How Seyfarth Shaw automates legal billing workflows with Intapp Billstream

Seyfarth Shaw deployed Intapp Billstream to visualize and automate each stage of the firm’s legal billing workflow, delivering increased visibility into workloads for its highly distributed teams.

Seyfarth Shaw LLP — an Am Law 100 firm with more than 900 lawyers across 17 offices — provides advisory, litigation, and transactional legal services to clients worldwide. For 75 years, the firm has upheld a commitment to excellence and innovation, which extends beyond the practice of law to how it runs its business, including the firm’s operations management technology, such as its financial systems.

Specialized legal billing software solutions for the firm’s needs

Am Law 100 firm Seyfarth Shaw sought to streamline its legal billing workflows and increase visibility across the firm’s highly distributed teams. Because billing team members work from nearly all of the firm’s global office locations — and generate a higher-than-average number of draft invoices — the firm needed a legal billing software to help staff and lawyers generate invoices as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Members of Seyfarth Shaw’s financial systems and billing teams, its director of finance, and CFO evaluated several options.

“When we saw a demo of Intapp Billstream, we really liked the workflow functionality and the visibility it provided for each stage of the billing process,” said Moe Ban, Financial Systems Manager at Seyfarth Shaw.

“We knew it would be easy to roll out without a lot of handholding,” said Ban. Intapp’s implementation partner Wilson Allen “helped with our last three Elite Enterprise conversions, [and] our experiences through those conversions and other custom development projects have been very positive, so we felt comfortable choosing a vendor we knew and trusted.”

We easily transitioned to Intapp Billstream, even with everyone working out of the office.

MOE BAN, FINANCIAL SYSTEMS MANAGER, SEYFARTH SHAW

Successful, streamlined implementation

During the implementation planning phase, the Seyfarth Shaw team realized that they’d be able to minimize software customizations and streamline a rapid rollout, due to Intapp Billstream’s market-leading, proven technology built for the unique needs of legal billing teams.

“The software has been developed by people who clearly understand the billing process,” Ban said.

During implementation, the development team and Seyfarth Shaw staff worked together to tailor the software’s rich feature set for the firm’s workflows, with bespoke status alerts and personalized reporting capabilities.

“The team helped us move everything along,” said Ban. “They’re very competent and were great to work with.”

Increased visibility and transparent workflows

The firm’s teams quickly benefitted from increased visibility into workloads and workflows. “Intapp Billstream gives people a distinct list of items to work on, which makes it clear what is outstanding and what is with someone else,” Ban says. “Gaining this visibility, being able to report on that, and receiving alerts on the status of draft invoices has helped us streamline draft to bill processes significantly.”

The firm’s lawyers now enjoy a higher degree of confidence that their draft invoice edits will be made precisely as intended, rather than being misunderstood or misread. Lawyers also gain another opportunity to review draft invoices without too much back-and-forth with the billing group.

For the billing group, implementing legal billing software Intapp Billstream has minimized the number of double entries on edits, saving time and effort during invoice preparation.

“Intapp Billstream adds a clear workflow to the entire draft to final bill process,” Ban said.

Gaining this visibility … and receiving alerts on the status of draft invoices has helped us streamline draft to bill processes significantly.

MOE BAN, FINANCIAL SYSTEMS MANAGER, SEYFARTH SHAW

Immediate gains and future-proof options

Seyfarth Shaw professionals are pleased with Intapp Billstream’s capabilities, and its technical team is impressed with the firm’s rapid adoption of the solution.

“We easily transitioned to Intapp Billstream, even with everyone working out of the office,” said Ban.

Currently, Seyfarth Shaw uses Elite Enterprise for practice management, but plans to move to a new solution, keeping its options open with the flexibility provided by Intapp Billstream’s forward-compatibility with a wide variety of future system possibilities.

Executive Summary

Seyfarth Shaw — an Am Law 100 advisory and transactional law firm with more than 900 lawyers across 17 offices in 170 countries in the Americas, EMEA, and Asia-Pacific regions — implemented Intapp Billstream as its billing workflow solution.

Challenges

  • The firm’s distributed billing team works from nearly all of the firm’s offices, increasing the need for visibility across the firm’s global footprint.
  • The team generates a higher-than-average number of draft invoices while requiring accuracy and timely billing.

Results with Intapp

  • Rapid implementation: Purpose-built software tailored for the unique needs of legal billing processes has streamlined deployment, getting the firm up and running in 45 days.
  • Reduced data entry and errors and leakage: Intapp Billstream minimizes double entries and errors during the invoicing process.
  • Maximized revenue: Integration with compliance features have led to fewer bill queries and faster settlement, reducing leakage by 20%.