Digital White Papers

I L T A W H I T E P A P E R & S U R V E Y R E S U L T S | L I T I G A T I O N A N D P R A C T I C E S U P P O R T & C O R P O R A T E L E G A L D E P A R T M E N T S 36 for a deeper dive into a specific tranche of invoices for further review. The concurrent review is the ideal for legal invoice review, because it allows the organization to avoid paying a noncompliant invoice in the first place. Rather than finding out after the fact that an invoice included noncompliant entries and positioning to negotiate for a credit or refund from the law firm, the organization can resolve the invoicing discrepancy or just the offending line entries, via a line-entry reduction, before it is paid. In a mature review model, the noncompliant entries will be highlighted for the law firm for reconsideration and resubmission, allowing the firm the opportunity to correct mistakes in the original billing. This cooperative audit method increases law firm compliance with billing guidelines and improves timekeeper billing behavior as they learn the types of tasks that are allowed or considered insufficient or noncompliant. The success of an audit program, including remediation negotiation in a retrospective review or invoice/line-item rejection in a concurrent review, is enhanced by involving the organization's relationship manager, managing attorney or procurement group at the outset as this indicates the importance of compliance with legal invoice billing guidelines. Often a strategy of employing a transition period wherein the penalties of noncompliance start low and increase over the course of the intermediate phase encourages the compliance of firms as they adapt to the revised billing requirements. In addition, since many organizations benefit from timely payment of invoices, this variable of delayed payment on submitted invoices must be contemplated in the audit model and workflow design to ensure that early pay discounts are not jeopardized. Once this ongoing relationship is established, the audit program can eventually become business as usual, wherein the noncompliant invoices or entries are brought up with the law firm billing coordinators and resolved without the involvement of senior level staff. Legal invoice audit vendors should be experts across multiple systems and behave as partners to organizations in increasing efficiency and driving higher value from legal spend. Invoice auditing is an ongoing journey to improve firm legal billing compliance, and beyond simply reviewing invoices, the vendor should provide analytics and insights into the organization's legal spend based on overall invoicing patterns. A trend analysis over a period of time can measure success as well as firms' engagement with compliant billing. Some metrics that may illustrate this include but are not limited to: • Dollars associated with noncompliant task entries and overall reduction percentage (%) at the firm, matter and timekeeper level. "A trend analysis over a period of time can measure success as well as firms' engagement with compliant billing."

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