December 03, 2019, NYC: On account of high demands from law firms across the US, UK and Canada, Accurate Legal Billing Inc, is releasing its latest innovation ‘Time Entry Cleansing’ that is all set to ensure that law firms’ time entries are fully compliant with each of their client’s billing guidelines. Using the new platform, law firms will be able to export time entries entered by the firm’s timekeepers in the firm’s current time and billing system to ALB in any format. ALB 2.0 will then check the uploaded time entries and highlight all non-compliances to the firm’s billing team.
This means that now, law firms can ensure that their invoices remain fully compliant with their clients’ billing guidelines as they continue to use the time and billing platform that their attorneys are familiar with.
A recent extensive survey conducted by CLOC (Corporate Legal Operations Consortium) revealed that the spend by in-house legal teams on availing services of outside counsel dropped by 24% in 2018. This will translate as a decrease in revenue for a lot of law firms, hence placing an indispensable need for law firms to take immediate actions to remedy any issue leading to decreasing cash flow. The same survey revealed that ‘more internal use of technology‘ was expected from law firms by legal operations teams.
ALB 2.0 aims to utilize adept technology and fulfill the ultimate financial need of law firms by helping them to prevent a decrease in profit margin, caused by reductions on law firms’ invoices by bill review vendors.
US outside counsel revenue in 2018 was $277 billion and the average reduction on outside counsel’s invoices by bill review vendors was 6%, which is $16.62 billion of law firms revenue taken away by bill review vendors.
ALB’s mission is to help law firms recoupe the vast majority of the $16.62 billion and growing.
How ALB’s Time Entry Cleansing Works
All the time entries created by the firm’s timekeepers are exported to ALB for review by ALB’s AI enabled system that automatically flags all the entries that are not in compliance with the respective client’s billing guidelines. The entries are color-coded to easily identify the type of non-compliance. The firm’s billing team is then recommended the necessary actions that they need to take and they can make suitable edits/corrections so as to ensure full billing guidelines compliance and avoid reductions on their invoices by their clients or TPA’s bill review vendors. The cleansed time entries are then reverted into the firm’s accounting software, ready for invoice generation and submission into the various bill review vendors’ systems.
No Integration Needed
No system integration is required from ALB’s or the law firm’s side which makes this process more efficient saves the law firms any associated third-party cost.
“We understand how tedious and expensive it can be to implement an entirely new time and billing software.” says Andre Wouansi, the Founder and CEO of Accurate Legal Billing Inc, “This is why the Time Entry Cleansing has been specifically developed in a manner that places no need for integration.”
This means that firms can continue to use their existing time & Billing and accounting software whilst additionally ensuring that they produce error-free invoices.
Upon discussing the innovation behind ALB 2.0, Andre says, “Having worked with law firms across 50 countries for over 15 years, we understand too well how tedious and complex it is for a law firm to upgrade their technology and adapt to the latest tech trends. It is a well-known fact that the legal industry is particularly slow in accepting technological advancements and a culture shift among law firms is a pretty huge deal as plenty of firms are reluctant to change the tools that they are using even if it means a loss of revenue to the firm on a daily basis. With ALB 2.0, we aim to facilitate this nature of the industry, where they can retain their existing time and billing platforms while being able to avail the benefits of the latest innovations in focused areas of their business, namely the timekeeping and billing.”
About ALB
Accurate Legal Billing is a cloud-based AI enabled time and billing software that lets law firms prepare and submit invoices that are always 100% compliant with each of their client’s billing guidelines. Salient features include automated bill review, time entry cleansing, budget preparation and tracking, conversion to standardized billing formats, multilingual and multicurrency invoice preparation and much more.
ALB is a privately held company and based in New York City.