In-House Counsel

In mid-May, I invited ten providers of e-billing software to answer three questions. I followed up several times with the invitees. Eight companies eventually sent me data: Allegiant, Bottomline, Bridgeway, CTTymetrix, DataCert, doeLegal, LawTrac, and Serengeti.

One question asked for the ?Number of bills (invoices) processed by your system on behalf of law departments during the past six months.? Both the average and the median were slightly above 370,000 (approximately 60,000 a month); the range, however, included two that processed less than 100,000 invoices during the period and two that processed more than 600,000 invoices.

Disregarding the number of law departments that have licensed a system, the differences in numbers of invoices processed could be due to (1) policy choices by general counsel regarding how widely they want to use e-billing among law firms; (2) inclusion of vendors other than firms, such as patent agents or discovery vendors; and (3) billing policies of users, such as deferring bills for another month or two if the bill amount doesn?t reach a certain threshold.