Maximizing Compensation
Outside counsel guidelines and their growing complexity are endangering law firm profits.
Today’s law firms can receive outside counsel guidelines (OCGs) from each one of their clients. Guidelines are evolving in scale and complexity, and the popularity of eBilling is helping make them less standardized and more onerous. Some go beyond billing and time entry to cover staffing, information security, public relations, and more.
Failure to comply with OCGs puts a law firm’s compensation at risk of delays, write-downs, and write-offs, as well as jeopardizing future business by damaging the client relationship.
The Challenges of OCGs
Compliance Across The Firm:
With numerous attorneys, clients, and matters, compliance needs to be understood and maintained every step of the way. Without an effective system to enforce compliance, especially at the point of time entry, many firms just hope for the best until they receive a rejected bill.
Coordination and Visibility:
Firm-wide compliance suffers when information is spread between systems and manually shared between departments. If there’s no central location or accountability, departments stay siloed and create their own ways of interpreting and managing OCGs.
Cost and Resources:
It takes a massive amount of money and time to manage OCGs, beginning with the hours needed to manually extract terms from policies and updates. Resources are required to train and monitor compliance, as well as correct rejected bills.
