Pros/Cons Electronic Billing

Law.com has an interesting set of articles posted which present many of the benefits, pitfalls, successes and challenges of e-billing. Anyone considering implementing such a program to streamline the processing of legal invoice payments, improve cost reporting capabilities, or review/audit incoming legal invoices should review this material.

One comment I would add is that, in addition to doing e-billing via traditional invoice file extractions from law firm billing systems to be transmitted and loaded into the system of a corporate law department, I would also consider advising a corporate law department to use an extranet to collect the costs. Although a law firm billing department will need to enter the appropriate data into such a system, it is often far easier for a firm to allocate 15-30 minutes of time each month by a member of the billing department to do this as compared with allocating IT resources to build (and maintain) a data extraction/feed.

The articles are available via the following links.

http://www.law.com/jsp/ltn/pubArticleLTN.jsp?id=1098217027167

http://www.law.com/jsp/ltn/pubArticleLTN.jsp?id=1098217027215