Tag: BusyLamp

A lot has happened in the world of legal electronic invoicing (or legal e-billing) over the last two decades. The pioneers of the e-billing market were vendors working on behalf of in-house counsel; in the late 1990s, those using legal e-billing software in Europe were predominantly US head-quartered investment banks and insurance companies. This migrated over to Europe soon after, albeit driven by US companies.

In Part 1 of this story, we explore the history of legal e-billing in more detail, highlighting early drivers and barriers to adoption.

EARLY DRIVERS OF LEGAL E-BILLING IN THE USA

The early drivers of the e-billing market remain relevant today. Different companies and jurisdictions are simply at various stages of their e-billing maturity; the early adopters are driving the industry’s developments as they seek even more value from their law firm relationships. Those at the start of their journey will find that these early drivers resonate with them currently. In the early days of e-billing software in the US, in-house legal teams had begun to formally review their legal bills and had laid down billing guidelines and rules for their law firms.

MOST COMMON BILLING ISSUES DURING INVOICE REVIEW:

• Failure to comply with client billing rules/guidelines
• Exceeding estimate or budget without authorization
• Duplicate time charges and the billing of disallowed expenses
• Insufficient delegation of work, e.g., tasks performed by over-qualified fee earners and excessive supervision.
• Poor billing procedures, e.g., excessive bundling of tasks
• Vague invoice narrative, e.g., “document review”

The highly manual process of invoice review transposed into standards and software that required law firms to deliver billing information to their clients in electronic format using a third-party system. This gave the in-house lawyer the tools to analyze billing information and take appropriate action – usually related to saving external costs.

From some early case studies in the United States, this seemed possible. For example, Suzanne Hawkins, former senior counsel of General Electric (GE), said that e-billing saved the company over $1m in legal spend in its first year of use and that any in-house legal department should be able to save more than 15% of its costs by picking up incorrectly charged disbursements and unnecessary time entries. Likewise, Kevin Harrang, the deputy general counsel at Microsoft, said that e-billing helped Microsoft reduce legal costs by $2m annually. PLC’s General Counsel survey in 2007 showed that 10 out of 15 corporate legal departments claimed to have recovered their investment in e-billing within the first 12 months of operation. To this day, e-billing software remains one of the easier investments to prove ROI on due to its ability to save on the bottom line.

While there is no doubt that the initial motivator for e-billing and a formal bill review process was legal spend management, what is clear from the US experience is that the improved quality of data (and, with it, the ability to analyze legal spend across law firms) allowed a much more informed discussion to take place with outside counsel. The result improved spend management, vendor management in general, and value for money.

Against this backdrop, the industry began to see requests for e-billing sent to European law firms. While spend management was a minor driver – law in Europe was not perceived so much of a commodity as in the US – many European corporate legal departments saw e-billing software as an opportunity to refine their legal panels and build a more strategic relationship with their external advisors.

THE INTERNATIONALIZATION OF LEGAL E-BILLING

Legal e-billing software was well established in the US since the late 1990s, but it didn’t begin to impact the UK legal market until about 2003.

In the early 2000s, for many UK law firms, a request from a client to “do” e-billing meant sending a PDF copy of a paper invoice as an email attachment. Those of us in law firms engaged in the billing systems and processes had a big learning curve to undertake before we could even begin to address the actual systems and organizational changes that would be needed. Those with global offices could draw on their colleagues’ experience “across the pond” for some advice and guidance on what this new business process was all about.

The reality was that only a few law firms in the UK had time and billing systems that could support e-billing, and it required a lot of manual work to produce a file acceptable to the e-billing vendor systems. The LEDES 1998B file format was heavily used in the US but did not support the features required for successful e-billing in Europe. For example, there was no support for VAT accounting, multi-currency billing, or cross-jurisdictional transactions.

A group of law firms and corporate counsel – mainly based in the UK – decided to cooperate, and they designed and proposed a modified LEDES format to address these shortcomings. This LITIG (Legal IT Innovators Group) organization was the leader in developing what became the now widely adopted LEDES 1998Bi (international) standard.

LIFE AFTER LEDES 1998BI – ADDITIONAL BARRIERS TO LEGAL E-BILLING

Even after the modified LEDES format addressed international billing requirements and made the work faster and less manual for law firms, there was considerable European skepticism surrounding e-billing.

Even if a corporate legal team decided they wanted to obtain the benefits of legal spend management software and had achieved executive buy-in, budget, and resources to implement, they could still experience significant barriers. Even the most dedicated teams faced mammoth hurdles that prevented full e-billing implementation, resulting in numerous failed e-billing projects in Europe.

In 2007, Caroline Poynton, editor of FD Legal magazine, made this somewhat downbeat comment: “There is much negativity around e-billing systems in the UK; some of it borne out by US experiences, the rest stemming from logistical confusion as to how this can develop smoothly in the UK market without costing huge amounts of time and money. But the fact is that e-billing is unlikely to go away because of the huge potential benefits, particularly for large corporates. In the long-term, firms are going to have to embrace the change and be prepared to make the necessary investment in time and resources to make e-billing work if they want to retain such clients and progress.”

One such logistical confusion Poynton was referencing was how to automate the highly regulated nature of the European legal environment, mainly the rules that apply in the generation of legal bills. This level of regulation of legal invoices does not exist in the US.

One of the main obstacles to full e-billing in the UK was the fact that under the then-existing legislation (Solicitors Act 1974 Section 69), for a law firm to be able to sue a client for non-payment of fees, any bill sent to the client had to be “delivered under the cover of a letter signed by a partner in order for the law firm to be able to sue for costs.” In other words, so that law firms could remain covered in the event of non-paying clients, this Dickensian-sounding rule – redolent of quill pens and crusty lawyer’s offices – was a significant barrier to full legal e-billing. This all changed in March 2008 when Commencement Order No.1 came in place as part of the Legal Services Act, which removed the requirement for a legal bill to be sent in this way and cleared the way for real e-billing to happen in England and Wales.

It didn’t stop there, though, as further statutory/regulatory concerns, such as tax rules, needed consideration. Again, using the UK as an example, many firms produced a legal “bill” and a separate tax invoice. If the “e-bill” were to replicate both documents, these statutory and regulatory issues would have to be satisfied. Firms had to ensure that their e-bills and other information sent to clients and e-billing systems complied with, among others, the requirements of the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA), HM Revenue & Customs, Data Protection laws, the Business Names Act and EU billing regulations. Firms also had to ensure that the e-billing intermediary system handled these issues correctly and that the e-bill, as seen by the client, complied with all the appropriate regulations. With most e-billing vendors of the time being US-centric, there were many hurdles to overcome.

As if regulatory and legislative problems weren’t enough, organizations themselves had issues to resolve internally. Such issues prevented widespread adoption in the USA too:

• Financial barriers to e-billing were common, particularly in smaller corporates and firms. An e-billing implementation was time, resource, and cost-heavy, and this cost continued beyond implementation. Costs of e-billing included setup, licenses, and the resources required to run e-billing from an IT and administrative perspective. Law firms may face billing department reshuffling, overhauling processes (uploading bills and managing queries and rejections), and even investment in other systems to support e-billing, such as practice management systems that could produce matter and timekeeper lists and time recording.
• IT resources were a luxury not given to most legal departments. The e-billing implementation would join a queue for corporate IT resources and the rest of the business. In-house legal teams frequently found their project pushed back behind more pressing business technology projects. Even after implementation, on-premises solutions require ongoing IT support in maintenance, integrations, troubleshooting, and upgrades to new versions.
• Change management continues to be a barrier even today but was more widespread when e-billing was new. E-billing fundamentally changed how firms billed clients, and the impact on teams, infrastructure, and processes was huge. As matters would be visible to the corporate client and billing guidelines put in place, it required law firms to be completely accurate with their timekeeping and narratives, right down to the task and activity codes. This data entry level was alien, a drain to learn, and in many cases, extremely manual. On the in-house side, ensuring teams didn’t “bypass” the system to continue managing their matters in the old, manual way was also a significant challenge, and legal leaders could not be confident 100% of the spend was passing through the system accurately.

With many of these vast logistical obstacles overcome by legislation changes and software developments, the last decade has seen more legal departments mandate their law firms to use e-billing so they can better manage to spend, budget accurately, and make strategic matter resourcing decisions. Part 2 explores the changes that have led to widespread adoption of e-billing software and identifies where the industry is headed.

Digitalization creates new business models. Uber provides mobility services without owning cars, thus displacing classical taxis. Airbnb offers private apartments for rent and thus creates competition for long-established hotel chains. All industry leaders must ask themselves if their traditional value propositions are still intact or if innovative players can use disruptive and networked technologies to push them out of the market.

This is also true for the legal industry, which, for decades, appeared to be immune to substantial changes caused by technology. While the core of legal services, i.e., the assessment of facts concerning the law, in most practice areas and cases, is still too complex to be executed by machines, this assessment of facts remains supported and surrounded by many operational activities such as document analysis, contracting and project management for which clients are no longer willing to pay high hourly lawyer rates.

The deconstruction of legal work has led to the standardization of high-volume and low-value tasks and the emergence of legal process outsourcers (LPO). In essence, corporate legal services today are in a situation like the one corporate information technology, financial, and human resource services were in some 30 years ago: Chief financial officers (CFO) now also expect in-house legal departments and law firms to use technology to deliver legal services better, faster, and at lower costs.

But legal departments often don’t know where to start with legal digital transformation. Often, they ask themselves questions such as: What differentiates legal technology projects from classic IT projects? Are legal departments per se a special/different audience? Do legal departments have the necessary funding? Can legal departments work/carry out the project in isolation?

This blog offers an overview of the basic steps to take in your legal technology journey.

STEPS FOR LEGAL TECHNOLOGY SUCCESS

1. Identify pain points. Don’t get tricked by all the exciting legal technology on the market. It’s critical to detail the pain points first so you can work out what the solution is. Example pain points are a high volume of trivial (legal) work, insufficient reporting capabilities, cumbersome admin tasks, and increased external legal spend.
2. Plan the budget. Work out the potential of the legal digital transformation project and create a business case. Costs at this stage will be rough, but you can make estimates and assumptions about benefits to calculate the potential ROI. (If high legal spend is a pain point, this guide to “Building a Business Case for Legal Spend Management” will help.)
3. Initiate the digital legal project. Develop a project and resource plan and assign team members and roles.
4. Consider the solutions. Define your requirements and evaluate build vs. buy (vs. do nothing) options. At this stage (when you have clear requirements), you should contact legal technology vendors. Ensure you include potential future users at some point during the solution review. This ensures the users have demoed the product you will consider their opinions. This will help with the adoption of legal technology after implementation.
5. Go live! Procure, install, and test the solution. Consider onboarding users in stages. Embrace failures and adjust accordingly for a successful full implementation.

These five steps are just five essential stages and only scratch the surface of how to approach a legal digital transformation project. For more detail on tackling each of the steps above and more steps, read our three-part series on seamless legal tech implementation or download the Right Legal Spend Management Solution Guide.

Despite legal operations being a relatively established function (only 2% of organizations are not focusing on it), 44% of organizations assign legal ops responsibilities to a corporate lawyer rather than a dedicated person. However, the broader trend is toward creating dedicated legal operations positions and building teams. So how do you prepare and train your existing team for legal operations success?

WHAT IS LEGAL OPERATIONS?

“Legal operations” has been around longer than you might realize; for example, the Corporate Legal Operations Institute (CLOC) formed in 2010. Many legal operations functions have been around for years, just without the name attached. The focus is usually on driving efficiencies, controlling spend, monitoring external counsel fees, and deriving KPIs.

Generally, legal operations encompasses all the functions of the legal department that are not the law itself. CLOC breaks these areas into 12 competencies at three maturity levels; you can find this resource on their website. The typical skills and responsibilities of legal operations are to:

• Define and drive initiatives to improve efficiency and process workflows.
• Manage outside counsel guidelines, legal spend (visibility, control, and reduction), and department budget.
• Optimize law firm performance for maximum value for money.
• Implement, measure, and analyze metrics that inform decision-making, turning them into actions that deliver improvements.
• Implement technology to achieve departmental and business goals.
• Work cross-functionally to demonstrate the legal department’s value within the organization.
• Understand and monitor the risks, risk appetite, and risk profile of the legal department within the organization’s framework.

So why the recent focus on legal operations? As businesses grow in scope and complexity, the volume and breadth of legal expertise required increases, and costs also go up. General Counsel are under more pressure than ever to justify their legal costs, improve the efficiency of their department, and collaborate with the broader business.

Legal operations will bring the legal department closer to the business and thus to the other specialist departments, resulting in Legal playing a different, more critical role in the company. With this demand to make the legal department act more “like a business” comes a need for cost control and process improvement. The problem with this for a traditional legal team is two-fold. First, the legal department’s priority will always be to advise on legal matters. Operations will take a back seat during busy periods or with an insufficiently staffed team. Second, achieving operational and business goals requires skills that are not necessarily part of a lawyer’s standard repertoire.

DEVELOPING LEGAL OPERATIONS SKILLS IN THE CORPORATE LEGAL TEAM

Whether your legal department has a dedicated legal operations resource, a whole team, or legal counsel doing legal operations as part of their “day job,” now is a vital time to future-proof your entire legal team and get them thinking beyond the practice of law. In-house lawyers have many skills that will enable them to succeed in legal operations, including law firm management, company knowledge, and a deep understanding of the legal department’s day-to-day operations and challenges. However, more is needed, and lawyers’ skills gaps tend to be in technology and software, change management, budgeting, and analytics.

Finding people with all these skills will be rare; whether your legal operations head should be a lawyer or non-lawyer is a matter for debate, but most agree that the end goal should be a diverse team of lawyers, non-lawyers, and specialist experts supported by the whole team having at least a basic knowledge of all the functions of legal operations.

Some of the ways to build these additional skills into your corporate legal team include:

JOB SHARING/SHADOWING

Consider placing lawyers with finance, sales, marketing, operations, product management, and data analysis – any area of the business that will broaden their skillset in a way that addresses one of the functions of legal operations. The challenge will be finding colleagues from these other departments qualified to do a genuine “job swap” into Legal. Shadowing is a desirable alternative in these scenarios. Also, try to upskill the non-lawyers in the legal operations team. Allowing them to shadow lawyers will enable them to better understand the different roles, responsibilities, and challenges facing the lawyers and hopefully build stronger working relationships within the function.

LEADING PROJECTS

It’s more than likely that your team members will have already been involved in large projects such as a merger or acquisition, but only from the legal perspective. If they lead the whole project, they will get exposed to other areas of the business and their impact on the overall recommendation and outcome. It doesn’t even have to be such a big project. An internal re-brand, product launch, or HR initiative will all work. Involvement in a software roll-out would be beneficial. Managing projects that involve stakeholders from multiple departments to deadlines and budget is a key part of legal operations, so leading any cross-functional project will build these skills.

TRAINING COURSES, CONFERENCES, NEWSLETTERS

The most obvious way to build the skills you need in your team is through training courses, but conferences can also impart knowledge and inspiration. Training doesn’t have to be an external cost as many of the skills will exist in the company already, and colleagues from other departments can help train. For example, lawyers should gain insights into data analysis, cloud, cyber security, AI, and commercials. Likewise, the business background professionals about the practice of law and the legal market so that they can provide the most value.

IMPLEMENT AND USE TECHNOLOGY

In today’s digitalized world, goals such as transparency, efficiency gains, and data analysis come through the combination of skilled personnel and software. The legal operations discipline is no exception to this; just look at the world’s leading legal operations teams. Each one relies on tailor-made legal operations tools in their daily work.

For this reason, empower your team to think about what slows them down at work daily and investigate if technology could solve these challenges. Encourage them to research and recommend software tools to help them and the wider team and lead the roll-out project.

REGULAR PRESENTATIONS AND OPEN Q&A ABOUT COMPANY REVENUE, PROFITS AND GOALS

If your company does regular “town halls” where they present financial updates and mission statements, encourage your team to attend these or start doing them just for your Legal team if they don’t exist on a company level. Get your team interested and educated in the organization’s financial health and how legal can contribute. A modern legal team must be fluent in financial terminology and confident with budgeting and reporting.

Request a demo of BusyLamp eBilling.Space today.

E-billing and its parent discipline of legal spend management came from the desire to serve in-house teams. The process requires law firms to submit invoices in a consistent LEDES format, enabling automated invoice review by the corporate legal departments and consistent data for reporting. This saves the legal department time and money by improving productivity, reducing erroneous bills, and enabling rate comparisons and data-driven decision-making.

Learn more: What is Legal E-billing?

E-billing is now well understood and not only in large firms. Over 70% of US mid-sized firms’ revenue is e-billed, and 25% in the UK. Many firms now have dedicated e-billing teams. Despite this, some firms remain resistant, mainly smaller firms processing smaller revenue amounts or unfamiliar with e-billing and LEDES, as they will have a steeper learning curve and initial cost and resource impacts. These firms can be reluctant to use a tool they perceive comes forced on them, especially in the short term; it will also mean their revenue decreases if the software spots and rejects invoices that do not meet the client’s billing guidelines.

BENEFITS OF E-BILLING FOR LAW FIRMS

The lessons will come from larger law firms, some of whom have been e-billing their clients since the 90s. While some of these firms will have also initially met e-billing with hesitation, they accept it is a cost of doing business with in-house clients, have fully functioning billing teams, and are now reaping the benefits and realizing that it can be a strategic revenue driver for the firm.

CORPORATE LEGAL DEPARTMENTS DEMAND TRANSPARENT RELATIONSHIPS

The knee-jerk reaction to e-billing is that corporate clients want to crack down on billing errors and get the cheapest rates. Instead, legal departments are looking for transparency and consistency. They want to be sure they are paying the appropriate cost, not necessarily the lowest cost. For example, this means not paying a partner for work a junior could do. Law firms unwilling to be open about line entry information may get thought of as hiding things. With so many law firms happily sharing this information, those who refuse to may need more work. With corporate legal teams looking for transparent relationships, refusal is a big risk.

HAPPIER CLIENTS LEAD TO HIGHER REVENUE

Yes, automated billing guidelines will likely result in the exposure of erroneous billing practices by the firm and a reduction in short-term revenue as these invoices are corrected. The gain for the firm is longer-term. The purpose of e-billing is not to “name-and-shame” and then fire non-compliant law firms. Billing guidelines can be complicated, and we’ve yet to find a law firm that doesn’t bill some errors. Corporate legal departments understand that this is a combination of human error and learning curves, which comes as part of the implementation process.

The benefit comes when the billing guidelines get created, reviewed, and amended so they are win/win for the client and firm. Using guidelines means that any conversations about disputed charges are less aggressive. Data can set future fees and expectations. The relationship becomes more fact-based and strategic. Happy clients that trust their firms will stick around and direct more work their way – we are seeing this trend already with many in-house teams reducing their panels to focus on fewer, higher-value relationships instead.

LAW FIRM INVOICES WILL GET PAID FASTER

Automated invoice review removes the need for manual checking of every bill. Those that meet the guidelines are approved automatically and can get paid faster. Many of our in-house customers commit to shorter payment cycles for electronic bills. This commitment can be a gesture to their firms that they view e-billing as a process that should be win/win. Some tools, like BusyLamp, allow law firms to submit “Work in Progress” or draft invoices for review or approval before submitting the invoice. In these instances, bills get paid even faster.

DATA-DRIVEN RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN IN-HOUSE TEAMS AND FIRMS

Much of the conversation around legal spend management data and its benefits go towards the corporate legal department and the savings they can make using data analysis to inform decision-making. Law firms also benefit from this data; both parties can use spend data in negotiations, detailed matter information makes for more thorough reviews, and firms can offer different charging models, alternative fee agreements and fixed fees based on facts. With confidence, the pricing models are commercially viable. This also comes back to corporate legal departments wanting transparency; they’ll be confident and happy that the agreed charging models are fair. Taking it a step further, the law firm can set universal rates and prepare more accurate and competitive estimates by analyzing spend data from multiple corporate clients.

COMPREHENSION OF E-BILLING IS A VALUE-ADD

Law firms should see e-billing as a marketing tool and something to offer to new and existing clients. Many law firms are experienced in e-billing and can advise clients on e-billing issues, best practices, and tailoring data to meet the in-house team’s needs. Prospective clients in today’s business environment will expect and require law firms to know about e-billing and demonstrate that they can offer this service when making new business pitches. In this age of “new law,” a law firm that can provide more than just legal advice appeals to in-house teams. A lack of e-billing understanding may hurt client acquisition efforts.

IMPROVE LAW FIRM PROCESS EFFICIENCY

While the initial onboarding process may have its hurdles and learning curves, e-billing will help the law firm identify and rectify internal billing and processing inefficiencies, allowing for more time on higher-value work.

REDUCING POSSIBLE NEGATIVE IMPACTS OF E-BILLING

Despite these benefits, getting up and running with e-billing can be costly, time-consuming and sometimes frustrating for the law firm. Here are some ways the corporate legal department and e-billing vendor can help reduce and eliminate negative experiences and impacts.

• Some legal spend management solutions have pricing models that charge the law firm up to 100% of the subscription cost with no cost to the in-house team. Since the corporate legal department (rightly, so it fits their needs) gets to choose which e-billing tool to use, we think it’s unfair to charge the firm. We also believe that if the in-house team is paying for the tool, they are more motivated to use it to its full potential, which demands collaboration with the firm and maximizing the value of data that is input, so firms aren’t wasting effort entering unnecessary data. BusyLamp doesn’t charge law firms; ultimately, it’s up to the corporate legal team which solution and pay model they select.
• Training lawyers to use new software can be a significant, time-consuming challenge for law firms. One way around this is to set up dedicated e-billing teams – all the larger firms have these. If fee-earners are to use the tool, then thorough training and support from the legal spend management vendor are essential at onboarding and beyond. Vendors may charge different amounts for different levels of training. While “online help” is usually included, higher-value training such as face-to-face can carry an additional fee. As the in-house team would foot this bill, the corporate team needs to understand the value and importance of investing in training. However, no amount of training can rectify the frustrations that accompany a poorly designed software interface. The software buyers on the in-house side should review the user experience (UX) and interface (UI) for the law firm and the corporate side, as the law firm experience can be below par with some solutions. The BusyLamp interface is the same for law firms and corporate clients to ensure both sides have an equal experience.
• Corporate legal teams can reduce the number of rejected invoices (and therefore law firm frustrations) by including the law firms when agreeing on billing guidelines. Even if they do not, they should make them readily available and ensure the law firm understands them. Suppose an in-house team/law firm is currently unfamiliar with billing guidelines. In that case, we recommend starting with a few vital ones, as a large list from the off is more likely to cause confusion and inaccuracy. Law firms should also note unexpected rejections and errors, and the in-house team should be prepared and open to accepting and discussing this feedback.
• Data security is an important issue, and law firms can be understandably reluctant to start uploading their information to a system they have yet to review and select themselves. The corporate legal department should ensure they choose a vendor with comprehensive information and data security policies (BusyLamp holds ISO/IEC 27001), including GDPR.

Find out more about data security considerations in our in-house legal tech data security checklist.

Data, in its raw form, can be a source of true facts; the interpretation and presentation of data allow people to put their agenda across.

Over the years, legal teams will have built up a significant amount of data (through case management systems, document management systems, e-billing solutions, risk registers, law firm reports, emails, legal advice, etc.), which is an extremely valuable but often underrated asset. Not only can legal data support strategic planning and trend analysis, but it is also an invaluable tool for:

• Managing external law firms.
• Managing internal resources.
• Understanding and supporting your business.
• Managing legal risk.
• Managing legal department finances.

Furthermore, the data forms a key part of the company’s knowledge management, which remains available irrespective of changes in the workforce.

The challenge is what you do with this information, how you keep it clean, and how you pull it together and present it. Some of the critical things to consider are:

TAKEHOLDERS NEEDING THE DATA

You will likely have many stakeholders wanting reports from the legal data, each wanting to use it for a different purpose. These may include:

• General Counsel will want to use the data to set the strategic direction of the legal function.
• Team leaders will probably use volumetric data to show and manage resource demands and promote their teams.
• Team administrators will look to make sure their team data is accurate and up to date.
• Procurement will need to support legal spend within the organization.
• Finance / Tax will be able to ensure (amongst other things) that provisions are adequate, and that VAT is correctly applied/recovered.
• Risk will need to better understand the changes in the risk profile and to support any reporting to regulatory bodies.

PRESENTING LEGAL DATA

Presenting the information clearly and concisely that gets the message across is a challenge, as different stakeholders will often want the same data presented in different formats. Producing a range of reports is both time-consuming and a drain on resources. Online dashboards can make it easier for different stakeholders to slice the data to suit their needs. While each option has its benefits and challenges, you will likely want to work with both reports and dashboards.

Keeping the data clean is essential so that reports and dashboards show accurate and consistent data. Despite best efforts, manual input will inevitably lead to mistakes because of typos or missed fields. A system like Onit’s European legal spend management solution BusyLamp eBilling.space automates invoice review, so data is input consistently. Data validation rules, reporting, and task reminders help legal operations managers maintain data cleanliness. Many Onit clients use data gap reports to highlight and complete missing data. Doing this regularly ensures it is a small, everyday task rather than becoming an unwieldy data clean-up project.

USING THE DATA

Legal department data can help you to:

1. Manage your strategy. This may include areas such as:

• Understanding and prioritizing the organization’s legal demand and spend.
• Changes in the team’s performance by using KPIs.
• What cost savings have been / can be, such as;
  • Outsourcing vs. doing it in-house.
  • Removing non-essential tasks.
• Understanding your legal team’s risk profile and internal controls by using KPIs.

2. Manage your external law firms through:

• Greater transparency of activity and spend, which, in turn, will help future discussions with firms, especially during panel reviews.
• Monitoring law firm performance which will help law firm reviews.
• Ensuring prompt payment of bills which may support faster-paying discounts discussions with firms.

3. Manage internal resources:

• Easily identifying peaks and troughs in work, allowing for better resource planning and allocation (Product design/review, property management, supplier contract renewal, key stages in litigation, regulatory projects, etc.).
• Understanding the impact of previous business initiatives will help prepare the department for future initiatives.

4. Understand and support your business. For example:

• Awareness of change in the volume of a particular type of work will help ensure you:
  • Have the proper legal support available (either in-house or through external firms).
  • Develop training needs for your business contacts and the lawyers.
• Visibility of the contracts that will support risk management, especially if there is a change in the legal or regulatory landscape or an economic downturn.
• Support product development by learning from previous iterations.

5. Manage legal risk

• Change in volumes of a particular type of work or within a business area will help identify emerging risks. These could include:
  • Frequent changes to standard terms and conditions could indicate that your documents are not keeping up with changes in the market.
  • Local changes to standard terms and conditions could indicate a lack of awareness or understanding of the documentation.
• Can help identify new training needs.

6. Manage legal department finances.

• Greater clarity on how much it costs per matter (internal vs. external).
• Avoid paying for duplicate advice.
• Drive costs down with external firms.

There are many business benefits to integrating your systems and making sense of the legal data that resides within them. Work out your goals and which of the above areas aligns with helping you achieve those core goals, then work backward to identify the data points that will help you have the visibility or measurements you need. Finally, you can create the reports and dashboards you and your stakeholders need.

Request a demo of BusyLamp eBilling.Space today and see our RFP functionality for yourself.

How special the last two years have been. With the pandemic and remote working, companies around the globe were suddenly faced with multilayered challenges. Effective time management and avoiding unnecessary administrative tasks have become more important than ever. In the following article, Anastasia Hufen, Legal Counsel at Helaba, a German commercial bank, describes first-hand how the introduction of our Legal Spend Management solution supports her in overcoming these challenges on a daily basis.

I just made my first steps working with Onit’s European legal spend management solution BusyLamp eBilling.Space as a lawyer in a middle-sized German bank, and – happy to confirm – the tool is great! My favorite features that support my personal time management are the hands-on and easy implementation process, compatibility with my existing devices and tools, resiliency in change management, and advantages concerning spend management of in-house affairs. Besides this? The result is a fancy legal spend management tool that helps a dynamic, cost-conscious business area work more efficiently with external legal advisors. But allow me to pinpoint in a bit more detail:

First, the technical side: Being a stand-alone application, the tool has an easy implementation comparable to the apps you are familiar with on your mobile devices; once the configuration process by the provider is completed, it is just up to you to log in and start working. Consequently, this results in a high acceptance by users like me that share the view that digitalization’s job is to make my real life easier (and not vice versa). In my experience, the configuration process at BusyLamp is as simple as you can imagine: You supply the lists of contacts to be on-boarded along with the billing rules you wish to apply, and in turn, BusyLamp delivers your tool. By the way, it is up to you to decide on the level of customization and integration with other tools: It is either a ready-made or fully tailored solution for implementation of your legal e-billing process, starting with the engagement of an external advisor and ending with payment by the accounting department. Any and all processing may be reflected, including any and all necessary limitations and requirements. So the basic challenge here is to ensure you know your processes and what kind of tool you need.

Second, once ready to go live, you’re in the driver’s seat and taking your business relationships to the next level of professionalism and transparency. This is because you’re working directly with your private practice counterpart in the system based on the billing rules and the guidelines defined by you beforehand. My recent experience shows that one outcome of the improved client-law firm relationship is the acute objectivity: As you stay informed about the costs – throughout your process, at any time, and as detailed as you wish – the effect is undeniable collaboration and transparency in terms of contacts, connections, interactions, and costs. Plus, the advantages of organized e-billing records cannot be overrated. Using the tool means that there are no unnecessary negotiations throughout the matter’s lifetime unless you wish to make exceptions in individual cases for whatever reasons. The system gives you fully automated billing processing where your only task is to provide the correct settings and control the potential rule breakers. It provides competition, fairness, and transparency, saving you time.

And, finally – and especially for those who (like me) take fun very seriously – it’s a fancy solution, looks and feels good, and is fun to work with. Therefore, overall: BusyLamp eBilling.Space is my insider tip for your effective time management.

See it for yourself! Request your personal demo today.

Legal Operations teams generally design, plan, and implement their legal team’s strategic initiatives to support the business. They must balance managing risk and regulatory changes with operational efficiencies while keeping costs in check. Access to data in a structured form allows the team to provide valuable and powerful advice, guidance, and support to their legal function. Given the unique position of an in-house legal function, they often hold a wide range of information about the business they support, which gives them an unparalleled view of their organization. While most in-house legal teams will broadly use the data for similar reasons, the rise in legal and regulatory changes impacting financial institutions has increased their demand for meaningful data. Some of the leading legal and regulatory changes include the Senior Manager and Certification Regime (SMCR), “ring-fencing,” Dodd-Frank, European Markets Infrastructure Regulation (EMIR), and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), to name but a few.

The introduction in 2018 of the Senior Manager and Certification Regime (SMCR) by the Financial Conduct Authority has put the additional onus on specific key individuals and material risk-takers within UK financial institutions to evidence their decisions. Maintaining structured data that can be analyzed and measured will help provide evidence for some critical decisions. These decisions might include law firm panel appointments, outsourcing / insourcing business activities, and management of legal risks.

Those Financial institutions with clear visibility of the derivatives and related instruments they have entered will have benefited in understanding any re-papering needed for “ring-fencing.” The data may also enable them to meet the new collateral obligations under EMIR. Understanding the legal spend to support these legal and regulatory changes will allow the in-house function to better prepare and budget for future changes.

Under recent Banking reforms, financial institutions must maintain “living wills” to try and ensure they fail safely. This activity requires the maintenance of critical contracts/documentation in a central location. As many of these will have passed through the legal function at some stage, a well-structured database with crucial contract details will help remove obsolete documents and add new ones.

With the increases in cyber security, the legal function will, over time, be able to identify better which external law firms have handled data for the organization and ensure robust measures to safeguard that the law firms are applying data.

The data can support trend analysis which will help the legal function understand and support significant changes in demands for products and services and any resultant risks. A substantial change in demand may be seasonal (such as the end of a tax year or when certain subsidies get paid), market or social-media-driven (such as mis-selling issues), or economic/geopolitical (such as changes in interest rates, exchange rates, commodity prices as well political uncertainty). Any of these can alter the legal risk profile of the business and change the demand for legal resources. Being aware of pressure points will help the legal function adapt.

Legal departments in financial services face unique regulatory challenges. Technology provides a central source of truth to manage these requirements. The resulting data output ensures legal operations can support the legal function quickly and accurately while predicting risk and change.

Learn more about BusyLamp from Onit, our end-to-end legal spend management solution built for European corporate legal departments. 

Getting your law firms onboarded as efficiently and painlessly as possible is a key factor in the overall success of a legal e-billing project.

Although e-billing vendors now have considerable experience in supporting legal departments through the implementation, there needs to be more emphasis placed on the problems and issues law firms face. While the technical aspects of the e-billing solution may be well documented, it is often the overlooked non-technical issues that cause law firms the most significant problems.

These issues can include: How should the law firm be organized to implement e-billing – should it be a centralized function or not? What additional processes must the firm implement to ensure that billing data is accurate and timely? What additional resources and IT system changes will be needed to meet the requirements of e-billing?

While most law firms can overcome these major issues, either on their own or with some external consultancy, there are detailed aspects that can be unique to your project. When you start onboarding, you can expect to receive a list of questions from your firm that cover these specific areas. These questions include:

• What is the scope of the implementation, i.e., which law firm offices, which of your entities, and what matter types are in scope?
• Will you require UTBMS codes, i.e., which Task/Activity/Expense codes are mandatory?
• What are the recognized timekeeper classifications?
• Which LEDES file formats are accepted, or how else can law firms submit billing data?
• Do you require Work in Progress (WIP) information to be submitted?
• Are there any special billing requirements, and how should fixed fee work be billed?
• How will the firms be instructed on new matters?
• How are charging rates managed and validated?
• What are the payment processes for valid invoices?
• What validation rules apply, e.g., what expenses will you reject, and which timekeeper types cannot get a charge?
• It helps to be proactive and think about these questions from the start of the project.

You must also provide a Billing Guidelines document containing rules and processes for the firms to follow. We recommend a dedicated law firm success resource to help ensure the project addresses these questions and removes frustration for firms.

Onit’s European legal spend management solution BusyLamp eBilling.Space provides this for every project in the form of Bryan King, who has over 15 years of e-billing onboarding experience, initially at Clifford Chance. While indirectly working for the legal department, this person assists all law firms with onboarding and implementation and provides a single liaison point between vendors, firms, and the legal department. Many law firms are familiar with e-billing now. Still, those less experienced firms welcome the opportunity to have the assistance of an individual who understands the issues often faced by the law firm.

These two quotes show how valuable this is for firms; the first is from the e-billing Manager of a large international City firm, and the second is from the Finance Director of a smaller regional UK firm.

“I have been involved with e-billing for around ten years at various major UK law firms. As it evolves, the challenges are increasing. Clients often have dramatically different approaches and requirements. What is undoubtedly critical to the successful implementation of e-billing is an effective onboarding process. I firmly believe that BusyLamp appointing Bryan King as a lead was an excellent business decision. With his law firm insight and expertise, he has been able to play a vital role of considerable value by assisting both the client and BusyLamp with law firm questions and confirming when those firms have raised pertinent questions or made observations of merit. This drives a more effective onboarding process which focusses on key areas of challenge which historically have been overlooked until post-implementation, which typically manifest in a backlog of rejected e-bills.”

“This is the first time that we have seen someone like Bryan working for an e-billing vendor. Usually, the vendor sends us a letter about a client requiring Billing, and we are left to get on with it (…) so useful having someone to answer our questions and who understands our concerns and issues.”

HOW CAN LEGAL DEPARTMENTS HELP THEIR FIRMS WITH E-BILLING?

Every e-billing implementation will benefit from a clear set of rules documenting working practices and expectations around the client billing function. Your e-billing vendor will advise you on what to include. Download this handy guide for some examples. Providing these clear rules will mean your firms will be ready and able to use the solution and provide successful e-billing.

• Go above and beyond ‘help desk’ level support for your firms by appointing someone (or selecting a vendor who provides someone) who understands law firm issues and works collaboratively with them through their onboarding process.
• Work with your vendor to answer a list of questions in anticipation of receiving them from your firms and be prepared to work with the law firm success manager to answer further queries as they arise.
• Make sure you have selected a solution that prioritizes the law firm experience in the interface through training and onboarding and using the latest technology to reduce the administrative burden for outside counsel.

E-billing offers great opportunities for you and your law firms to work collaboratively on a non-legal project with common goals. The aim should be to reduce billing errors, enhance the quality of billing information and improve decision-making processes. Implementing e-billing software is also a chance to work more effectively and efficiently with your outside counsel in a win-win partnership.

Legal spend management technology generates savings for in-house teams in many ways. We wrote a blog on six of these ways. The most obvious is cost savings, whether through a greater ability to ensure firms adhere to billing guidelines, have spend visibility, or use data to make future budgeting decisions. Time savings also come through the automation of laborious tasks like invoice review and reporting, which get calculated into monetary amounts.

Using these savings areas, different eBilling software providers will estimate savings from $46,000 to $800,000 per year for a “typical” legal department. However, to truly know the financial impact, consider the investment cost; this is typically less publicized!

Below are some cost considerations to consider when planning your legal spend management project and selecting a vendor.

PRICE OF LEGAL SPEND MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE

This is usually a fixed subscription fee per annum and may or may not include hosting, training, and maintenance costs, so look out for these in the proposal. The first year may be higher than subsequent years due to initial set-up costs. Subscription fees may come from a few factors: legal spend, number of users, volume of matters, and number of law firms. Consider the best pricing model for you now but also bear in mind your department might grow; how long is your subscription price fixed for, if at all? If you grow, how does the price increase? Also, consider the cost of additional features not included in standard packages.

LEGAL SPEND MANAGEMENT IMPLEMENTATION FEES

Unlike ongoing subscription fees, these are one-off costs payable to the software vendor and/or consultants you may have involved, usually in the first year, but you may have requirements further down the line that add a cost. These fees cover onboarding internal users and law firms, integrations, and customizations such as reports, data migrations and add-ons outside the basic package. Be sure to find out the charges for these.

INTERNAL COSTS

Most modern solutions are now cloud/SaaS based. Security concerns were the main reason for housing software on-premises when e-billing first launched, but cloud security is far more robust these days. If this is a concern, ensure your vendor has the appropriate certifications, like Onit’s European legal spend management solution BusyLamp eBilling.Space, such as ISO/IEC 27001:2013. SaaS solutions carry a much lower internal IT cost than on-premises solutions. However, you may still have to factor in contractor or project team costs.

TRAINING AND SUPPORT COSTS

A user-friendly, familiar, and easy-to-learn legal spend management interface reduces the training required for your in-house teams and law firms, but it will still be necessary. Consider what level of support and training you need at implementation and beyond, as these range from online help only through to fully managed services and the costs vary considerably.

UPGRADE COSTS

Do you need to pay to upgrade to future versions and updates of the software, or is this included? If the upgrade cost is prohibitive, you could fall behind on the latest legal spend management features. Consider the internal costs and impacts of these upgrades, which are lower with SaaS solutions.

FUTURE COSTS

While you don’t have a crystal ball, anticipate potential integrations or features you might need and ask a) if they’re available and b) what these will cost. You want to avoid migrating to a different legal spend management solution if your current one no longer meets your needs or becomes too expensive to do so, so try your best to predict this; ask the vendor about the typical growth pathways of their other clients. A factor that affects most legal departments is cost increases as you add more users, spend and/or firms. Familiarize yourself with the pricing model to avoid surprises.

BusyLamp Legal Spend Management is cost-effective. Even with these expenditure areas, BusyLamp generates a quick return on investment. You can work out your potential savings with our Guide to Building a Business Case for Legal Spend Management or contact us directly and a team member will be in touch to help you calculate your costs and projected ROI.

Part two of a three-part “Guide to Seamless Legal Tech Implementation” Parts one and three are below.

Part 1 – Scoping the Project Before Buying
Part 3 – Change Management Before and After Implementation

The importance of stakeholder engagement is vital, both during technology project definition and implementation. So how can you identify key project stakeholders and get the buy-in required?

As you read in part one, collecting and analyzing stakeholder and end users’ requirements is a crucial enabler of success when designing and implementing a new system. It is possible to outline solution requirements without considering stakeholder needs, but to do so presents a real but avoidable risk of project failure.

Some of these stakeholder groups or individuals may be fully on board and require little management regarding expectations. However, there are likely to be key stakeholders who will have other priorities or may be resistant to the change that a new software tool brings.

When software projects fail to deliver expected benefits because of stakeholder/end-user issues, these projects fall into two categories:

• Those that do not independently verify stakeholder requirements (“one of the users said this, so that’s what we must do”)
• Those that treat project stakeholders and their requirements as a kind of inconvenient truth (“they exist but we don’t really agree with them/want to listen to them”)
• Neither of these positions are desirable or helpful. However, it is possible to mitigate them.

WHAT ARE YOU TRYING TO ACHIEVE?

Effective solution selection requires understanding the needs of all stakeholders and the ultimate users of the application.

As learned in part one, producing a scope document helps eliminate confusion within the project by managing expectations from the start. With the users’ needs captured, you can define the objectives of the software purchase and identify additional project stakeholders.

IDENTIFYING THE PROJECT STAKEHOLDERS

After defining the project objectives, identify the relevant stakeholders. Gather their requirements and learn the solution’s impact on their teams. A successful project requires the buy-in from not only the legal department, but of the entire management level. If you miss the input of some project stakeholders can seriously affect the successful implementation of your software. Stakeholder identification can be time-consuming as it may include parties beyond immediately obvious ones. Who are typical stakeholders? There are immediate system users (for e-billing, this would be accounting and legal/legal operations), but there are also legal service providers and law firms, sales, IT, and procurement users.

A structured and consistent approach can help you identify stakeholders and their roles. Tools and techniques include focused interviews, multi-media communications, surveys, role-playing, and follow-up action workshops. This will ensure stakeholder groups are fully engaged and supported.

USING THE INFORMATION

Once you capture the stakeholder requirements, the next stage is interpreting the results and choosing what to act on. At this stage, achieving balance is vital; keep the stakeholder who shouted the loudest from dominating the requirements. Remember what the legal department is trying to accomplish and select only those items of feedback that will help. Try to prevent the project scope from becoming too broad. Remember that the best solutions are both effective and efficient and that a positive ROI will measure success.

If you have access to an experienced project manager/analyst, they can record and interpret the results of the stakeholder and user sessions and feed the conclusions into the overall project requirements.

ONGOING COMMUNICATIONS

Finally, it is essential to let stakeholders know what you have done with their feedback and why. This is vital to engage them in the project.

You cannot always please all project stakeholders, so use data-based justification for the decisions taken when you can. Stakeholders, particularly the primary users, can make the new process sink or swim. When it comes to implementation, you will need their support to encourage their teams and peers to use the new system. While they may not like what they hear, they value the reach out (and will find out in the end anyway).

Finally, you will need to continue using the stakeholders for validation of the project as it progresses, primarily to ensure that the delivered system does not “drift” from the agreed objectives and to check that the original requirements are still valid as they may change time. This is also a benefit of having a scope document. Plenty of applications have gone live to a user population that says, “great, but that’s not what we need now!”

THINGS TO CONSIDER FOR EFFECTIVE STAKEHOLDER ENGAGEMENT

So, what lessons are there for those involved in system selection and implementation?

• Be clear on what the project is trying to accomplish?
• Identify the project stakeholders in context; what are their roles and responsibilities?
• Use relevant capture methods; keep them consistent and unbiased.
• Incorporate the feedback into the solution requirements. Maintain balance and remind yourself of the project objectives.
• Keep the stakeholders informed of the consultation outcomes and be prepared to adapt the project if it doesn’t achieve the agreed objectives.

Part 1 – Scoping the Project Before Buying
Part 3 – Change Management Before and After Implementation