Better Legal Spend Audits Pair People and Processing Power

Complex caseloads generate hundreds of billable hours for law firms, yet despite efforts to control legal costs, that ability often evades carriers. However, legal spend management software and human experts working together are getting results. 

To gain a better understanding of how billing experts are working in lockstep with specialized legal spend management (LSM) software to achieve strategic spending goals and manage invoices, we spoke with Melinda Severson, Director of Client Services at Bottomline, and colleague Laura Pillsbury, Director of Expert Bill Review at Bottomline. 

Q: Melinda, you know the pulse of the customer. What do they tend to prioritize? 

Melinda Severson: Most customers expect to meet basic goals. They want to increase efficiency, understand and control their costs, and improve decision making. It's important to have both the right technology and the right people involved to achieve these goals. 

Legal spend management technology (LSM) increases efficiency in several ways. [The right] auditing tool helps customers become more efficient in the audit and reviewing of invoices. It also automates the invoice submission process and provides firms with a centralized platform to submit their invoices for multiple carriers. Efficiency can also be seen on the back end, with payments. LSM tech should integrate with your claim system or your AP system to have case information linked to those invoices, as well as helping you process payments automatically once they have been reviewed and approved in the system. 

Q: Laura, as Director of Expert Bill Review for a global enterprise, you’ve seen it all. Explain how ‘farming out’ some of a law firm’s bill review can improve outcomes? 

Laura Pillsbury: Expert [third-party] Bill Review helps you increase efficiency primarily by taking some of the workload off your claims management team. We've determined that the time spent reviewing and approving invoices can be reduced by up to 90% if you hand off that work to our experts. It lets you concentrate on the main goal of a claims litigation group: thinking strategically. You want to maximize time doing claims work; minimize time in bill review. 

Q: So, the Claims leaders of an insurance carrier just trust someone’s software for a good outcome? 

No. There’s sort of a myth out there that legal bill review is just scanning for keywords with machine learning or AI, but the expert bill review process must always include people. Insurance carriers need very customized reviews based on their own philosophies, their specific guidelines, specialized lines of business, and perhaps regional considerations where you have unique needs and challenges. You want a person managing the billing aspect of relationships. Training and coaching on how to bill appropriately can also be handed over to our experts. 

This way, legal bill submissions look like they need to, and you're generating the kind of data that’s right for your organization. We can make immediate and calibrated shifts if the audit strategy needs changing. That can take a lot of time if you rely on systems alone. Add people to the mix and you can do it immediately. And the appeals process is integrated. 

Q: What specific functionality should be on the LSM solution checklist? 

Melinda Severson: The right technology has tools that help identify invoice issues such as guideline compliance, incorrect rates, and unapproved timekeepers. It provides law firms and other vendors with insight into what could be problematic line items. They now have a way to address that before the customer sees the invoice. An integrated appeals process gives law firms an opportunity after the audit to raise concerns and fix mistakes. 

Q: What about from the Expert Bill Review side, Laura? 

Laura Pillsbury: Knowing an insurance carrier’s legal spend management philosophy is important. Controlling costs means something different to everybody. Most carriers want to pay what they owe, but only what they owe, and they want to make sure that their law firm partners are aligned with their approach to make sure that happens. 

One thing that's unique is the fact that we've always used technology and its objective factors to pair it with a subjective reasonableness review. That is what takes your cost control ability to the next level, because there's a lot of ‘squishiness’ out there in the world of legal bill review, and that's where you can find it -- on a subjective review.