7 Critical Factors When Choosing an E-Billing Solution

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Your legal e-billing is an important way to track and monitor your legal spend. It is how you know how much your legal services cost, but also what outside counsel is doing and how they are performing. This should give you ample information to decide how to manage these outsourced professionals. With the right e-billing software, you can bring powerful insight into this area of your business.

Sophisticated e-billing solutions also give you powerful data. Translated into in- depth analytics, that data shows you clearly where you might be overspending. It shows you in detail where your legal spend might be out of range in comparison with others in your industry. You can see trends in your legal costs and make use of contextual information that helps you make informed, sound business decisions.

To best leverage all of your resources, look for software that does more than simply digitize your traditional invoices — you need a solution that helps you rethink your approach to legal spend and matter management. Here are seven important factors to consider when choosing a legal e-billing solution.

1. Customized Workflow Management

Getting your billing information into the right hands is essential for proper workflow management. Your software solution should have the option to create a customized workflow, so the right person receives the right invoice at the right time. Invoices should flow through the workflows and approval process, while taking into account factors like visibility permissions or invoice approval thresholds. The software should be nimble enough to align with your unique workflow needs, minus any manual handoffs.

2. Powerful Matter Management

Effective matter management is critical in not only providing data indicators around the health, budget and status for each matter, but also provides a level of instant visibility across all of your matters that traditional tools simply cannot replicate. Your software should be able to pair invoices with the correct matter so you can automate budget tracking.

You can now hone in on what matters are taking up the majority of your budget and which costs centers have been impacted the most. This empowers a strategic judgment of when it is time to go in a new direction or even “pull the plug” on litigation efforts. It also gives you strong data and baselines that can challenge your priorities, as well as your resources at hand.

3. Customizable Rules Engine

Your software should have intelligent features that do much of the work for you. A customizable, web-based rules engine lets you predetermine what line items you want to automatically flag, adjust, or reject. This means there is no more approval of expenses that are not in line with your budget or guidelines. Your software should also present you with the ability to adjust on your own after the rules engines takes the first-line objective review. That way you can take into consideration any unique one-off situations or arrangements you may have set up with your law firms.

4. Intelligent Invoice Review Process

In order to perform due diligence on your costs, the best legal billing software should have intelligent review functionality. This allows you to drill down to understand what is behind every charge so you can take that information into discussions regarding your law firm panel, performance, and more.

5. Customizable Reporting & Powerful Data Analytics

It is essential that reports are easy to produce and easy to understand. The solution should provide built-in dashboards and reports that are simple to adapt to your business and/or department. Report customization and data interaction capabilities are also key to helping you address your needs on the fly.

6. Ease of Use

All of these results should come through an interface that’s easy for your team to implement and use. All the “bells and whistles” are meaningless if your staff members are frustrated. Data in and of itself is not “business intelligence” if it’s not put into proper context. Your solution should be intuitive and should be backed up by a responsive and experienced customer service team.

7. Solid ROI

Any solution is an investment, but superior solutions should actually improve your bottom line. By reducing inefficiencies, and providing in-depth data that gives you strategic insights, the solution should have a demonstrated return on investment.

With these features, your legal billing software does more than reduce paperwork and manual processes. It should help you uncover savings AND deliver the legal analytics and insights you need to improve overall performance.


LegalBill by Quovant takes the complexity and cost out of managing matters, invoices and legal bill review — a powerful cloud solution built on more than 20 years of best practices and delivered with clear pricing, turnkey installation and immediate value for you and your team.

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published to the Quovant site. After the 2022 Mitratech acquisition, the content was moved to the Mitratech site.