The quarterly publication of the International Legal Technology Association
Issue link: https://epubs.iltanet.org/i/4983
www.iltanet.org 78 Peer to Peer inside ilTA I t and accounting departments have widely divergent skill sets in many cases. e-billing is one area where the two collide. I was recently asked by an IT professional why we chose to use so many vendors for e-billing. Wouldn't it be more efficient to use one or two? Many in IT believe that the accounting department is responsible for the wide array of vendors. This is not the case. E-billing vendors are chosen by the client. The firm must go along with the client's choice in order to submit invoices. Clients make choices based on a variety of factors: cost, auditing capabilities, matter management and reporting are just a few. Ease of use by the law firms is not usually top of the list. Having multiple vendors can be a challenge for the law firm. Each person submitting invoices must be familiar with the nuances of each vendor. Unique logins, Web addresses and procedures must be used. Naming conventions and terms for client-generated matter numbers need to be learned. Some sites require timekeepers to be loaded and approved in advance. Some have simple interfaces. Others might require an IT background just to upload an invoice. Automatic rejections are also treated differently by each vendor. Some allow line-by-line corrections to invoices online. Some will reject the whole bill after corrections are made by the firm. Because e-billing vendors can audit invoices for compliance to outside counsel guidelines, many rejections can happen for minor things that might amount to only a few cents on the invoice. Time-narrative guidelines are more problematic. Attorneys have developed their narrative styles over the course of their careers. In the past, clients didn't take issue with long descriptive narratives of a day's work. Now clients are becoming more sophisticated in the review of bills. E-billing software enables clients to fully monitor each phase of a matter. The use of UTBMS task codes enhances the ability to quantify tasks on each engagement. Because of this, many clients are now rejecting bills if they contain more than one thought in a time entry. Sophisticated audit techniques can now detect a narrative that contains what is referred to as "block billing." For example, an entry that contains "review" and "revise" must be shown as two separate time entries. For this reason, some firms have chosen to go with outside vendors to process their invoices. At Loeb & Loeb, we have our own internal e-billing. An automated add-on to our time and billing system generates a LEDES 98B file in compliance with our clients' specifications each time a bill is issued. An event-driven reporting system notifies the e-billing uploader that files are available to transmit. Invoices are then reviewed prior to upload by a trained eye familiar with the nuances of each client and e-billing vendor. Most e-bills are submitted in the form of a LEDES 98B file. This is a pipe delimited text file. To the untrained eye, it looks like random numbers and phrases separated by a pipe ("|"). This file is sent directly to the third-party Client Preferences drive E-billing Choices "Clients make choices based on a variety of factors: cost, auditing capabilities, matter management and reporting are just a few. Ease of use by the law firms is not usually top of the list."