Am Law 200 Firm Achieves eBilling Excellence with Aderant BillBlast

Introduction

To support its burgeoning staff of more than two hundred lawyers and policy advisors in Washington, D.C., one of the nation’s top regulatory and transactional law firms set out to find a reliable eBilling solution that could keep up with its high volume of invoices. The firm selected Aderant’s BillBlast legal eBilling solution to streamline its processes with automated submission, tracking, and appeals management while eliminating the impending need to grow their staff to manage them.

Change Driven by Necessity

Before implementing BillBlast, the firm experienced a wide range of issues with its existing solution and processes. Representatives cited tracking difficulties (billing staff had to manually check vendor sites for status updates) and insufficient accounts receivable search capabilities as two of their primary concerns.

When selecting BillBlast, the responsiveness of Aderant’s support team and the ability to identify and correct issues before bills are posted stood out to the firm. Through implementation, the firm looked to adopt a proactive approach to matter management which would make the firm’s monthly average of seven hundred eBills more manageable.

A Defined Impact

Upon implementing BillBlast, the billing team was thrilled with the ease of use that BillBlast brought to their eBilling workflows, emphasizing the following features and functionalities that contributed to the team’s efficiency and productivity:

• BillBlast’s ease of use and learning, — even if the individual does not have eBilling experience – “Even team members very new to legal eBilling were able to jump right in and use BillBlast to contribute and expedite bill delivery.”
• The ability to easily carry out basic eBilling tasks, “with the click of a button,” such as submitting invoices or attaching costs; having managed these tasks manually in the past, the team saw significant time saved.
• Streamlining the process for assigning and managing matters; the billing team can assign client matters to the appropriate billing specialist, making it easier to identify billing assignments internally, and billing specialists can filter invoices so that they are only presented with those that they are responsible for.
• BillBlast’s option to add notes to individual invoices to keep other team members apprised of invoice status, boosting collaboration.
• Compliance is more readily achievable through BillBlast’s alerts and automation. For example, BillBlast flags non-reimbursable time and expense entries and provides messages specific to individual client guidelines; the system also warns the billing team of violations for incorrect office copying rates.
• BillBlast monitors invoice rejections, so managing follow-ups is less tedious and more productive. Any disputed invoices are automatically directed to a follow-up queue, eliminating the need to constantly monitor each eBilling site and email account for rejections.
• The billing team can generate reports in Excel and in PDF format (to communicate billing insights to non-billing professionals at the firm) that show reduced items, client rationale for the deductions, and the appeal deadlines to inform the billing lawyer in a timely manner.

Commenting on BillBlast’s impact, a firm representative remarked:

“Every year, as the demands on my time increase and the job becomes more difficult, BillBlast enables me to manage high volumes of information while maintaining productivity and efficiency that I would otherwise not be able to do on my own.”

Overall, BillBlast has brought the firm increased ease of use, transparency, and efficiency in billing and has allowed the staff to focus on other matters, including client satisfaction. Since implementing BillBlast in 2018, the firm has reported gross annual revenue in excess of $200 million and earned a spot on the National Law Journal’s list of the largest law firms in the United States (the 2021 NLJ 500).