Hi there,
There was a time — not too long ago — when the arrival of your monthly phone bill wasn’t just an at-a-glance statement. It was a dense novella you had to interpret.
As a firm partner, I’d sit there, highlighter in hand, trying to decipher which of those 573 calls were business-related and which ones were my wife sharing the latest disaster with our children.
It was deeply inefficient and excruciating.
Then, almost overnight, that monthly slog vanished as flat-rate plans replaced usage-based billing. No more sticker shock. No more forensic accounting exercises. The complexity didn’t disappear; it was just absorbed into a smarter, more efficient system — one built around customer experience.
I can’t help but see the same thing playing out in legal today.
In-house teams still wrestle with the equivalent of the old phone bill: the law firm invoice. Detailed. Narrative-driven. Often ambiguous. Hundreds, sometimes thousands, of line items describing “drafting,” “reviewing,” “conferencing,” with no real clarity on impact or value.
To cope, we built e-billing platforms designed to scrutinize these invoices line by line, checking compliance against billing guidelines. The result is not much more effective than my highlighting lines of phone calls.
E-billing served a purpose. Just like that old AT&T bill, it gave in-house teams some sense of control. A way to flag overbilling, ensure compliance, and push back when something felt off. But make no mistake: e-billing was built for a world that assumed law firm spend needed to be reactive and heavily policed.
More importantly, e-billing was built assuming that the only measure of law firm value was time.
Just as you no longer want a monthly phone bill with 12 pages of itemized calls, the market is waking up to the absurdity of reviewing every task in six-minute increments after it's already been done.
Yes, there are elements of automation that e-billing offers (think: auto-rejection of invoices that don’t comply with billing guidelines). But just consider that process:
- Firms and clients agree on hourly rates.
- Billing guidelines are set.
- Lawyers log their time in painful 6-minute increments.
- Firms submit lengthy invoices with ad nauseam bill narratives.
- Clients review, cross-checking against guidelines (invoking kill-me-now feelings by the poor souls reviewing — at least those without software).
- Errors are flagged, and charges are disputed.
- Firms appeal.
- Back and forth ensues.
- A final amount is agreed upon.
- Payment is made — after delays, tears and write-offs.
But that’s just providing a (very poor) solution to a problem that should not exist.
The root cause is equating time with value. Failing to focus on and price true value and clear outcomes.
As I wrote before, it’s little wonder that law firms are now using AI to write bill narratives and clients are using AI to review bill narratives. That’s pretty funny.
Thankfully, that model is cracking, and like the phone bills of old, it’s giving way to a more efficient system built around the client experience.
The real question isn’t whether e-billing as we know it will disappear. It’s how quickly we’ll let it.
Smart legal teams aren’t waiting in the dark for invoices anymore, they’re demanding better end-to-end workflow management:
- Legal departments want greater price predictability, starting at matter inception.
- They also want visibility into the work in progress in real-time, to eliminate surprises.
- And not surprisingly, they want value and outcomes as they face increased budget pressure and scrutiny internally.
The good news is that these demands benefit law firms as well. Lawyers would much rather defend clients than defend 47 line items describing “emails sent.” And law firms want to know that the amount invoiced will be the amount paid.
The future of legal pricing is proactive, not reactive. Transparent, not guesswork. Predictable, not surprising. And just like those old phone bills, today’s e-billing platforms will one day be a quaint memory — relics of a time when we mistook detail for control.
(Oh boy, am I going to get a lot of hate mail from my e-billing buddies. It’s not personal. I promise!)
Cheers,
Jim
