How New Legal Tech Features Drive Efficiencies in e-Billing and Invoice Review
What’s one of the quickest and surest ways to realize value from a legal technology investment? By optimizing your billing and invoice review processes.
For instance, a corporate legal department with ten staff attorneys could, by reducing legal spend by 6% and making a 6% gain in productivity, achieve $670,000 in annual savings. That’s achievable by using a legal management solution with strong e-billing and invoice review features.
How that works was the topic of an in-depth session at this year’s Interact 2020 conference, Driving Efficiencies through eBilling and Invoice Review Improvements, led by Mitratech product managers Brendan Harney and Cal Yelderman. They explored recent enhancements and future additions to our product roadmaps that will allow users to wring more efficiency out of their operations than ever.
Adding greater flexibility for timekeepers
One improvement to our long-established Collaborati e-billing solution Brendan covered? Providing an OOTB solution for a Timekeeper to bill on invoices in different currencies on behalf of a firm’s multiple offices in different countries or regions.
That means a single timekeeper can bill for multiple offices, in various billing combinations. In lesser, siloed e-billing systems, a firm can only use timekeepers who are assigned to a specific office to conduct billings for that office.
On the TeamConnect side, it’s now simple to review timekeeper updates to see what offices an individual timekeeper may be billing for, and what his/her assigned home office is It’s also easy to see the individual rates that a timekeeper may be authorized to use on an individual office basis.
A manager can also review the specific contact records for an individual timekeeper, so it’s visible what she’s billing on specific matters on behalf of specific offices, and the active rates being employed.
Those are just some of the recent improvements to Collaborati and TeamConnect, and this multi-office structure has already been embraced by hundreds of our clients.
Improving legal invoice review
The development team’s goal? To reduce the amount of time it takes for a high complexity invoice, especially large ones (of 1,000 lines, for example), to get to final approval by 30%.
This will be a two-phase project; Phase One has already “hit the street,” as Cal put it. The remaining phase will be implemented by early 2021.
What drove the development team? The desire to address the pain points that many clients suffer during a high complexity invoice review process. In the table below, you can see those specific pain points, and the features we delivered in Phase One that answer them.
Some of the improvements that are on track for Phase Two? They’ll include matter spend insights, allowing users to visually comprehend how the spend on a specific invoice will impact their overall budget for that matter, and escalate flags, where a reviewer can post comments about the invoice to the attention of other reviewers. This allows conversations about these comments or questions to take place entirely within TeamConnect, rather than through emails or other channels.
These and other advancements owe thanks to the ongoing co-innovation between product managers, developers, and corporate legal departments and law firms. To see the entire presentation, as well as other sessions for legal and risk & compliance professionals that took place at Interact 2020, access them via on-demand video.
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