covers; where one file has several clients, each has their own agreement and account.
Every week, review the instalments that are overdue or due within 7 or 30 days, and issue the receipt voucher against the agreement itself.
The agreement is printed in the office’s approved wording from a single template its lawyers review, and its value never falls below what has actually been received.
Why does the office’s right start with a written agreement?
A written agreement is the reference that settles any later question about fees: what the work covers, how much it costs, and when each instalment is paid. In many offices the arrangement stays verbal, or on a sheet of paper kept by the partner, so each side remembers it in its own way, and the disagreement surfaces at the first appeal or the first late payment. When the agreement is written down and kept in the client’s file inside law firm management software, the accountant and the lawyer in charge both see it, and collecting fees no longer depends on one person’s memory.
Many fee disputes do not start with a refusal to pay, but with a single question: was this work covered by the agreement?
This guide deals with the organisational side only: what is recorded, how it is followed up, and how Murafe keeps it linked to case files and vouchers. The drafting of the clauses, their legal effect and the amount of the fees are for the office’s lawyers to decide and remain their responsibility, and the guide offers no opinion on them. The aim is for every new agreement to come out complete the first time, and for the office to know on any given day what each client owes it and what remains outstanding.
What does an office usually write in a fee agreement?
Most fee agreements revolve around six elements: the parties, the scope of work, what is excluded from it, the value, the payment schedule and the special terms. The more each element is pinned down with figures and dates rather than general phrases, the less room there is for disagreement. The table below sets out what is written under each element and where it comes from in the law firm management software, so that the same information is not written twice in two places that may come to differ.
Element
What is written
Where it comes from in the system
The parties
The office, its licence and the lawyer’s name; the client’s name, nationality, ID card and address
The office’s details from the settings, and the client’s from their file
Scope of work
The case the agreement covers: its number, court, capacity, opponent and claims
The “Scope of work” field, or the “Write scope from case” button
What the fees do not cover
Appeals before higher courts, if it is agreed to exclude them
The field for appeals not covered by the fees
Value
The total fee in figures and in words, in Qatari riyals
The agreement’s value; the amount in words is written automatically
Payment schedule
Each instalment’s amount, due date and description
The agreement’s payment schedule
Special terms
Anything specific to this client, including how expenses are borne
The agreement’s special terms, printed in their place in the template
Expenses are the item most often forgotten when an agreement is written. Court fees, expert fees, translation and travel may be included in the fees or excluded from them, depending on what the office agrees with its client; what matters is that it is written down explicitly. If they are excluded, record every amount you pay on the client’s behalf with a payment voucher “charged to the client’s account”, so it is added to their statement of account as an amount they owe, and the client sees the total of fees and expenses together in the client portal if their account is shown to them.
Dividing fees into instalments with due dates
The payment schedule turns the total value into dated obligations that can be tracked: each instalment has an amount, a due date and a short description, such as “first instalment on signing”. Many offices tie instalments to stages of the work, such as filing the case or submitting the closing memorandum, but tracking needs a date, not a stage; so give each stage an expected date, and adjust it if the course of the case changes. In Murafe, the agreement is written in the following steps:
From “Fee agreements”, click “New fee agreement”, and choose the client and the type of agreement: case fees, legal service, annual consultations (subscription) or general.
Enter the agreement’s title and date, then the total fee in Qatari riyals.
Divide the value into instalments, and give each one its amount, due date and description.
Link it to the cases or legal services it covers.
Check the preview of the agreement as it will be printed, below the form, then save it.
The agreement’s status controls the timing: leave the agreement as a “draft” while negotiations are under way, since a draft does not enter the client’s statement of account and its instalments are not counted as overdue or due; once it is signed, set it to “in force” so that tracking of its instalments begins. After the first receipt voucher has been issued against the agreement, it cannot go back to “draft”, so that an instalment actually received does not disappear from the statement.
Linking the agreement to cases and services, and one agreement per client on the same file
Linking the agreement to the cases or services it covers brings the financial side to where the lawyer works: from the case file you can see which agreement covers it, and from the agreement you can see which files it includes. When a legal service is added, its fees are set and it is linked to the agreement, if there is one. Fees for services and consultations that are not linked to an agreement still go into the statement of account and the outstanding balances, so no amount is dropped because it falls outside the agreements.
When several clients share one file, whether heirs, partners or several names on one power of attorney, each of them has their own fee agreement: the agreement is chosen next to each client in the case form, or from the case file with the “Edit capacity / fee agreement” button. Each agreement’s instalments and each client’s statement of account are then tracked separately, and the system will not link a client to an agreement that is not theirs, so one heir’s share is never mixed up with another’s. Common situations include:
Heirs in a single estate case: one case file, and a separate agreement for each heir, paid and tracked on its own.
A company with an annual consultation agreement: its various legal services are linked to that same agreement instead of one agreement per service.
A case and then its appeal: if the appeal is outside the first agreement, write a new agreement for it and link it to the appeal file.
A court-appointed case: its fees are set by the court and paid to the office by the court, not the client, so they are recorded in the “Court-appointment fees” section without an agreement and stay off the client’s statement of account.
Tracking overdue instalments and those due within 7 and 30 days
Regular follow-up matters more than the schedule itself. On the “Agreement instalments” page, instalments are split into overdue, due within 7 days and due within 30 days, with an “All instalments” list showing their statuses, plus search and filters. The “Financial summary” also shows what is overdue and what falls due within 30 days, next to income and expenses. It is enough for the accountant or the partner to set aside a fixed time each week for this page, in this order:
Start with the overdue ones: who is late, by how much and since when, and decide who will contact each client.
Then those due within 7 days: remind the client before the due date, not after.
Then those due within 30 days: to estimate what will come into the office this month.
On payment, issue the receipt voucher and select the agreement and the instalment on it, so the instalment’s status and the client’s balance are updated together.
Reminders do not rely on the phone alone: the system sends clients reminders of instalments falling due by email or WhatsApp, according to the office’s settings, and personal calls are kept for cases that need a direct conversation. If the client’s account is shown in the client portal, they can see for themselves the payment schedule of their agreements with each instalment’s status, so they know what they owe before anyone calls them. These are the statuses as they appear in the schedule:
Instalment status
Meaning
Paid
Received in full, with one or more receipt vouchers
Partly paid
Part received, part still outstanding
Overdue
Its due date has passed and it has not been paid in full
Due today
Its due date is today
Upcoming
Not yet due
Printing the agreement in your office’s wording
The agreement is printed in the office’s own wording, not a generic text: under Settings → “Fee agreement template”, the title, preamble, clauses and signatures are written once, and only the variable parts are filled in for each agreement. Every office starts with a default template that its lawyers review and adapt before first use, so the wording remains their responsibility. Printing agreements is a separate permission under “Roles and permissions”, and the audit log keeps every print of an agreement: who printed it, when, and which agreement. The variable parts are:
The agreement’s reference number.
The scope of work: the case the agreement covers, with its number and court, the client’s capacity, the opponent and the claims, written automatically from the case details with the “Write scope from case” button.
The appeals not covered by the fees, and the agreement’s special terms.
The agreement’s date and weekday, the value in figures and in words, and the payment schedule.
The second party’s details from the client’s file: name, nationality, ID card and address; and the office’s licence and the lawyer’s name from the office’s details.
The agreement’s value never falls below what has been received: rules that protect the figures
Once receipt vouchers have been issued against an agreement, the system keeps the figures consistent with clear rules: the agreement’s value cannot fall below the amount received against it, the agreement cannot go back to “draft”, and its client cannot be changed. If the office agrees with its client to reduce the fees after part of them has been paid, the value and the remaining instalments are adjusted; and if the new value would be less than what has been received, the system first asks for the excess voucher to be cancelled, and the cancellation is recorded with its reason, without the voucher being deleted.
An agreement can change by mutual consent; what has actually been received stays in the books as a record that cannot be erased.
Before any new agreement is approved, a quick review of five questions is enough: are both parties’ details complete, with a valid ID card in the client’s file? Is the scope of work written from the case details, with the excluded appeals specified? Do the instalments add up to the value, and does each one have a date? Is the agreement linked to what it covers, with its status set to “in force” after signing? Has the signed copy been uploaded to the client’s documents? If the accountant can answer yes to all of them, little will turn out to be missing on the day of a dispute.
Questions on this topic
No. The office writes its own wording once in the “Fee agreement template”, and every office starts with a default template that its lawyers review and adapt. The system fills in only the variable parts, from the details of the agreement, the client and the case, and the legal wording and its effect remain the office’s responsibility.
Write an agreement for each client, then choose the agreement next to their name in the case form or with the “Edit capacity / fee agreement” button in the case file. Each agreement’s instalments and each client’s statement of account are tracked separately, and the system will not link a client to an agreement that is not theirs.
Yes, once the person authorised to show the account in the portal, usually the accounts employee, decides so. The client can then follow from their phone what they have paid, what they still owe and how much of it has fallen due, the next instalment, and the payment schedule of their agreements with each instalment’s status.
Yes, as long as the new value is not less than what has actually been received. If it is, first cancel the excess voucher, stating the reason for the cancellation, then adjust the value and the instalments; the cancelled voucher stays in the list as a record of what happened.
