5 Reasons Legal Department Operations Is Taking a Second Look at E-Billing

Legal e-billing has been around since the mid-1990s when it was introduced as message-based store and forward systems based on EDI technologies developed during WWII. Many legal departments implemented these burgeoning e-billing systems as enterprise-scale software deployments at great cost.

Unfortunately, not much has changed since then, and many legal departments find themselves still using the system they originally installed.

But now, savvy legal department operations leaders are taking into consideration the huge advances in technology to increase visibility and efficiency while reducing risk for their department.

The top five reasons to re-evaluate e-billing software for the modern era are:

1. Software As A Service (SaaS) has removed the barrier to replacing or augmenting software.
   No longer are legal departments constrained by IT resources the months required to implement and configure a new system. SaaS software makes it easy to get started with a new system in days rather than months.
2. The need for a shared workspace has become critical as working with outside counsel has exploded.
   It’s common for a legal department to be working with multiple (even numerous) law firms for a variety of tasks. Trying to keep track of all the firms – much less stay on the same page for open matters, timekeeper rates, budgets, and invoices – is difficult in legacy e-billing systems.
3. Processes need to be flexible – without working around the system.
   Processes change from instance to instance, from day to day. Different people need to get involved depending on changing criteria. Companies need the ability to include additional people ad hoc to a process without ‘faking’ it. This is important both for getting work done and for creating audit trails.
4. Poor timekeeper management reduces cost benefits.
   Tracking all authorized timekeepers and their rates is complicated in legacy e-billing systems. Timekeeper rates are less static than in the past as well, when this data is out-of-date, your department may be spending more than it realizes.
5. Management expects analytics around every facet of outside counsel work.
   Many e-billing systems fall down when it comes to reporting. The need to report on metrics that matter specifically to your department, and quickly track your KPI’s with dashboards, has only recently been tacked on to legacy e-billing systems. You shouldn’t need to export everything to Excel before you can analyze it.

Today, Onit announced the launch of BillingPoint, its suite of Legal E-billing and Matter Management Apps, at LegalTech New York 2014. This new suite of Apps enables corporate law departments and laws firms to share all the types of sensitive information (i.e., matter types, practice areas, timekeeper rates, expenses, invoices, budgets, or any document essential to their financial relationship) in a truly collaborative workspace.

Now law firms and law departments can now take advantage of the first real innovation in legal e-billing in more than two decades. BillingPoint was designed from the ground-up by experts in legal e-billing — the founders of Datacert — Eric M. Elfman and Eric Smith. Onit has developed the first truly innovative e-billing software that takes advantage of all the advances made in technology over the last 20 years.

Come learn more now.

Image courtesy of Sujin Jetkasettakorn / FreeDigitalPhotos.net