How Procurement Can Benefit From Legal E-Billing Software

There are well-documented benefits of e-Billing for corporate legal departments. With digitally created billing files and automated processing and checking of invoices, e-Billing saves a huge amount of administrative resources and tracks external legal spend in almost real-time, ensuring adherence to guidelines and budgets.

Less talked about is how the legal procurement function can benefit. Legal spend management software captures detailed invoice line-item data on matter information and bill totals, as well as timelines, timekeepers, and expenses coded using the UTBMS (Uniform Task Based Management System) code set for tasks, activities, and expenses. This creates an extensive data set to analyze and make future decisions.

Organizations can use the powerful reporting and analytics capabilities in modern e-Billing solutions in the following ways:

1. BENCHMARK SERVICE PROVIDER PERFORMANCE WITH E-BILLING

E-Billing ensures consistent entry of billing data points for all service providers. This allows for accurate comparison of performance metrics such as timekeeper rates, experience levels, time to complete a matter, budget adherence, and billing guidelines compliance. Some solutions allow the in-house team to rate the firm, though this data point is subjective. Benchmarking metrics give legal procurement visibility into the service and value they receive from each service provider, leading to open and honest conversations.

2. INFLUENCE FUTURE LEGAL PURCHASE DECISIONS

The data generated by Legal Spend Management can ensure the right option is selected when deciding how to resource legal work. Longer term, the right analysis will lead legal procurement to the right purchase strategy based on past data and comparisons. This works even better when legal procurement is open with providers about using this approach and sharing their goals so external providers know how to meet expectations.

3. REVIEW AND RESTRUCTURE EXISTING PANELS

Panel reviews can be time and resource intensive because of insufficient data from which to compare levels of experience, performance, and expertise across firms, a lack of spend data, and an inability to track service delivery methods across providers. E-Billing removes all these problems, reducing the resources needed to conduct a review and generate a confident outcome. One positive of a panel review can be a reduction in panel size, which usually leads to more significant discounts by consolidating work to fewer firms. The potential downside is a lack of specialist firms on the panel. Weighing up these risks can cause conflict between procurement and the legal department and is much harder to evaluate without the data generated from Legal Spend Management software.

4. RENEGOTIATE RATES AND TERMS

By comparing fees and rates and reviewing service provider performance, legal procurement can enter negotiations with an arsenal of data to help them reduce costs and create more valuable relationships with external providers. Firms often do not have access to this level of data and may be surprised by legal procurement’s findings. They want satisfied clients and are open to these discussions.

The above benefits drive savings and confident decision-making and create a healthy competitive environment within the industry, raising standards for all corporate clients and ensuring maximum value from legal service providers. With procurement helping with financial management activities, the legal department can focus on their external legal business relationships, improving the in-house relationship between legal and procurement as they work together to achieve company goals.

Learn more about BusyLamp from Onit, our end-to-end legal spend management solution built for European corporate legal departments.