| E-Billing | |
| Black creek Capital | Gary Reiff, Chief Legal Officer |
| Blue Shield of California | Trudy Johnson, Legal Business Manager |
| ModSpace | James Sheets, VP and Corporate Counsel |
| Yahoo | Ron Bell, Deputy General Counsel |
| Matter Collaboration | |
| Capital One | Molly Dodge, Legal Department Staff |
| FMC Technologies | Jeff Carr, General Counsel |
| Nike | Peter H. Koehler, Jr., General Counsel, U.S. Region |
| Budgets and Accruals | |
| Albemarle | Margaret Wendt, Law Department Administrator |
| Lennar | Chris Marlin, Deputy General Counsel |
| Olin Corporation | Stu Roth, Senior Deputy General Counsel |
| Semitool | Craig Bohn, Chief Intellectual Property Counsel |
| Service of Process | |
| PULTE HOMES | Ellen Padesky |
| SKANSKA | Linda Turteltaub, Corporate Counsel |
| Reporting | |
| American Express | Mark LoSacco, Head Litigation Counsel |
| Lennar | Chris Marlin, Deputy General Counsel |
| Small Law Department Benefits | |
| Jamba Juice | Michael Fox, Vice President, Legal Affairs |
| Kruger Products | Alex Teijeira, General Counsel & Director of HR |
| Vail Resorts | Larry Gang, Assistant General Counsel |
| Large Law Departments Benefits | |
| Alcatel-Lucent | Steve Rosen, VP-Law |
| Clear Channel | Andy Levin, EVP & CLO |
| McAfee | Ron Wills, Senior Corporate Counsel & Head of Litigation |
| Implementation | |
| AECOM | Eric Chen, General Counsel |
| Heinz | Karen Katz, Law Department Administrator |
| Olin Corporation | Stu Roth, Senior Deputy General Counsel |
| Stanford University | Debra Zumwalt, General Counsel |
| Savings | |
| Idearc | Joe Garza, VP and Associate General Counsel |
| Kruger Products | Alex Teijeira, General Counsel & Director of HR |
| NRG Energy | Susan Kurtin, Legal and Regulator Department Analyst |
| Resun Leasing | James Sheets, VP and Corporate Counsel |
E-Billing
|
ROUTING LEGAL BILLS TO LEGAL STAFF AND MANAGERS IN
MULTIPLE LOCATIONS Gary Reiff, Chief Legal Officer at Black Creek Group |
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Before: CLO Gary Reiff’s team of three lawyers at
real estate private equity firm Black Creek Group had to
field paper bills covering millions of dollars in legal
work from 20 law firms and send them for approval to
business group leaders located in different offices,
states and countries. “We were trying to keep track of which bills had been reviewed and approved, which had gone to accounts payable and the overall budgeting for the various companies,” Reiff says. “It was exceedingly difficult because we had no coordinated system for review of those bills.” In 2007, Reiff’s team set a three-month deadline for its firms to start submitting bills electronically. In-house, they used the interim to train business group leaders on the system and implement a coding system to make categorizing matters a breeze. |
After: The paper bills are gone, and so are the
days of chasing invoices through the company. Bills are
received, reviewed and paid through Serengeti Tracker,
which Reiff chose for his experience with the system
when he was in private practice. “I didn’t want to create work for our law firms,” he says “You don’t have to code differently or do special things; you just do everything the same—write down time and expenses, and easily translate it into the billing system.” Outside counsel also appreciate that they no longer have to inquire about the status of bills—the system lets them login and check for themselves. The system allows the trio to efficiently manage invoices for “a lot of legal work,” Reiff says. “It allows us to move, review and address legal bills without dealing with paper, and it allows us to cross-compare law firms and rates. We keep up in real time with legal expenses.” |
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The Evolution of E-billing Melissa Maleske | Inside Counsel | 05.12.2010 |
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MANUALLY PROCESSING PAPER BILLS VS. E-BILLING Trudy Johnson, Legal Business Manager at Blue Shield of California |
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"For Trudy Johnson, keeping
track of legal spending at Blue Shield of California
required repetitive, old-fashioned techniques. It started with Johnson, the legal business manager, tearing open the paper bills that law firms mailed to her office. Then someone in her group would make sure the bill met expense guidelines and copy the data from the bill onto a spreadsheet before sending it to accounts payable. 'It was very, very manual,' said Johnson, who was |
determined to find a better way. Johnson found it six months ago when Blue Shield dropped its paper-based procedures for an electronic billing system. The web-based program allows Blue Shield to automate the billing process and quickly sort data, meaning Blue Shield can keep closer tabs on legal spending. 'We have been reaping the benefits ever since,' said Johnson, whose company installed a program by Serengeti Law.'" |
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Paper is going way of dinosaur, but not easily Eric Young | San Francisco Business Times | 09.28.07 |
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GREATER VISIBILITY INTO WHERE LEGAL SPENDING IS GOING James Sheets, VP and Corporate Counsel at ModSpace |
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| "When James Sheets joined ModSpace as the only attorney in January 2004, he decided the modular building company needed a better way to control the number of law firms it was using and keep track of its various matters. 'Basically, firm invoices were being paid without anybody looking at them, and not only that, there were no means of tracking how much we had been paying to law firm XYZ or law firm ABC,' he said. 'We only had the total dollar amount.' | Now, the general counsel of the Berwyn, Pa.-based company uses an electronic matter management system that allows him to keep track of open pieces of litigation and keep tabs on bills from outside counsel, and provides him the data needed to negotiate lower rates. 'I really think the advantages have been gathering the data, giving you the information you need to determine where to spend the money and auditing the invoices so nothing has slipped your intention,' Sheets said." |
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Law Departments Turn To E-Billing To Save Costs Jocelyn Allison | Law 360 | 09.23.09 |
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AUDITING
INVOICES FOR COMPLIANCE WITH BILLING GUIDELINES Ron Bell, Deputy General Counsel at Yahoo |
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| "Yahoo's legal department utilizes a sophisticated e-billing program, which provides the company's lawyers with up-to-date expenditures by its outside law firms and has helped to reduce outside counsel costs. 'Our lawyers can now go in and really have a dialogue with firms when they are billing for things not in our policy,' says Ron Bell, deputy general counsel at Yahoo. 'We can say, 'Why are 100 lawyers on one hearing?' It's useful for having a dialogue about expectations.' Of course, law departments have long operated as cost | centers rather than revenue producers at most, if not all, companies. And while that does not change during bad economic times, it does increase the pressure on GCs and other senior-level in-house counsel to keep an even closer eye on expenses. 'Litigation and acquisitions are still being done,' says Bell. 'But very close attention is being paid to legal services. We're having to be smarter and think carefully and prioritize the work that comes in.'" |
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Economic Pressure May Force Permanent Shift in Corporate
Legal Costs Leslie A. Gorgon | GC California Magazine | 04.16.09 |
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Matter Collaboration
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CENTRALIZING
KEY LEGAL INFORMATION Molly Dodge, Legal Department Staff at Capital One |
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| "Capital One has discovered that one of the fringe benefits of having all of their outside counsel in a shared online ebilling/matter management system is that they can easily put in place and enforce uniform policies that govern their relationships with outside counsel. 'Having multiple billing and matter management systems created additional layers of complexity, as well as an increase in administrative resources,' said Molly Dodge of Capital One’s legal department. 'We now leverage a single system for ebilling and matter management which has decreased the complexity associated with adherence to document retention guidelines and administrative resources, as well as increased efficiencies in legal department reporting.' Providing | outside counsel with access to this central repository enables Capital One to share specific information such as company acronyms, physical locations, forms and templates, and key firm and rate agreements. Several features within this system allow the company to easily enforce outside counsel guidelines by automatically rejecting a firm’s invoices if budgets and/or case assessments are incomplete. 'We have increased our ability to easily analyze our entire legal portfolio, determine internal and external best practices, and reduce costs associated with the maintenance of multiple billing and matter management systems,' added Dodge." |
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Electronic Billing 2.0 Chris Marlin, Stuart Roth, Rob Thomas | ACC Docket | 05.01.09 |
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STANDARDIZING FIRM ENGAGEMENT AND MATTER
OVERSIGHT Jeff Carr, General Counsel at FMC Technologies |
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| "Financial/Administrative Management: All external counsel interface with the company through the Serengeti Tracker system. Each firm has agreed to the company’s ‘‘Covenant with Counsel’’ that sets forth the alliance concepts governing the relationship and stating each party’s commitment to the other philosophically, culturally, promotionally and symbiotically. Each firm has one engagement letter posted to its firm profile that serves as the master services agreement between the company and the firm. ‘‘Work orders’’ for individual matters are in the form of opening a new matter and granting the external firm access to it, thus eliminating repetitive engagement letters and confusion between multi-city firms. All engagements are a variant of the ACES alternative fee arrangement where firms are rewarded for efficiency, economy, success, and customer satisfaction. All invoices are submitted and approved electronically through this platform eliminating paper shuffling and reducing process steps and time. Most payments are made through a VISA purchasing card facility resulting in 4 to 15 day processing time. Budgets, both at the matter and annual level, are created and administered through the system. This also provides metrics and historic data for benchmarking, performance review and continuous improvement. This system has also been incorporated into our SOX | section 404 control for identification and
management of contingent liabilities. As further described below,
all matters, whether handled by
internal counsel, external counsel or mixed teams, are
integrated into the Serengeti Tracker system, thus
fostering efficiency, collaboration and information
leveraging by all members of the Legal Team. Matter Management: All Legal Team members use the Tracker matter management system provided by Serengeti. Lawyers (both inside and out) are required to input and update all matters in the system. This system includes all litigation, intellectual property and general matters and may be sorted in various combinations to provide current and historic data. The General Counsel has direct and real-time access to all matters within the system, and the other lawyers have the same access to matters for their specific business units and other matters within their specialty area. Using technology in this way as an information platform and collaborative tool eliminates the need for lawyers working on matters to write separate reports and/or schedule meetings to discuss case status, and enhances overall efficiencies. In addition, key internal consumers of legal services such as business managers and controllers have access to matters involving their business on it as well." |
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1° LAW Jeff Carr | International In-house Counsel Journal | 06.01.07 |
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BETTER SHARING OF KEY MATTER INFORMATION Peter H. Koehler, Jr., General Counsel, U.S. Region at Nike |
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| "Since joining Nike from private practice, I have seen the many advantages of the system from the client's perspective. Tracker simplifies our processing of bills and budgets, and streamlines the sharing of other | important information about the status of the case. Serengeti Tracker helps us collaborate more efficiently with our outside counsel, both in the U.S. and abroad." |
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Serengeti RANKED No. 1 four
years in a row Serengeti | Advertisement | 02.15.09 |
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Budgets and Accruals
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AUTOMATING THE ACCRUALS COLLECTION PROCESS Margaret Wendt, Law Department Administrator at Albemarle |
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| "'At Albemarle, we took a time consuming manual process for collecting monthly accruals from more than 75 law firms and converted it to the on-line accrual reporting system in Serengeti Tracker. This new workflow allowed us to streamline our entire process | for collecting unbilled amounts and future spending estimates. Setting up the module was simple, and now our monthly accruals are gathered automatically by running one report,' said Margaret Wendt, Law Department Administrator at Albemarle Corporation." |
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Over 1,000 Law Firms Adopt
Serengeti Accrual Reporting Serengeti | Press Release | 09.18.08 |
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PREDICTING FUTURE
SPENDING WITH ONLINE BUDGETS Chris Marlin, Deputy General Counsel at Lennar Corporation |
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| "Chris Marlin, deputy general counsel of Lennar Corporation, describes how ebilling coupled with budget tracking is now at the heart of their management processes: 'Lennar requires budgets from its outside lawyers on all matters, no matter how small. At a time when the homebuilding industry is in its toughest economic position in decades, if not in its history, the ability to project and manage fees and costs, in every kind of case, large and small, is a business imperative. | Our ebilling and matter management system enables us to provide as much predictability in fees to its business units and divisions as practical and enables outside lawyers to update budgetary projections as a case develops and changes course. Our in-house attorneys also utilize the budgeting capabilities of Serengeti Tracker to run cost-benefit analytics on matters that may merit new direction.'" |
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Electronic Billing 2.0 Chris Marlin, Stuart Roth, Rob Thomas | ACC Docket | 05.01.09 |
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ENHANCING FINANCIAL REPORT
ACCURACY WITH ACCRUAL DATA Stu Roth, Senior Deputy General Counsel at Olin Corporation |
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| "In order to comply with public company reporting requirements, most law departments must report on not only what has been billed by their outside counsel but also the time that has been spent and not yet billed. Accruals of unbilled time can be material on larger matters, as well as on a high volume of smaller matters that may not be billed each month. Like many other law departments, Olin Corporation collected such information each quarter through a series of phone calls and emails to its firms, followed by two weeks of data entry, organization and report generation. Since the initiation of online accrual collection last year by Serengeti, Olin simply calendars when the information is required from its firms and the system does the rest — | informing the firms, providing a convenient upload mechanism for the required information and organizing the information into the necessary reports. 'At each accrual collection deadline, we can now immediately generate reports that we need to quantify the unbilled work, estimates of additional work to be billed during the accrual period and all bills that are in our review process — for our total accrual numbers,' said Stu Roth, Olin’s senior deputy general counsel. 'The system not only saves us weeks of time every quarter, but also provides more accurate reports than the manual processes that we had to use before this new functionality was available.'" |
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Electronic Billing 2.0 Chris Marlin, Stuart Roth, Rob Thomas | ACC Docket | 05.01.09 |
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CHECKING BUDGETS, STATUS, AND STAFFING DURING BILL REVIEW Craig Bohn, Chief Intellectual Property Counsel at Semitool, Inc. |
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| "The monthly review of bills is also often the best time to check to see if a project is on track. As a result, sophisticated ebilling/matter management systems present not only bills, but also key information regarding spending versus budget, the latest status reports from outside counsel, summaries of law firm staffing and the most recent estimates of exposure. Instead of pulling the file and spreading out documents on your desk as | you review a bill, the latest ebilling systems can save you significant time by putting this information one click away. 'The month before beginning ebilling it took me seven working days to review our paper bills,' said Craig Bohn, chief intellectual property counsel at Semitool, Inc. 'The next month, it took me only two hours to approve the same volume of bills coming through Serengeti.'" |
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Electronic Billing 2.0 Chris Marlin, Stuart Roth, Rob Thomas | ACC Docket | 05.01.09 |
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Service of
Process
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RESPOND MORE QUICKLY TO COURT
DEADLINES Ellen Padesky, Corporate Counsel at Pulte Homes |
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| "We are delighted that CT and Serengeti have worked together to provide this new integration. This not only | saves us a significant amount of time, but also helps us to act more quickly to respond to court deadlines.” |
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CT and
Serengeti Announce Integration Between Service of Process
and Matter Management Systems Serengeti | Press Release | 09.14.06 |
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EASILY TRACK EACH SOP DOCUMENT ONLINE Linda Turteltaub,Corporate Counsel at Skanska |
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| "Having the service of process documents feed directly into Serengeti from CSC has made a definite impact on the Legal Department. With Serengeti and CSC, we can easily retrieve our SOP documents, notify the | appropriate people, and monitor response due dates. Moreover, because the entire process is electronic, we can easily track the processing of each SOP document online.” |
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CSC and Serengeti Announce XML Integration Between CSC’s SOP
and Serengeti’s Matter Management Systems Serengeti | Press Release | 05.10.07 |
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Reporting
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USING REPORTS FOR TRIAGE Mark LoSacco, Head Litigation Counsel at American Express |
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| "Objective results assessment often is
based upon electronic billing data and information automatically
tracked by matter-management systems. Such data may include amounts
paid or received at the conclusion of the legal project, the duration of the project, the number of hours spent on the project (this could include in-house as well as outside counsel), aggregate fees and expenses, and comparisons between predicted and actual outcomes for fees and expenses, duration, and amounts paid or received. ...[A]nalysis of such information can highlight better-than-average performers who merit a larger share of the company’s legal work. For busy in-house counsel |
managing many projects, such data can also help to identify
the areas in which their time would be best spent (for example,
situations in which spending is too low or too high compared with
the potential losses). 'We use objective data regarding spending, results, and exposure predictions to perform triage,' said Mark LoSacco, who oversees all domestic litigation for American Express. 'We run frequent reports that help us to know which cases may be getting off track so that we can concentrate on those situations where we will have the most impact.'" |
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After the Case, Analyze the Results Chris Marlin, Stuart Roth, Rob Thomas | ACC Docket | 05.01.09 |
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MEASURING OUTSIDE COUNSEL PERFORMANCE Chris Marlin, Deputy General Counsel at Lennar Corporation |
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| "The Lennar legal department has weighted certain metrics that it utilizes to measure outside counsel performance, rate outside counsel, and determine with which lawyers and firms it places its legal spend. Some of those metrics are automatically and objectively measured by the Serengeti system, including total cost to resolve and case cycle time. Substantive legal differences, regional and other differences can be accounted for in the reporting tools offered through the ebilling and matter tracking system. Serengeti also | enhances the subjective, more qualitative assessments of lawyers, by providing the context for important evaluative information relating to each lead lawyer on each case. Lennar uses these opportunities to contribute data to the evaluation of lawyers so that it can quickly assess its national litigation portfolio and determine which lawyers do the best job at which kind of case—and which lawyers are meeting the company’s strategic objectives most directly." |
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Electronic Billing 2.0 Chris Marlin, Stuart Roth, Rob Thomas | ACC Docket | 05.01.09 |
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Small Law Department Benefits
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SOLO ATTORNEY DOING THE WORK OF MANY Michael Fox, Vice President, Legal Affairs at Jamba Juice |
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| "'It just makes life easier,' said Michael Fox, the only in-house lawyer at Jamba Juice Co., the Emeryville operator of smoothie shops nationwide. Fox switched to an e-billing system from a paper-based system shortly after joining the company 2 1/2 years ago. | Fox's system lets him keep especially close tabs on the cost of lease-related work, a critical area to a company that has 640 locations. 'That would almost be impossible to do on paper (bills). It would take too much time to figure it out. ... It's well worth the money."" |
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Paper is going way of dinosaur,
but not easily Eric Young | San Francisco Business Times | 09.28.07 |
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LEVERAGING
OUTSIDE COUNSEL TO GET MORE DONE Alex Teijeira, General Counsel and Director of HR at Kruger Products |
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| "With the latest Web-based ebilling systems, even the smallest law departments that have little technical or other support can now quickly connect with their outside counsel. Alex Teijeira, the solo GC and director of HR for Kruger Products in Ontario, Canada, manages numerous law firms worldwide for a wide range of legal issues that run the gamut from IP to litigation and compliance. He decided how he wanted to organize the spending and other information in Serengeti’s ebilling/ | matter management system and then had his firms put in their active projects. 'All of my outside counsel—in Canada and internationally—were already on the network, so with their help I was able to fully implement my practice in less than three weeks. Now instead of stacks of paper, all of my legal files, spending and budgets are available online with a few mouse clicks.'" |
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Electronic Billing 2.0 Chris Marlin, Stuart Roth, Rob Thomas | ACC Docket | 05.01.09 |
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SMALL LAW DEPARTMENT BENEFITS Larry Gang, Assistant General Counsel at Vail Resorts |
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| "Serengeti has been great for our smaller law department. With only a few in-house lawyers we are able to efficiently audit invoices from all of our firms, manage budgets and documents, and track key information online. We can also quickly generate the | management report that we need. Small law departments get the same system and service as the largest companies on Serengeti. This is an excellent choice for a department of our size." |
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Serengeti No. 1... Yet again Serengeti | Advertisement | 02.15.06 |
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Large Law Departments Benefits
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GREATER
EFFICIENCY AT A MULTI-NATIONAL LAW
DEPARTMENT Steve Rosen, VP-Law at Alcatel-Lucent |
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| "'We wanted a system that would make us significantly more efficient managing our legal work with outside firms, that would be easy to use for our professional and support staff worldwide, and that would allow us to work with our outside counsel firms more effectively' said Steve Rosen, VP-Law. 'Serengeti helps us meet | these goals and also helps eliminate much of the paper that we were dealing with, since we now have organized online information coming in directly from our law firms, which helps us stay on top of our legal spending and results.'" |
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Serengeti Matter Management
Helps Lucent Technologies Connect with Firms Worldwide Serengeti | Press Release | 03.25.03 |
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COORDINATION OF WIDELY DISPERSED LEGAL TEAMS Andy Levin, EVP & CLO at Clear Channel |
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| "Clear Channel was one of the first customers on Serengeti. Over the years, we have benefited from 8 major releases—each of which has incorporated customer feedback and delivered useful new features. We have also watched them extend their | legal platform to firms and corporations worldwide. With Serengeti, our widely dispersed legal teams have replaced much of the paper that we used to receive with online data coming directly from our firms." |
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Serengeti No. 1... Yet again Serengeti | Advertisement | 02.15.06 |
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ORGANIZED LEGAL
WORK AROUND THE WORLD Ron Wills, Senior Corporate Counsel and Head of Litigation at McAfee |
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| "With law department offices and law firms across four continents, McAfee was challenged by keeping track of the changing inventory of legal work, spending, and current status of key projects. 'We needed an ebilling system that would be flexible enough to accommodate the many currencies that our company and firms are working in, as well being simple enough that we could realistically require all of our firms worldwide to do ebilling,' said Ron Wills, McAfee’s senior corporate counsel and head of litigation. 'Now that we have all of our legal work on Serengeti, we can run up-to-date reports on inventory, spending, budgets, and status, | and we have saved hundreds of thousands of dollars using Serengeti to enforce our outside counsel guidelines.' Once the ebilling connection is established, it also becomes convenient to collect regular status updates, deadlines, documents and accruals directly from outside counsel around the world. 'Our reconciliation of unbilled time sitting out there on the books of our firms used to involve hundreds of pages for each period,' added Wills. 'Now the accruals come in directly from outside counsel worldwide, and are available in a single report in Serengeti.'" |
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Electronic Billing 2.0 Chris Marlin, Stuart Roth, Rob Thomas | ACC Docket | 05.01.09 |
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Implementation
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WORLDWIDE ROLL-OUT Eric Chen, General Counsel at AECOM |
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| "AECOM is Serengeti’s 250th customer: A global provider of professional technical and management support services to a broad range of markets, including transportation, facilities, environmental and energy. With more than 43,000 employees in over 100 countries, AECOM is a leader in all of the key markets that it serves. 'With projects from San Francisco to Abu Dhabi, our legal department is looking forward to standardizing processes, improving control of our legal spending, and | reducing our environmental impacts with e-bills and electronic documents in Serengeti’s online system,' said Eric Chen, AECOM general counsel. 'We selected Tracker because of its widespread acceptance in the legal profession, and its ability to meet the specific needs of our worldwide operations, including our sustainability initiatives. We’re happy to represent this milestone in Serengeti’s growth.'" |
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Serengeti Extends Lead in Legal
Matter Management/E-Billing Serengeti | Press Release | 04.15.09 |
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TOTAL ADOPTION WORLDWIDE Stu Roth, Senior Deputy General Counsel at Olin Corporation |
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| "At first, many people in-house thought 80% adoption by our top 20 firms would be a success. Today, all of our firms send 100% of their bills to the U.S. through | Serengeti, and we expect the same total adoption overseas." |
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Electronic Billing 2.0 Chris Marlin, Stuart Roth, Rob Thomas | ACC Docket | 05.01.09 |
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QUICK IMPLEMENTATION Stu Roth, Senior Deputy General Counsel at Olin Corporation |
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| "Olin Corporation set up a combined ebilling/matter management system with over 500 active matters, including training and connection of the law department and all of its law firms and other vendors worldwide, in less than two months. Stu Roth, senior deputy general counsel who headed up the project, cites two main reasons for its success. 'First, we made very specific decisions regarding the information that we wanted to be able to report on from the system, and used those priorities to drive the necessary system configurations (matter types, business units, etc.). Second, we were very clear with our firms and other vendors regarding | the information we expected them to provide at the outset, including deadlines for providing this information. We kept the initial requirements as simple as possible so that there would be no excuse for delay, and then had supplemental information entered later (either by ourselves or by our firms).' As a result, Olin was able to quickly begin processing all of its law department spending online, and then add to it the collection of exposure estimates, status updates, accruals of unbilled time and other key information once the system was up and running." |
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Electronic Billing 2.0 Chris Marlin, Stuart Roth, Rob Thomas | ACC Docket | 05.01.09 |
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POSITIVE LAW FIRM RESPONSE Debra Zumwalt, General Counsel at Stanford University |
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| "Serengeti Tracker connects Stanford’s legal team with its internal clients and its law firms in a shared online system that efficiently tracks spending, activities, and results. As part of the implementation, Serengeti converted Stanford’s data from LAWTRAC Online, the system that Stanford had previously used to manage its legal work. | 'Our top priority was a system that is easy to use for both our lawyers and our outside counsel,' said Debra Zumwalt, Stanford’s General Counsel. 'The response from our law firms has been very positive. Because Serengeti is a convenient way for our firms to transmit information to us, we receive more timely and useful updates, and can track the latest developments across all of our legal work.'" |
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Stanford University Law
Department Implements Serengeti Tracker
Serengeti | Press Release | 02.07.05 |
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Savings
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$50,000 SAVINGS IN
FIRST 9 MONTHS THROUGH BETTER GUIDELINE ENFORCEMENT Joe Garza, Vice President and Associate General Counsel at Idearc |
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| "Like many law departments, Idearc (formerly Verizon Information Services) decided to adopt an online system for working with outside counsel primarily because of the advantages of ebilling over the manual processing of paper bills. They were able to show concrete savings by putting expense guidelines into place with their firms, which were enforced through the system, saving approximately $50,000 on expense audits during their first nine months. Once the ebilling connection with their firms was established, they began requiring more information from their firms, having them input key data directly into the system regarding pending projects. 'Now that we are comfortable that we are capturing our | spending from outside counsel electronically, we are looking forward to using the same system to better manage other key aspects of our legal projects,' said Joe Garza, Idearc’s vice president and associate general counsel. 'We expect a smooth transition into the broader use of project budgets, collaboration on documents, tracking of deadlines, and requiring periodic status updates from outside counsel.' This phased approach is common because it permits legal teams to adapt gradually to the use of online systems that connect the law department with outside counsel, from ebilling into the wider use of matter management for appropriate projects." |
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Electronic Billing 2.0 Chris Marlin, Stuart Roth, Rob Thomas | ACC Docket | 05.01.09 |
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30% SAVINGS THROUGH BETTER MATTER
MANAGEMENT Alex Teijeira, General Counsel and Director of HR at Kruger Products |
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| Paying bills before Serengeti was
"hell." He received "about two kilograms" of paper bills a month and
it could take up to six months for them to be processed – including
rekeying in Kruger's systems, which introduced "massive" numbers of
errors – and then paid. Now, firms "print" invoices to a file formatted using the legal electronic data exchange standard, which is supported by virtually all legal billing systems, and |
upload it to Serengeti. The system
automatically sorts and attaches invoices to relevant
matters. Teijeira credits Serengeti with a 30-per-cent reduction in
legal spending. "...The investment repays itself very quickly," he says. Most of the reduction comes from better matter management. "Being well managed means instructions are clearer, information back from firms is clearer, and billing is absolutely clear," says Teijeira. |
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Bye Bye
Extranets Gerry Blackwell | Canadian Lawyer | 01.01.10 |
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$1,000,000 SAVINGS IN FIRST 10 MONTHS FROM LEGAL BILL REDUCTIONS Susan Kurtain, Legal and Regulator Department Analyst at NRG Energy |
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| "During its first 10 months of ebilling, NRG Energy realized over a million dollars in savings through the reduction of legal bills. A key aspect of NRG’s management of legal spending is putting in place project budgets with their outside counsel. Just having a budget can make a big difference in the conduct of outside counsel; having a system that continuously monitors spending compared with the budget helps in-house counsel keep projects on track. Susan Kurtain, analyst for the legal andompliance departments, noted that, 'NRG’s fiscal priority i to | manage to the matter budget that gets established when a matter is opened. Using Serengeti to manage the legal spend for NRG allows us to track on a real-time basis the total spend for a matter to its current fiscal matter budget—thus keeping NRG apprised of its current performance versus the plan. The system also allows for mandatory budget requirements to be set before invoices can be processed, which keeps both the firms and NRG engaged in the process of managing to budgets.'" |
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Electronic Billing 2.0 Chris Marlin, Stuart Roth, Rob Thomas | ACC Docket | 05.01.09 |
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|
$300,000 SAVINGS IN YEAR ONE FROM
COMBINED E-BILLING AND MATTER MANAGEMENT James Sheets, Vice President and Corporate Counsel of Resun Leasing |
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| "The solo-attorney law department at Resun Leasing was able to realize savings in the first year in excess of $300,000 (approximately 40 percent of prior annual legal spending) by diligently using a combined electronic billing and matter-management system. 'With ebilling, we recognized inefficiencies in prior billings, implemented an audit system, and tracked legal spending by matter | type,' said James Sheets, Vice President and Corporate Counsel for Resun Leasing. 'With electronic billing and online reporting, we were able to recognize which types of matters were more suited to in-house work while knowing what to pay efficient, reasonably priced outside counsel for more specialized matters.'" |
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Electronic Billing Enters the Mainstream Rick Lavers, James Sheets, and Rob Thomas | ACC Docket | 05.01.06 |
|
