We’ve observed this all too common “disconnect” in the legal electronic billing industry:
Global corporations purchase or develop proprietary e-billing systems to better manage their legal spend “globally.” This action sets off a chain of events that exposes alarming weaknesses and inefficiencies in the current e-billing/invoicing systems:
- Company X buys a new e-billing system. Of course, the decision-makers are thinking: control costs, cut waste, and track time. The company, not understanding the complexity of its request, informs its outside counsel firms that any invoices must be submitted electronically, so they can be handled more efficiently by this new system.
- Outside counsel, Law Firm Y, scrambles to produce a solution that includes manually cobbling together what data is spit from their current time and billing software system to create an electronic file that kind of meets the new electronic invoice demands of its client.
It’s the 21st century, but would you know it from the condition of our electronic billing systems integrations?
E-Billing Demands of 21st Century Clients
At the outset of 2009 RORA Client Systems sat down with one of the largest law firm time and billing application vendors. Here’s what we wondered about their current business:
“Your client law firms must be begging you for application feature enhancements so they can better produce electronic invoice files and answer their clients’ needs.”
Their answer:
“No, they’re not.”
Wow.
Spending chunks of man-hours manually editing data from various time and billing systems to try and meet the invoicing requirements of clients is hardly the clean, efficient technology one expects of 21st century “global” law firms.
The facts of the matter:
- Global and domestic corporations are under constant and immense pressure to slash their legal spend
- Those without an e-billing system in place are scrambling to implement one and get it online
- Most of the law firm time and billing applications currently on the market cannot fully accommodate the countless, client specific, electronic invoice requirements to produce the actual electronic invoice files from the tracked time and billing data. Law firms are responding thus:
a) manually entering invoices into their clients’ billing systems
b) manually editing inadequately constructed invoice files of their time and billing data so they match clients’ e-billing requirements
c) pushing back on clients’ requests claiming technical difficulties or VAT incompliance
d) a volatile combination of the above.
Stay tuned. In my next post I will begin peeling the layers to expose the roots on all this craziness.
Hi Rora,
I’d like to suggest that another reason many law firms may not be asking the time and billing vendors for enhancements, is that they have either written custom programs themselves and/or hired an outside consultant to write the custom programs to output the necessary files in the various client required formats. This was often necessary at the outset of ebilling 10 years ago because the time/billing vendors could not react quickly enough to allow the law firms to meet their clients’ requirements. Once this path was chosen, it can be a significant undertaking to migrate to a different methodology.