Transcript:
The matter life cycle within a law firm and any professional services firm is incredibly complex. There’s lots of different stages, lots of different people and teams working in there. And so when you get to the billing stages, which happen at various stages through that matter, if that time isn’t compliant, if we’ve forgotten about some terms and it goes out on a bill to the client, it’s not necessarily that the client responds immediately to say this bill’s wrong.
Quite often there’s a delay on the client side. Then when they come back, you have to look, you have to issue a new bill, you have to go back through all of that past work to understand what should have been billed, what shouldn’t have been billed. So every time you’re non compliant on your terms, it’s opening up a delay for your client to spot that, to respond back to you and for you to then go and work out how you should be more compliant. So if you imagine that’s happening three or four stages or three or four times during a matter, you can end up with quite significant delay from having done the work to when you actually get paid for it.
It’s incredibly important for law firms to really focus on the guidelines and the terms that they agree with their clients and make sure that they’re compliant with them throughout the matter life cycle and hopefully throughout the rest of that relationship. What we’ve seen in in practice is where firms use technology to track that, they’re much more likely to stay compliant. They’re much more likely to have happier clients, which leads to better outcomes for both.
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