Getting paid for hours the firm had already worked

A mid-size insurance defense and commercial litigation firm runs three offices and 48 attorneys, serving as panel counsel to eight carriers alongside a broader litigation and corporate practice. It ran on a patchwork: Tabs3 for billing, shared drives for documents, a 14-tab spreadsheet one coordinator kept by hand from carrier guideline PDFs, and email for nearly everything else.

• Every carrier sets its own approved timekeepers, rates, increments, and codes, across 10 guideline documents that change without notice
• A paralegal's new rate was filed but never reached the adjuster, so for six weeks every invoice carrying her time bounced
• An associate learned what Thursday's entry got wrong in a reduction notice two months later, if a partner forwarded it
• Rejections were tracked in dry-erase marker, and last quarter three aged past the 60-day appeal deadline and were written off
• Matter status depended on which office opened the file, and manual intake delayed data entry, and conflict checks, by days

We ran a phased modernization, sequenced so the billing crisis got fixed first while building toward one connected operating picture for the whole firm. Each phase delivered a working, standalone improvement before the next layer went in, so casework and billing never stopped.

Billing rules and invoice screening

The 10 guideline documents become one dated rule set, each rule citing the paragraph it came from, with roughly 60 discrepancies against the old spreadsheet settled. Every invoice is screened against that carrier's terms, rates, people, caps, math, and codes, before it leaves the building.

Time-entry feedback

Entries are still recorded as written, but the timekeeper hears back the same day, while the work is fresh, instead of in a reduction notice nine weeks later.

Write-down governance

Work a carrier will not pay for reaches the billing partner before the invoice goes out, as a deliberate decision rather than a write-off discovered months later.

Appeals and rejection tracking

Every rejection is a tracked record with an owner, a deadline reminder, and one dashboard of causes, so nothing ages past a 60-day appeal window unnoticed.

Legal CRM and client intake

Standardized onboarding forms, automated conflict checks, and rules-based assignment route new matters to the right team on day one instead of days later.

Case management, documents, and contracts

Every matter is visible from intake to resolution across all three offices, with court schedules, filings, and documents under version control. Contract creation, review, and renewals are automated, AI-assisted research supports larger matters, and a secure portal gives carriers self-service visibility.