Legal Bill Review FAQs

Explore our FAQ page for answers to common questions about legal spend management, outside counsel billing practices, and how LegalBillReview.com supports cost-saving strategies.

Questions from In-House Legal Teams:

  • We prove to the law firm that LBR's participation benefits the law firm. Most lawyers overlook the reality that the client's in-house attorneys are not the only stakeholders that must be convinced of that lawyer's value. Oftentimes, leaders in other departments will automatically assume that outside law firms are overcharging. We show the law firms that their willingness to correct unreasonable or incorrect charges allows LBR to confirm to all of the client's stakeholders that the attorney delivered full and fair value. Consistent confirmation of value from a law firm will likely earn that firm a client for many years to come.

  • We focus on attorneys’ hours, not their rates. Many attorneys must meet annual billable hours quotas, which gives them an incentive to record more hours per client. So we look at the amount of hours it takes to complete a task, the number of tasks bundled together in a single block of hours, the number of attorneys billing hours for the same task, and numerous other metrics -- all to analyze the value that the attorneys have delivered to you, the client.

  • We carefully review our legal bills internally and we will ask for reductions when we notice billing errors. Why would we need your service?

    Is that the highest and best use of your time? Consider the increased productivity of your team members by having LBR review the legal bills, discuss adjustments with the law firms, and process payments. Also consider whether having your internal legal team members demand adjustments from the law firm is harming that relationship. LBR is the buffer that keeps your communications with your law firm focused on legal issues, not financial issues.

  • LBR's analysts are experienced, US-based attorneys who take the time to review each bill and consider it in the broader context of the overall matter. We set clear expectations and guidelines for our clients’ law firms, which results in greater detail and clarity in the attorneys’ time entries. When bills fall short of that standard, it’s a matter of simple enforcement and follow-up. By the end of our review, we have extensive information on which to judge the value of each time entry. We then present that information to the law firm as the basis for a particular adjustment.

Questions from Legal Operations:

  • No. LBR is a “people and process” extension of your legal operations team. In other words, we provide a dedicated staff of human, US-based legal ops professionals and attorneys to help you develop and refine your outside counsel billing guidelines, and to take on the task of reviewing bills and enforcing compliance with those guidelines. We handle every phase of the process – bill review, identifying and clearing flagged charges, and obtaining reductions directly from the law firms. This means there’s no new software to purchase, download, customize, or train employees to use – that all happens on our end, internally. LBR is here to reduce complexity for the client, not to provide any new administrative or technological burdens. We’re a full-service solution for effortlessly outsourcing your entire outside counsel bill review process, start to finish. When we’re done with our review, we’ll simply notify you or your accounting department of the final bill amount to pay.

  • Legal e-billing software can give you valuable insights into your legal spending categories and your budgeting. But, according to a recent survey of in-house counsel, 89% of legal e-billing software users find it “not effective” or only “somewhat effective” in reducing their monthly spending on outside counsel. And they still pay a license fee for the software and experience significant “soft costs” — especially the drain on employees’ time spent analyzing the output of the software and individually negotiating bill reductions with each outside law firm. LBR's analysts are experienced attorneys -- not computer programs. We know what to look for, how to interpret time entries in the context of each legal invoice and the representation as a whole, and how to communicate our findings to the law firm tactfully and persuasively to form our analysis and then we discuss our findings with the attorneys -- no software does that.

  • Not at all. In fact, our goal is to make your life easier and your process more efficient. We routinely customize our workflow in order to adapt to our clients' specific needs. We first understand your current process and pain points, then we discuss ways in which LBR's service can help improve efficiency and overcome any challenges your department may be experiencing.

Questions from Financial Teams:

  • LBR reduces your legal bills to equal the value you actually received. Not every invoice requires adjustment. But our experience demonstrates that, as a whole, there are significant savings opportunities across all of your legal matters, even if they are all handled by a single law firm. Keep in mind that, unlike regular sales revenue, cost savings are 100% profit. And LBR's risk-free fee structure ensures that you profit from the savings we achieve for you.

  • LBR's fee is a small percentage of the total dollar amount we review. We back up our service with a performance guarantee, ensuring that you will never pay more than the law firms' original, unadjusted charges – and you’ll usually pay much less. LBR's service is truly risk-free and adds zero net cost.

  • They could try, but it wouldn't work. That's because LBR reconstructs the invoice from the ground up, as it should have been. We don't deduct amounts from the top down. No matter how much "fluff" is added to the top -- whether the bill is 101% or 300% of the true value -- LBR will identify and correct the overcharges. In reality, firms usually charge less once they know there’s a “cop on the beat,” consistently enforcing compliance with billing guidelines and standards.

Questions from Accounting Teams:

  • LBR collects the cost-center data from your legal team as an early step in the process. After the adjustments for each law firm are completed, LBR sends your accounting team a Payment Release Statement that details the amounts to be paid on each invoice, along with the correct cost-center code for each payment.

  • When LBR sends adjustment statements to a law firm, we send them on a document formatted as a "Credit Memo from Law Firm to Client" and obtain the attorney's digital signature on the Credit Memo. The Credit Memo is attached to the Payment Release Statement we send to the client to advise the client to initiate payment to the law firm. Thus, the client has a signed document from the law firm confirming that the original invoice amount has been adjusted and the client is not short-paying the invoice.

  • Most LBR clients record our fee as an expense under the general legal account. Some clients will prorate our fee across the cost centers assigned to the invoices we reviewed in that month's statement. Just tell us which you prefer and we will give you the amounts and the cost-center codes for our fee.

Questions from Procurement:

  • We work directly with your existing outside law firm to ensure your stakeholders in legal keep their partnerships and maintain their assets. In fact, since we work with most of the Am Law 200 law firms, we may already have an operational relationship. We work to prove that LBR's participation benefits the law firm. We show the law firms that their willingness to correct unreasonable or incorrect charges allows LBR to confirm to all of the client's stakeholders that the law firm delivered full and fair value. Consistent confirmation of value from a law firm will likely earn that firm a client for many years to come.

  • We focus on attorneys’ hours, not their rates. Many attorneys must meet annual billable hours quotas, which gives them an incentive to record more hours per client. So we look at the amount of hours it takes to complete a task, the number of tasks bundled together in a single block of hours, the number of attorneys billing hours for the same task, and numerous other metrics -- all to analyze the value that the attorneys have delivered to you, the client.

  • LBR is a “people and process” extension of your legal operations team. In other words, we provide a dedicated staff of human, US-based Attorneys to help you develop and refine your outside counsel billing guidelines, and to take on the task of reviewing bills and enforcing compliance with those guidelines. Legal e-billing software can give you valuable insights into your legal spending categories and your budgeting. But, according to a recent survey of in-house counsel, 89% of legal e-billing software users find it “not effective” or only “somewhat effective” in reducing their monthly spending on outside counsel.

  • Moving to LBR requires no internal resources in order to realize savings. And, in fact, significantly reduces internal administrative burden. LBR handles the bill review, appeal/adjustment, and approval process, and then sends client payment release statements with the correct cost-center codes in "ready-to-enter" format. No more chasing down legal team members to determine the correct cost allocation. If the amount billed exceeds the value delivered, LBR cooperatively works with the lawyers to adjust their bills to the correct amount.

  • There is no fee to get started. Our fee is a percentage of the total dollar amount of the bills we review, but since there is a Performance Guarantee, your adjusted bill plus our fee will never exceed your original bill amount – and will usually pay much less.

  • You can actively monitor spend reductions with active LBR client dashboards and dynamic reporting. This not only provides you transparent access to cost reduction details, but will enable you to govern and control the data to enforce budgets, minimize continuous billing errors and drive compliance within your law firms and organization .

Questions from Law Firms:

  • LBR strives to adjust legal bills to equal the true value the client received. Isn't that your law firm's goal too? We do not demand blanket discounts or lower rates. We identify specific charges on the invoices that appear to require an adjustment and we explain in detail our reasons for that adjustment. We then invite attorneys to discuss with us any facts that might compel us to reconsider a particular adjustment. We are reasonable and understand that sometimes a time entry fails to capture the value delivered or the complexity of the work. On top of being respectful, reasonable, and responsive toward law firms, LBR is in a position to independently confirm that the law firm has delivered appropriate value to its client. Remember, the client's in-house attorneys are not the only stakeholders that must be convinced of a lawyer's value. Frequently, leaders in other departments will suspect that outside law firms are overcharging. When a lawyer refuses to acknowledge a billing error, clients become convinced that the law firm is intentionally overcharging. And, as one General Counsel put it: “Outside counsel who is not willing to discuss a reduction in bills is a counsel, absent some compelling reason, which should be an easy candidate for elimination in [the] future. There is a lot of talent out there.” Conversely, when a law firm shows a desire to correct unreasonable or incorrect charges, LBR can then confirm to all of the client's stakeholders that they delivered full and fair value, making them more likely to earn the client's business for many years to come.

  • Very little. Your firm should continue to send the client's bills in the same way you always have. At the time you send the client your bill(s), please email LBR the bill(s) in both pdf and spreadsheet formats. If our analysis results in no adjustments, LBR will approve the bill(s) for the client to pay. If adjustments are needed, LBR will send a report to the law firm identifying any adjustments that appear necessary. Upon reaching agreement on the correct payment amount, the law firm executes a credit memo, which LBR attaches to the payment release we send the client.

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