When considering legal spend management vendors, first ask yourself: What is the highest priority I’m trying to achieve?
Saving money on outside counsel
Reporting tools and analytics to compare law firms’ personnel, rates, and expenses
Identifying and correcting overcharges and inefficiencies (like excessive time, unnecessary work, and inadequate detail in time entry narratives)
Monitoring and enforcing compliance with outside counsel guidelines
Having a standardized format of legal bills at your fingertips
Automatically flagging charges with potential rule violations and budgetary limits
Saving time by removing the burden of reviewing and approving bills
Once you’ve answered the question above, know this:
LegalBillReview.com can either enhance your software or completely stand alone independently of any internal software. It all depends on your priorities.
If you already have software, or if you are looking for the historical billing analytics in addition to actual cost savings, LegalBillReview.com and software complement each other quite nicely. LBR can help you “clear the flags” generated by the software and analyze time entries for additional excessive charges not identified by software. Then, LBR presents its analysis directly to your law firms to negotiate bill reduction. In other words, LBR fills in the “realized cost savings” gap that software otherwise leaves up to you. And since LBR is a people and process extension of your legal ops team, we customize our bill review workflow to meet your specific needs. Below is an example of a workflow to help illustrate how LBR could integrate with your team's process.
LIMITATIONS OF SOFTWARE AS A STAND-ALONE TOOL
It is important to note that software provides you with tools to help you make business decisions. But those tools do not yield automatic benefits; you must have the internal bandwidth, know-how, time, and attention to use those tools and consistently apply the data in order to drive any new efficiencies.
Software uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to flag potential billing errors based on a set of objective rules. As a result, you need to review and manually “clear the flags,” which means making an independent determination of whether each rule violation flagged by the software is legitimate or if it is a false positive. Then, you will need to develop an internal process to use that data to communicate with each law firm each month to request changes or reductions.
Software provides you with the ability to analyze historical billing data by firm, matter, attorney and hourly rate. You can then use that information to make business decisions and plan future adjustments to manage spend more efficiently, but there is no guarantee that this will result in long-term savings.
Software can perform valuable functions like alerting you when a matter has exceeded its predetermined threshold. You then need to discuss with each law firm and determine a remedy. This can also present a downside in that each firm may be inflating costs to ensure they bill up to the authorized limit.
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.
In short, software can provide a litany of benefits, but it’s only as valuable as your team’s ability to learn it, use all of its features, and stick to it month in and month out.
A SERVICE, NOT A TOOL
LegalBillReview.com, on the other hand, is a customizable, full-scope service, rather than a tool. Our process handles both the bill analysis and the negotiation of direct bill reductions with your law firms, providing immediate and realized cost savings each month.
LegalBillReview.com uses US-based attorneys to analyze every charge, on every legal bill, to make sure each time entry adds fair value. We then communicate our findings with your law firms to negotiate any bill adjustments as appropriate. Once approved, LBR authorizes payment of a reduced bill amount and you realize the savings. LBR is a turn-key service which steps in and relieves your staff of the burden of handling one key aspect of your legal operations: reviewing and approving outside counsel bills. In addition to saving time, this process delivers realized savings each month. Further, the zero-risk billing model ensures that your adjusted bill amount plus our fee will never exceed your original bill amount.
In other words, LBR doesn’t simply give you the tools; LBR applies the tools to directly achieve the desired result.
