Global E-Billing Disconnect EXPOSED, Part 2

In last week’s post, The Disconnect in Global E-Billing, Part 1, I started a foray into the more absurd aspects of our global legal e-billing milieu. Here in Part 2, let’s start peeling back those layers and begin to bare the underlying factors and belief systems at work in the collective legal unconscious, so to speak:

•  Despite the popular and well-recognized LEDES file formats, there remain >250 OTHER format “flavors.” Add to this particular disconnect the fact that some of the influential corporate clients impose their own proprietary electronic invoicing file format on their outside counsel firms.
• Law Firms and time and billing vendors are bamboozled—how do they possibly accommodate all the disparate electronic file formats currently in play?
• Corporations that issue Outside Counsel Policies frequently inject yet still more maverick billing factors into the toxic brew:  allowable attorney rates, various disbursement rates, and other traditional rules of engagement. For example, one company may allow $.15 per copy, while another allows only $.04.; some corporate clients may agree to pay for first year associates, while many others refuse; and so on. Tracking these “rules of engagement” is onerous and over the long haul, a costly time-suck—no time and billing system currently in use is able to track all these billing variables.
• Billing Clerks earn on average $40,000 annually, which in the Big Picture is but a drop in the bucket for most law firms. Hire more billing clerks and simply raise rates so clients can absorb the cost, right?

A tactic of RORA Client Systems’ R&D is yanking open the hood on some of the popular law firm time and billing systems to see what’s inside. As expected, we found that each comes bundled with different assortments of e-billing file formats from which a law firm may choose.  But more importantly, we realized that regardless of the corporate client, the underlying e-billing data requirements for all of them are basically the same!  Yes, it’s the same data in different order, using different delimiters. 

What’s needed to connect the dots?

Agreement on a few standard formats.

Sounds simple, right?  Though the law firms may still need to manually handle the Outside Counsel Policy requirements, this affirmative action alone could launch a powerful domino effect:

• Fewer human errors.
• Far less law firm overhead.
• Measurable financial savings passed onto clients.

I often hear corporate lawyers say something like this, “We spend so much money with our law firms. They’ll do whatever we say.” Perhaps this attitude has helped perpetuate the electronic billing mess we’re all left to mop up.

Stay tuned for Part 3 next week.