Understanding Benefits of Legal Invoice Review Services

There is a way to unlock the potential of your corporate legal department with legal invoice review services. In an era where law firms are raising their rates and legal departments are expected to do more with less, legal invoice review services offer a strategic advantage.

By integrating human expertise with advanced financial intelligence tools, this service helps scrutinize invoices thoroughly, leading to significant cost savings and enhanced productivity. Legal invoice managed services can free in-house attorneys from the time-consuming task of invoice reviews and appeals, allowing them to focus on critical legal matters. Legal invoice management services amplify the legal department's role as an indispensable business partner by controlling costs and making informed decisions.

In legal invoice review services, also called managed bill review, trained legal experts review outside counsel billing for compliance with corporate legal guidelines and suitability. It is important to note that U.S.-based lawyers and paralegals should be utilized for this critical service and not just “subject matter” experts. Only properly trained, certified, or degreed professionals should rule on the appropriateness of time billed for the type of work performed e.g., “This document should have taken four hours to prepare and not eight.”

Managed bill review adds a layer of subjective review by human legal authorities, outsourcing the work away from the in-house legal team and saving them time.

Various technology providers offer managed legal bill review services delivered by a third-party provider. These providers focus entirely on legal invoices and billings and should be set up as seamless users of the enterprise legal management software. The expert reviewers can be embedded in the corporate legal department workflow to analyze invoices from within the enterprise legal management platform. This helps customers save time and money in their own legal invoice review process.

Combine Financial Intelligence Tools with Human Subjectivity

Enterprise legal management software consists of various applications that enhance legal operations and matter management for in-house lawyers and their outside counsel. One of the most popular intelligent tools is AI-powered financial applications, enabling automated bill compliance and automatic flagging of billing errors in invoices.

This tool is typically used as an objective compliance review and often the in-house legal team and managing attorney must review the findings and negotiate with the law firms when violations are found.

Managed bill review means that outsourced professionals, instead of overburdened in-house managing attorneys provide the subjective, qualitative, in-depth analysis that such enterprise critical invoices deserve. Qualified outsourced bill reviewers handle appeals and can serve as expert witnesses. They can also conduct continuing education training sessions in addition to providing thorough, ongoing auditing of invoices.

While the automated financial tool singles out billing errors and can correct them, this process is never 100% accurate. Adding the human subjectivity component to the legal invoice review process is a more complete approach.

Legal Invoice Review Services Benefit High Volume and Complex Invoices

For legal departments with a high volume of invoices, managed bill review services reduce the time that in-house attorneys need to spend on invoice review, allowing them to focus on other business. The benefit is greater levels of invoice scrutiny which can lead to additional cost savings.

In a recent article by Kris Satkunas and Stephanie Beck, both of LexisNexis CounselLink, they pointed out the value of extra scrutiny on large invoices: “…given that invoices with more than 1,000 charge lines also have very high bill amounts (on average over $800,000), legal departments with large invoices are likely leaving money on the table. If legal departments could more closely scrutinize these invoices, the savings opportunity would amount to millions of dollars.”

Certainly, financial tools in enterprise legal software provide exceptional levels of automated bill compliance, but managed bill review takes it to the next level with human expertise added to the complex mix of legal invoices. It provides thorough, ongoing auditing of invoices and line-by-line analysis.

Why Consider Managed Bill Review Services For Legal Invoices

Any corporate legal department with more than $5 million in annual outside counsel spend has various reasons in support of managed bill review:

• Companies need to save money, and law firms are raising their rates.
• The corporate legal department must demonstrate savings.
• Law departments need to do more with less.
• In-house lawyers’ caseloads are expanding, and lawyers are strapped for time.
• Different people in the organization review bills differently, leading to inconsistent practices, random behavior, and unpredictable results.
• Attorneys spend time on invoice reviews and appeals which takes time from actual legal work.
• Legal bill review and negotiating fee write-downs and appeals.

For law departments that want the legal team to focus on legal issues instead of invoice issues, managed bill review provides that extra scrutiny that makes it easy to focus on other operational areas. It doesn’t just reduce the time in-house attorneys spend on invoice review, but also drastically reduces the time spent dealing with law firm appeals, pushing that work to the legal bill review experts. With increased attention to invoice reviews through managed bill review, legal departments seamlessly and efficiently control costs, maximize productivity and make better decisions, elevating their role as an indispensable business partner. Contact us and discover how legal invoice review can transform your legal operations.