7 Ways MBR Optimizes Your Legal Spend (And Time!)
Discover how Managed Bill Review (MBR) can save time, significantly reduce legal spend, and eliminate the headaches associated with handling legal invoices.
A recent study undertaken by the Association for Corporate Counsel (ACC) finds that legal spend continues to rise. In their survey, median legal spend increased from $2.4 million in 2022 to $3.1 million in 2023.
And these legal departments are putting more than just dollars into their legal spend, there’s also significant work going into the bill review process that quantifies and qualifies the spend. From the time spent training on invoice guidelines to the exhaustive review process of each line item, bill review can become both a time and money vacuum for your team. But it doesn’t have to be.
A Quick Recap: What is Managed Bill Review (MBR)?
Managed Bill Review (MBR) provides an alternative approach to traditional bill review processes. In the place of tedious, manual line item reviews, technology and legal spend experts step in to streamline, contextualize, and analyze line items for you, offering significant savings in both time and money to your legal department. The most powerful MBR tools will use a combination of AI-enabled and expert human analysis to ensure a timely, comprehensive, and accurate review of all legal invoices. This hybrid approach ensures that each line item in every bill is appropriately reviewed, categorized by task type, and analyzed against the role assigned to each task. All to give you peace of mind that the right work is being sent and billed to the right department, your organization is adhering to your billing guidelines, etc. — while finding opportunities for reducing legal spend and optimizing your review process.
When legal departments turn to MBR, they not only save time by streamlining processes and improving efficiency but also money through cost reductions and improved decision-making. And every hour saved can be monetized as well, as legal managers turn their attention to higher-value work.
7 Ways MBR Optimizes Legal Spend (And Your Efficiency)
Training Time for Internal Employees:
Internal employees no longer need to spend time training on complex invoice guidelines.
Line Item Review:
While traditional line item review is cumbersome to the point of being ineffective, MBR blends AI with subject matter expertise to capture, analyze, and potentially correct every invoice line item.
Faster Payment Cycles:
By expediting the approval and payment process around legal invoices, MBR can reduce delays and prevent late fees (and in doing so improve relationships with outside counsel!).
Eliminate Low-Value Work:
Most legal departments don’t have the time in the first place to conduct a line item review of their legal invoices, much less categorize each one around meta-data and then analyze and deliver actionable analytics. But even those who spend manual hours on review could be better served by implementing MBR. MBR gives legal managers and teams back time to focus on work that requires the human touch.
Accuracy:
MBR enhances the accuracy of bill review by using AI-enabled analysis and categorization. This reduces the risk of costly billing errors.
Benchmarking Data:
By delivering visibility into legal spend and law firm performance, MBR gives legal departments insight into performance trends. High-level analysis as well as granular reporting provides legal teams with benchmarking data to determine which firms are most expensive, least compliant, prone to error, etc. This allows teams to negotiate and adjust for better rates.
Departmental Data and Workload Allocation:
Managing legal spend effectively requires a strategic approach to staffing and workload distribution. By allocating all legal bill reviews to a managed solution, organizations can optimize their staffing. This can reduce tedious, low-level work for employees and, in some cases, eliminate roles focused solely on bill review.
You Could Be Reducing the Time, Costs, and Headaches of Legal Bill Review with 97%+ Invoice Accuracy
MBR offers a solution to the challenges associated with legal billing, effectively improving legal spend by saving both time associated with legal invoice review and the money that is left “on the table” when legal teams overlook invoice review. By adopting an MBR approach, companies find both immediate benefits and also set a foundation for long-term cost savings and efficiency gains year over year.
The right partners offer a fully-integrated, scalable platform for:
- Managed Bill Review
- Matter Management
- AI-Driven Spend Analytics
- eBilling
- Subject Matter Expertise
With Mitratech’s MBR, for example, organizations like yours are saving time on legal invoice review and reducing annual costs by 15% or more.
Our focus? On your success.
Schedule a demo, or learn more about Mitratech’s products, services, and commitment.
