Hi there,
“Why is e-billing even a ‘thing?’”
It’s a good question — at least I think it is.
Let me first start by saying that e-billing (like a lot of problematic things in legal) is largely a symptom of a broken system that we’re all trapped in, but not necessarily responsible for.
But to my point about “why e-billing?”
E-billing is one of the few payment ecosystems that sits outside of the traditional enterprise purchasing model.
And it makes no sense. 🤔
For example, here’s how traditional enterprise billing systems work:
- Both parties agree on a price for services.
- Vendor submits and client approves the purchase order.
- Work gets done.
- Invoice gets sent.
- Invoice gets paid.
Contrast this with e-billing in legal:
- Firms and lawyers agree on an hourly price.
- Then you have to make sure you have outside counsel guidelines in place.
- Lawyers get to work — and have to document everything they do in painful 6-minute increments.
- Firms submit incredibly lengthy invoices each month documenting each tiny sliver of time spent.
- Clients spend hours cross-checking these against outside counsel guidelines — it adds up fast. (Some e-billing solutions endeavour to automate this process.)
- Clients reject erroneous charges.
- Firm appeals these rejections.
- This goes on for a bit.
- Firm and client finally agree.
- Client pays firm.
- Firm finally receives payment — but not after a significant delay and plenty of write-offs.
None of this even takes into consideration the hundreds of hours that in-house teams spend on due diligence of e-billing vendors, piloting potential solutions, and implementing the one they choose.
Nor does it include the recurring cost of e-billing platforms or the internal human capital required to run them.
For firms managing multiple versions of e-billing systems which vary by client, they’re essentially being levied a silent tax in running each of these systems — just to get invoices paid.
Like I said before. E-billing makes no sense.
Yet it continues to get tremendous air time in legal — despite other technology solutions (like PERSUIT) that are:
➡️ Vastly easier to implement ✅
➡️ Have a much higher ROI 💵
➡️ Have a rapid time-to-value (We’ve seen 5X-30X ROI and sometimes in a matter of weeks!) ⏳
When compared to other legal technology being implemented by corporate legal departments that are more resource-heavy, lower-ROI, and hard-to-value technology solutions, our platform should be an easy choice. 🥇
(If you didn’t already know, PERSUIT is a legal tech platform that fundamentally changes how in-house legal teams engage outside counsel.)
But it often isn’t.
(Of course when our clients finally come to “see the light,” they often wonder why they didn’t use us sooner 😇 .)
It just goes to show that the ecosystem that dictates how in-house counsel and firms engage is complex — with many players doing their best to navigate a system that they didn’t (and likely wouldn’t) choose.
Like e-billing.
It’s billed as a solution — but is arguably part of the problem by continuing to prop up what (in my view) is an unsustainable system for clients to engage their outside counsel.
Fixing the inefficiencies in that system isn’t going to be easy.
But we’re going to keep trying until we get there 🌈.
Cheers,
