You hear it everywhere; companies want to lower legal costs. In my previous blog post I discussed the need to adopt standards. Law firms have a “hidden” high cost of e-billing because there is no single e-bill standard, there are hundreds or thousands of “standards”.
Firms are delaying their billings, proof-reading every entry on every bill, submitting bills that get rejected or short-paid, and finally writing off a great deal of money. Corporations need to understand that all this is reflected back into law firm rates.
Here is a simple way to fix this problem and lower costs to both firms and corporations:
- Quickly accept the current LEDES XML e-bill standard. The XML technology allows for tremendous flexibility for dealing with custom fields. Corporations should force the middle tier processors to accept this single standard. There won’t be a standard until the very top recipients of e-bills, primarily insurance carriers make the switch.
- Work with Time and Billing vendors (or LEDES) to provide specific billing guidelines in an electronic format that the Time and Billing system can import and use for Bill Scrubbing. Law firms want to submit bills that fit your guidelines, but like e-bill formats, there are few standards. Time and billing vendors can provide tools to “scrub” bills if they had your guidelines in something better than just written documents.
So, corporate America, do you want to collaborate to use technology to reduce costs for everyone involved?
Your feedback is welcome.
