Snell & Wilmer: Compliance Upstream and Downstream with Aderant Solutions
Challenges
When Laurie Welch arrived at Snell & Wilmer, the firm was using one product for timekeeping with very little mobile usage, an unused solution for eBilling and were very new to Aderant. Each was having problems, throwing the firm’s entire ecosystem into disarray. Compliance and billing were quickly becoming almost insurmountable tasks.
At one point, the firm’s real-time timecard validation for their timekeeping solution underwent five months of downtime. During that time, there was no real-time validation to ensure compliant entries. Since the rules could not be tailored to specific client requirements, for many clients, they were forced to disable the validation functionality entirely, causing multiple errors downstream in the billing process. The firm’s timecard validation solution also was simply unable to handle the month-end load of timecards to be validated and more often than not, real time validation had to be turned off completely in order for timekeepers to release their time at month end.
The firm’s email bill solution posed equal challenges. The third-party system-generated emails containing client bills, were getting caught in client spam filters, and with no ability to make modifications to the verbiage or presentation, the email function was essentially useless.
Solution
The firm needed a customizable real-time validation and eBill/email solution that would work well with Aderant and made the decision to switch their time entry, real-time validation and eBill solution to Aderant’s PMS-agnostic platforms, effectively replacing their entire ecosystem. The firm selected iTimekeep for time capture, which not only makes entering time easy, but also provides the best means for contemporaneous time entry. They also selected the time-entry solution’s companion, OCG Live for real-time compliance with outside counsel guidelines at the point of time entry. Rounding out their solution set, the firm selected BillBlast for its advanced eBilling management and its consolidated visibility into the eBilling process.
Business Impact
Snell & Wilmer’s monthly billing process has enjoyed a complete overhaul, and they now have compliance being enforced and adopted both upstream and downstream, making the entire process easier and more efficient.
The impact on the firm was immediate. According to Welch:
iTimekeep & OCG Live: “iTimekeep is so easy to use that I have timekeepers who have never entered their own time now doing it themselves. The ability to dictate time on their phone or Apple Watch was a big hit and with OCG Live, we now have compliance at the point of time entry – where it should be. It doesn’t matter how good your billing team is if timekeepers don’t know how to create time entries that are acceptable to our clients. ITimekeep and OCG Live help educate timekeepers in real-time, creating better timekeeping habits. Before we had iTimekeep and OCG Live, it was taking our lawyers an average of just over six days to release their time. Now it’s two days.”
Expert: “Since everything integrates seamlessly with Expert, the transition was easy and natural.”
BillBlast: “Nearly half of our clients are eBilled. I use BillBlast analytics religiously to determine which clients are the toughest to get bills through, and which of our attorneys are costing us the most in potential lost revenue so I can set them on the right path. Getting better control of our eBilling compliance through real-time validation, combined with the BillBlast analytics reduced our A/R backlog related to eBilling by 50%.”
Cultural Impact: “The hidden gem within the new ecosystem is the analytics. They allow me to determine where my efforts are best spent, setting client specific timecard rules which put warnings, errors or informational flags in the appropriate places to alert timekeepers in advance of potential problems and instruct them on how to correct them. The dashboard gives me the so-called evidence to illustrate habitual errors to users. I love that I can do that. The addition of real-time validation through OCG Live was welcomed by the timekeepers. They appreciate the guidance on what is and is not acceptable to the client. Being able to show them and then help them become more compliant has completely altered the timekeeping culture in a positive way.”
