Peer to Peer Magazine

79 WWW.ILTANET.ORG Reducing the Cost of Ebilling MEMBER RESOURCES RECOMMENDED BEST PRACTICES FOR LAW FIRMS » Understand the deadline for each invoice submission and prioritize the oldest and most expensive invoices. » Utilize spreadsheets to track: » Items paper-billed that need to be submied as an ebill. » Items that have been rejected and need to be resubmied aer correction. » Paid items. » Items on appeal. (However, spreadsheets are time-consuming to maintain and ineffective when many people at the firm handle ebilling.) » Adopt a centralized mailbox with a standard filing structure for notifications to track invoice status. » Investigate tools available to help administer ebilling. Due to increased efficiency, purchasing the tools might be less expensive than adding ebilling staff. Adjustments by the System and/or Bill Reviewers DISCUSSION » Adjustments connected to items forbidden by the client's billing guidelines should not have been billed. » Bill reviewer adjustments and write-downs may be for services believed to be unauthorized or for excessive costs. » If approval for these services was obtained, discuss with the responsible professional and submit a supplemental bill or appeal the adjustments. RECOMMENDED BEST PRACTICES FOR VENDORS AND CLIENTS » Ensure that your system provides a feature for clients to track approved exceptions to the billing guidelines. A feature to track exceptions will reduce the number of resubmissions or appeals needed on inappropriate adjustments. RECOMMENDED BEST PRACTICES FOR LAW FIRMS » Adapt future invoices to reflect write down/ adjustment comments; add to training documentation. Accounting DISCUSSION » Ebilling submission, correction of rejections, payment and resubmission of disallowed items where permied are accounting functions. The information in a firm's financial system needs to mirror the information in the ebilling system. This is essential for clients that perform billing audits and should be standard practice for all clients. RECOMMENDED BEST PRACTICES » Within the financial system, mirror any edits to LEDES invoice files necessary to correct a rejection. Note adjustments to invoice line items, and enter payment amounts. » Verify that additional resubmissions are trackable, whether as a separate invoice or via appeal. Relationship aorneys usually think in terms of how to keep the client happy rather than how much it might cost the firm when they are asked to ebill, but be prepared for the costs. Ebilling requires additional work, a rigorous level of efficiency, additional soware, technical expertise and possibly additional staffing to meet the deadlines imposed by clients for legal vendors to be paid for their services. With the greater expense involved, it is all the more important to ensure that your organization is utilizing best practices in every possible area. P2P JANE A. BENNITT With more than two decades of hands-on experience in implementing collaborative client/ outside counsel solutions, Global Legal Ebilling founder Jane A. Bennitt is a subject-matter expert in the creation and deployment of collaborative case management, ebilling and contract management solutions. Jane's specialty is global ebilling. She works with law departments, insurance claims organizations, law firms and vendors needing assistance with gathering requirements around workflow and business processes, compliance concerns, designing and implementing automated solutions, data availability and quality, and creating metrics to support business process improvement. Contact her at jbennitt@globallegalebilling.com. KEELY M. KURTAS-CHAPMAN Keely M. Kurtas-Chapman is the Billing Manager at Vorys, Sater, Seymour and Pease LLP, with more than a decade of law firm billing and financial reporting experience. Her specialties include electronic billing, UTBMS task/activity coding, complex multiple-payer billing, matter budgeting and reporting. Keely has participated in several projects to improve the timekeeping, billing and ebilling processes for internal and external clients. She is currently the Treasurer of the LEDES Oversight Committee (LOC) and has served on LOC subcommittees. Contact Keely at kmkurtaschap@vorys.com.

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