Expert Disbursement Management ensures that law firms properly account for - and bill - all client related costs. It reduces the administrative burden of managing client-related costs by accurately tracking, managing, and billing for the day-to-day operational costs firms incur while servicing their clients.

Expert Disbursement Management helps firms accurately capture both soft and hard disbursements. Soft disbursements, or indirect costs, concern allocations of firm expenses such as information retrieval services, word processing costs, internal copying and duplication costs, telephone and fax expenses, internal messenger costs, and more. Hard disbursements, or direct costs, are expenditures made by a firm in connection with a specific client matter, such as airfares, hotels, taxi services, external copying costs, external delivery services, and more.

Expert Disbursement Management provides firms with a variety of methods for capturing and posting these costs. Disbursements can be entered from other ADERANT Expert applications, within Expert Disbursement Management, or pulled from popular cost recovery systems.

Like time entries, disbursements can be created, adjusted, and transferred throughout ADERANT Expert. For example, disbursements are automatically posted to the applicable client and matter through Expert Accounts Payable when an invoice is posted or through Expert Expense Management when a timekeeper's expense is approved.

• Increases cost recovery
• Accelerates billing cycles
• Improves access to disbursement data
• Minimizes administrative overhead

• Captures both hard and soft costs
• Integrated with popular cost recovery systems
• Supports multiple billing arrangements
• Supports anticipated disbursements

ADERANT's cost recovery application includes powerful administration and maintenance capabilities to accommodate virtually any billing arrangement. A robust rate hierarchy can be established at various levels and grouping, including:

• Rate by Office or Department
• Rates by Client/Matter disbursement type

Additionally, Expert Disbursement Management allows firms to mark disbursements up or down by either percentages or amounts. It uses effective dates to store historical rate information.

Expert Disbursement Management also allows firms to account for anticipated disbursements. The application creates and bills disbursements dynamically from within Expert Billing before a firm incurs actual costs. It works with Expert Accounts Payable so that it can automatically match anticipated disbursements with incurred disbursements.

Expert Disbursement Management can also automatically generate a single disbursement charge instead of charging for each soft disbursement, such as billing costs at based on a percentage of the total fees billed to a client.