I've recently been following several online forum discussions about eBilling and the increased focus on electronic invoicing as a method of cost effectiveness and process efficiency, both direct and indirect. I find these discussions interesting because of the passion expressed by most posters about a topic I frankly considered passé. Essentially, the majority of posters on these threads either lament the failure of eBilling (a 12-year experiment with little relative adoption) or herald the intrinsic business value of standardized electronic invoice transmission formats (and in particular the wealth of data they provide).
The fact is, the failure of eBilling, as many attest, is not in eBilling at all. It's not the fault of LEDES or UTBMS, or any other coding or transmittal standards. The failure lies in the matter management and other information systems that have not delivered on the supposed promise of "targeted information mining" and "pragmatic benchmarking" that the proliferation of eBilling data was supposed to open the gates to. What's more, law departments that have spent some time mining their eBilling data have spent a lot of time discovering what they already knew: it's hard to compare services between and among firms, and the efficiency and effectiveness of those services, because most legal projects are not "apples to apples." For those that are similar enough to compare, they're generally commodity services, and the market has figured out ways to address cost parity there.
To be a "next generation" technology, what we should focus on is the potential for eBilling to serve as a powerful conduit between client and provider. In an ever-evolving world of Web2.0 technologies and emerging communities of practice, could eBilling not be a "gateway technology" to more meaningful collaborative relationships between law departments and law firms? I tend to believe that stronger relationships produce greater results.
Full Name
Eyal Iffergan
Location
Sugar Land, TX
