This can be extremely frustrating, especially if the reduction isn’t that severe-imagine a payment of $10,000 being delayed just because the reductions amount to $600. The clients refuse to pay you for your invoices unless they are fully compliant with their guidelines. As a result of this, your invoices are severely reduced. We can’t even blame these vendors here, the pressure on them to bring about at least 6% reduction on every invoice submitted to them is tremendous.
These invoices, before reaching your clients or their TPAs have to go through strict bill review vendors and the extremely powerful technology they have in place exclusively to scrutinize your invoices, flagging you for every, even if slight, non-compliance there is. Amidst the excitement is however, the growing anticipation among the timekeepers and the billing department: how are they supposed to track all the time being spent on working on multiple cases effectively and without error? How much additional workload is going to be imposed on the billing clerks who now have to check every additional invoice for errors and non-compliances? What follows is the preparation and submission of invoices that contain several non-compliances to various clients. Let me break this down further for you with a probable scenario:Ĭongratulations! Your firm just acquired 20 new clients-work has never been more exciting-the financial prospects have never looked so promising. For this reason, an increasing clientele can in fact mean worsening cash flow for the firms. While an increasing number of clients is generally considered a boon for law firms, it also means that the number of billing guidelines that they have to maintain compliance with is significantly increased.
Timekeeping to be more precise, effective timekeeping is something dreaded by even the most efficient of lawyers, especially given how inevitable it is should they wish to pave a successful legal career and bring their firms good revenue.Īlthough advancing technology has severely reduced the manual effort that goes into timekeeping, the invoices prepared accumulating these entries are filled with numerous errors resulting in extremely delayed payments, poor cash flow, having to write-off too many hours, etc. More often than not, lawyers don’t even realise the importance of efficient timekeeping unless they are being chased down by their firm’s billing departments for clarifications on almost every single entry created by them. Unfortunately for law firms around the world, law schools do not spend as many hours as they should teaching attorneys about which activities or expenses are actually billable for, and which are not.