e-Billing & Legal Spend Management

In today's tough times all departments are being forced to lower expenses any way they can. This is especially difficult for corporate legal departments that are continually faced with ongoing litigation and many other legal responsibilities. To protect the company you understand that careful management of outside legal costs is critical to the bottom line. You already realize paper invoices make control and visibility over hundreds of firms and thousands of matters a challenging proposition. Moreover, you find it even more challenging to try to make planning and budgeting decisions or to negotiate with firms with limited online financial information. 

Bridgeway's legal spend management solutions enable you to:

• Bring all your law firms online at an affordable and predictable cost.
• Automatically enforce your billing guidelines.
• Support standard LEDES files.
  
• Utilize a variety of alternate fee Arrangements.
• Apply flexible approval workflow rules.
• Manage in-house and firm budgets.
• Collaborate with your law firms over billing issues.
• Tightly integrate with your corporate financial system.
• Easily convert foreign currency invoices to US dollars.
  
• Analyze your legal spend through advanced financial reporting.

Legal Spend Management

Bridgeway gives you total control of your legal spend with a solution that allows you to bring all your law firms online quickly and affordably. Bridgeway's electronic billing solutions  allow you to leverage all your financial information to improve efficiency and controls over your legal spend with one integrated solutions provider.

Enforcing Your Billing Guidelines

You need your law firms to be compliant with your published billing guidelines. The question is "can your e-billing solution implement your billing guidelines?" Many systems fall short , and there are limitations to what the audit rules can do. Bridgeway's e-billing solution allows you to implement all your billing guidelines with audit rules that can analyze invoices and leverage matter and financial information to intelligently reject invoices or give your approvers appropriate invoice level or line item level warnings. Our clients use rules to validate timekeeper rates, matter-negotiated rates, tiered discounting arrangements, and many other cost saving rules.  

Alternate Fee Arrangements

More and more corporations like yours are adopting fixed fee, tiered discounts, unit costs for specific tasks, hour caps on certain tasks, success-based arrangements, and other AFA billing to help control costs. You want to leverage your matter management and e-billing historic financial information to select the appropriate kind of AFA for various types of matters. Bridgeway has the e-billing solution that will allow you to aggressively implement AFA billing utilizing our advanced rules engine.

Approval Workflows

Once the invoice has been automatically checked for compliance against your billing guidelines, you need a solution that routes the invoice to the correct set of approvers. Approval workflows may need to take into account the invoice amount, the matters involved, your organizational structure, a time limit, and both serial and parallel workflows. Bridgeway's e-billing solution gives you the power to implement your specific invoice approval workflow.

Budgeting

Traditional hourly billing still exists so you need tools to manage hourly engagements effectively. Extensive evidence shows that the single best way to lower your legal spend for hourly engagements is to require your firm to prepare and submit budgets for each matter. You may want overall matter budgets, quarterly budgets, or monthly budgets; you may decide that you want fees and expenses, timekeeper totals, or more detailed UTBMS task and expense totals. You then need an automated way to make sure your firms are staying on budget with appropriate warnings when you're approaching the budgeted amount and errors if the firm attempts to exceed the budget. You may also be faced with internal budgeting requirements at the practice area and business unit levels. You need a system that can roll up your various matter budgets to help you construct an overall legal department budget for C-level reports. Bridgeway's e-billing solution allows you to manage your budgeting requirements at many levels with budgeting rules to preempt problems before they occur. Cathi Collins, VP of Bridgeway Research chaired the LEDES Budgeting Subcommittee and was a major contributor to the new LEDES XML Budgeting format specification.

Collaborate with your Law Firms over Billing Issues

When your e-billing solution automatically detects problems with an invoice, you want your contact at the firm to receive an automatic e-mail detailing the problem and you want your firms to be able to look up the status of an invoice on their own so you are not bothered by routine billing issues. When you manually identify a billing issue, you want an easy way to collaborate with your contact at the firm to resolve the issue. Bridgeway's e-billing solution will save you time and in many cases completely eliminate work by streamlining your invoice issue resolution. When necessary, you can collaborate with your law firms to easily address more challenging billing issues.

Accounts Payable Integration

A successful e-billing solution requires tight integration with your corporate financial system or systems. As invoices are approved they need to be routed to your corporate accounts payable system. You need your vendor information automatically synchronized and you want payment information fed back into your e-billing system. Bridgeway's e-billing solution supports all major accounts payable systems and with our Smart Link integration appliance you can customize the integration.

International Invoices

International invoicing requires the support of LEDES98BI files and the ability to convert from various foreign currencies to US dollars using the current exchange rate. With many countries, you also need to support taxes, for example VAT, and to abide by safe harbor policies. Bridgeway's e-billing solution is used by many clients to manage their international invoicing needs.

Financial Reporting

Your matter management and e-billing systems amass a huge volume of information to analyze and report upon. The true test of an information system is how easy is it to produce the reports you want. Bridgeway's e-billing solution facilitates management of your legal spend through advanced financial reporting.

The Bridgeway integrated Legal Spend Management Suite delivers the following features to make your e-billing implementation a success: 

• Improves your productivity through streamlining of the entire invoice routing and approval process.
• Automatically informs your law firms when there are billing issues, allowing for quicker resolution.
• Controls your expenses through budgeting and cost analysis reporting.
• Automatically enforces your billing guidelines through configurable audit rules.
• Receives any number of attachments with your invoices for receipts.
• Integrates currency conversion for international invoices.
• Includes a two-way accounts payable interface to show payment details.
• Imports timekeeper rates importing to bring new firms online and manage new rate agreements effectively.