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Invoicely pricing for Public Relations

hello and thank you for joining us for the next episode of the digital transformation of the legal industry webinar series this episode will discuss an slw digital transformation case study in billing invoicing client budgeting and cost projection this is the seventh episode in an eight part series if you missed any of the previous episodes you can find recordings on the slw institute on the slw website a recording of the webinar and the slides will be made available to all feel free to enter any questions using the q and a feature in the zoom menu we invite you to follow us on linkedin to see news about other upcoming webinars and with that i'll turn things over to our moderator thanks michelle steve lundberg here um schweitman lundberg today we've got uh welcome everybody to the to the presentation as we've got a kind of an interesting you know uh behind the curtain presentation about what goes on in the in the uh billing area of a law firm uh and we've got a great lineup today to bring us a lot of perspective and some of the practical aspects of what we do so uh our first speaker today is going to be janelle kallus who's been a speaker on many of our programs and janelle is going to focus on the history of billing uh janelle's practice uh principally is around strategic counseling and fto and patent analytics but today she's going to be talking about the history of billing um so we're glad to have janelle and then we've got three people from our uh accounting department uh which is terrific department and uh we've got bob brace who's our executive director of the firm also uh led the accounting department before his current job for a long time we've got shayna devine who's our currently our account county manager and sheena's got many many years in the ip space and as well as kelly ebert who also helps us with our billing kelly's also very accomplished in every billing system you can think of andre murray is also on the panel andre is going to be talking about budgeting andre does a lot of represents a lot of large companies that have very i guess i would call it strong needs for very accurate budget predictions as we all know many of our clients the budget is to keep on track of that and make sure you hit it is as important as the legal work in some ways so andre is going to talk about that and last but not least um jill young who is our software manager management firm and she is a total expert in how to get billing into our accounting system and also transform it into the various um codes and such that our clients need so with that i'm going to kick it off and our first speaker is janelle janelle take it away thanks steve uh today i'm going to talk about a brief history of law firm billing which uh turned out to be a lot more interesting than i thought it would next slide okay before the 18 the mid to late 1800s lawyers in the united states basically charged what they thought their clients could pay and uh one example of this was abraham lincoln uh lincoln typically charged five dollars to twenty dollars and it could be anything from uh putting on a trial to writing an appeal brief or anything in between he did have one case though where he charged a railroad five thousand dollars in order uh that the railroad obtained immunity from paying taxes lincoln lost at the trial level he lost at the state appellate level but he won at the supreme court uh and after all that when he went to collect his fee the railroad refused they tried to stiff him so lincoln sued the railroad and uh eventually did get his five thousand dollars okay after that um in the uh mid to late eighteen hundreds u.s legal fees were capped per service by state law and litigation fees were usually paid by the losing party some lawyers were able to collect bonuses or charge retainers to circumvent the limitation of capped fees in 1908 the ada declared contingency fees to be ethical which opened a new source of revenue for at least litigation matters by the 1930s and 40s however the nature of legal fees was set on its head uh by what had been a cap system and that was turned into a base system state bars began publishing minimum fees in most cases providing that those lawyers charged less than the minimums that were to be punished similarly the aba model code which stayed in effect until 1969 declared it unethical to undervalue services eventually change was necessary and helping fuel this change in attitude was the expansion in 1938 of the federal and many states rules of civil procedure which made litigation potentially more complicated and therefore less amenable to flat fees uh and it wasn't just uh litigation it was also transactional law over time uh lawyers complained that dentists and doctors were out earning them next slide a 1958 aba pamphlet contended that lawyers were bad businessmen in comparison to other professionals the remedy being to better track time and keep more detailed records that pamphlet suggested that lawyers work 1300 hours a year or five to six hours a day five days a week for a 48 week year in 1975 the supreme court outlawed both the capped 1800s practice and the base system from the 1940s and held that set fees for legal services constituted price fixing and was a violation of antitrust laws coming in right about this time uh was what was called the billable hour by the late 1970s most lawyers charged for services based on hourly billing however the billable hour did not just appear out of nowhere uh it was actually invented by reginald heber smith in 1914 in order to increase efficiency of the boston legal aid uh group uh in boston and uh uh heber's rachel hebert smith basically invented the time sheet and uh his timesheet was uh divided into six minute increments uh smith said that the service the lawyer renders is his professional knowledge and skill but the commodity he sells is time later it was found lawyers who tracked their time made more net income than lawyers who didn't track time made in gross income and way before the 1970s the first law firm to bill by time was shearman and sterling next slide okay the 1980s saw a rise in audits of law firm invoices first manual invoices and then automated software this was because over time clients came to feel that um that uh the billable our way of billing uh did tend to inflate their bills and so they wanted to do anything they could to get their costs under control by the 2000s pushback from clients against hourly billing has brought back flat fee billing for much of prep crosswork and software advances have resulted in each client having its own rules regarding what can be built and how much can be charged next slide uh and here's that picture of reynold reginald heber smith the father of the billable hour as well as the father of legal aid uh so that was a brief history of of law firm billing i'm going to move it over now away from the past towards the president future and introduce andre who's going to talk about budgeting thanks janelle uh yeah fascinating uh fascinating history there of uh of bullying in the legal profession thank you um yeah so just uh i'm just gonna briefly deal with uh some budgeting issues um and just you know mainly dealing with the the question of uncertainty in budgeting and i think this is this is something we really you know kind of battle with um you know we have a lot of clients who ask us for budget estimates maybe on a you know monthly basis but more typically a quarterly basis and then an annual basis and and this is this can be a challenge because of you know uncertainties that creep in um due to a number of factors you know one of these particularly is you know prosecution as as a patent application is making its way through the patent office um we we really often don't know when you know an office action is going to you know be issued against the case or when you're going to get an allowance so just dealing with the u.s you know patent office and patent offices internationally inherently introduces a lot of uncertainty also when estimating budgets for a year there might be some decisions coming up like a foreign filing decision typically which can be a very expensive decision if you're if you're you know extending a patent application to you know five or six countries uh and and filing over there it could be that could be a fifty thousand dollar um and and that's a lot of money but very often at the beginning of the year we may have no idea and the client may have no idea whether they actually want to you know foreign file a family of patents and if so how broadly and that's just because we just don't have enough information as to the legal prospects of the case you know we might not have you know seen any office actions or uh had any uh prosecution on any of the corresponding applications and then also on the business side if a family of you know if a patent family is covering a certain product there might still be uncertainty at when we are asked to produce the budget as to whether that product is really that going to be commercially valuable so typically you want to push those decisions up but anyway that's just to you know just highlighting two of the uncertainties that come in uh so if we could kind of move to the next slide so when we're doing a budget for you know a patent budget for a for a client or a company uh we will typically break out the uh the fees and expenditures into preparation uh and filing expenditures and prosecution uh expenditures and i think it's very helpful to uh to break those those out you know typically the the preparation and filing expenditures tend to be more predictable and more controllable than than the prosecution fees and expenses but even with the prosecution uh i mean with the preparation uh and filing fees there there are a bunch of variables that can creep in there you know are you gonna be finding provisional patent applications versus uh you know utility filings and all those utility filings continuations and again the foreign filing question that i mentioned earlier so even with there there are there are you know it's not really just a simple equation of are we going to file this many applications next year what's the budget and then on the prosecution side of things you know often we'll see the uh you know what call the kind of prosecution costs snowball the more cases you have in the portfolio and as they progressing through the patent office that's the snowball that tends to uh you know gather steam and gather costs and and certainly they're you know cases that are being allowed and kind of falling out of the prosecution snowball but by and large that that tends to uh tends to take a while to reach steady state for for most companies and if if a client is asking you know for it how do we how do we cut the budget by ten percent next year for example if we look at this prosecution leg uh it really is a bit of a difficult decision and you typically don't want to be making just in time decisions there for example if you receive an office action and it may be you know if you want to abandon 10 of your portfolio in in order to reduce that to make that decision as individual office actions come in may is tricky because you might not want to be abandoning it might be a key case and uh you obviously want to prune the the less valuable assets if you are going to looking to cut costs over there so just a you know a plug for some of the other presentations we've talked about doing portfolio analysis and ranking and rating and really having your portfolio organized and ranked and rated so you know which are your most valuable assets which are your least valuable assets uh going in can be very helpful to reduce the prosecution uh spend so when an office action comes in on a case it's then you you kind of know you know relative to our whole portfolio is a lower or higher value case and that can assist with the decision making there so just an aside on that front so you know take take your mind we're we're going to be looking at uh budgeting for prep and then for prosecution if we go to the next slide i'm just going to quickly go through some budgeting approaches so the the the and these approaches are arranged uh ing to uh sophistication um and so let me put it that way so the first one is really looking at the docket report and saying okay what what do we know uh is coming up in the next three months and uh you know what are what are the estimates for that so typically we can use kind of the docket report plus a bit of guesstimating uh for a shorter time frame typically a three-month outlook but obviously you know we have no idea typically beyond the three months what's going to happen and as far as office action goes with respect to prosecution any and even if you are looking at a docket at any point in time and looking three months out there may be some events that are going to occur within that three-month period that would not appear on the docket uh something may come in with a uh you know a final office action for example which is a two month response date or there might be something which just uh you want to respond to more quickly um so i'd say that's probably the easiest and the least sophisticated uh the the second approach which is more useful for doing longer term budgeting you know if you were doing a budget for a year uh or you know you know two quarters is is looking at historical data and then at building in some projections and then the third approach and the most sophisticated is deploying machine learning plus projections to to uh estimate what your you know what your budget may be for the next year so moving on to the next slide this is a screenshot of a spreadsheet that we use internally for some clients to generate budget projections for a year and this is the this would correspond to the the second tab on the previous slide we look at historical data plus uh projections and uh what what you'll see here is the the yellow fields are input fields and we can plug in various numbers over here which then kind of spits out that that the pie chart you see on the right there you know showing for a particular year us prep and filing non-us preparation so basically uh you know preparation or preparation filing of non-us applications and a similar breakout for prosecution uh u.s prosecution and non-us prosecution and then also kind of miscellaneous counselling work um the in in in this in the second set of yellow boxes over there you'll see um you know filing assumptions and that that's where we will typically ask the client for various types of applications you know what are you planning for the next year and we'll also show them their data in the in the column next to that you know which is headed previous year how many of those types of applications they filed in the previous year so for this example client they might have said to us we want to file 16 you know original uh new applications uh five conversions uh i think it's ten ten cons and and five provisionals etc so we'll plug all those numbers in and and that really populates the preparation row in the in the in the kind of table above that the the more you know where we estimate um we bring in the estimations based on historical data it's more on the prosecution which is the second row on the top um table over there you'll see it says price monthly and those inputs the 18 000 3000 those are really generated based on looking at what was spent in the previous year and doing some uh regression analysis and typically linear regression analysis on on the previous year or two years of data and uh so we uh the next idle show is how we get that but just before we move on so those numbers are are inputted uh based on on historical data and you know using using this technique of inputting the filing assumptions how many cases do you think you're going to file this next year also then from the from the prosecution side of things looking at what was your spend last year and uh and kind of projecting that out to to this year we found that to be pretty accurate actually and uh it normally gets us pretty close to the pin on an estimate so if we can move to the next slide you know this is an example of a graph that we might use which uses a linear regression analysis to project you know foreign prosecution costs and us prosecution costs and uh basically what we do is take the accounting records label all of the cost items as either being us or foreign prosecution and then graph it and do a you know a trend line on that and basically just eyeball uh you know into the middle of next you know for example if we're doing the budget for 2022 uh in the middle of that year you know what does that number look like and use that as the input into the sheet that we've got before and as i mentioned that that tends to be tends to be fairly accurate so next slide uh just moving on to now machine learning so this is something we are working on internally at the moment and uh what we're what we're uh shooting for here is really to take two sets of data and there's applicant specific data or company specific data and patent office data and and really you know train a model based on on that data for the applicant specific data what we're looking at is financial data so we'll you know similar to the graph i showed before we will break out uh us versus international costs and also preparation versus prosecution costs uh and and put that into the model but also portfolio data um you know when and where you know geographically where where do you have cases pending at the moment and also when were they filed what is the age of those cases uh what what art units are they in and then also analyzing the file wrapper data to to kind of just see um you know is there an activity happening you know as the patent office done anything which indicates that they may issue an office action you know in the next year or the next three months or whatever the time frame is and then the the patent office data really looking at you know looking at broadly across an art unit or in even at an examiner level how quickly does this examiner pick up cases um how many first office action allowances do they get we can kind of process all of that into the model as well and then kind of combine those two sets of data into a model which helps us to to you know generate projections for clients steve did you want to um uh you know i think you summed it up pretty well andre um but we do we have modeled a number of the art units now pretty much every one of them except for i think maybe design patents at this point but by taking you know patent office data we're able to predict the likelihood of anyone major prosecution event occurring in the future based on the current state of an application so if it's you know you basically tell the model given an xml file that might represent or does represent the prosecution history and it'll take that as an input and spit out probabilities for the next eight quarters and then by multiplying those by the typical budget expenses that a client allocates for those you can get a an estimate of what a pending application is going to cost on average or probably statistically probability wise for the next you know uh two years and then and i and you've mentioned all the other factors that go into this um you have to have of course account for the new cases being introduced which would not be in the model for the existing cases and so on and so forth and but it gives us some idea of what's going to happen next on any given case and we take it across a large number of cases the uh prediction is pretty accurate well thanks steve um so yeah just one final slide from me the next one um you know just to also highlight some other budgeting tools that are out there um quantify ip which has been acquired by an aqua has you know global ip estimator which is a a tool that can provide budgeting estimates and we we internally use that to provide estimate to our clients particularly for foreign filing but they're asking you know what's the what's the estimated cost of uh if we foreign filing these number of countries um cpa global also has a product called forecast ip financial modeling and then um just a little plug for our internal tool here which we've code named costradamus.ai which will be ai driven ip burgeoning but uh anyway um that's all i have um uh michelle sorry i forget who's next do i think bob is next or or is it chill i forget is it joe it is chill yeah oh sorry thanks joel unless unless bob wants to ski to time entry um so uh to start with um i think anyone who's done time entry can agree that it's can be a necessary but laborious task so what we've tried to do is take the sting out of time entry with some various tools and innovations so with that our main entry system is foundation ip and with that we have a foundation ip is feature rich um in its components and that allows um time to be entered and associated with specific actions so we can better track what that billing entry applies to and it also allows us to pull reports and get an understanding of the amount of billing per the individual items and that as andre just was referring to can help us with our budgeting and our forecasting also it's very accessible for the attorneys to look up and monitor the billing for their clients in that system without having to actually access our main accounting system so the accounting system is aderant and this is where the heavy lifting of the billing entry actually occurs and our accounting staff then will intake the entries from fip and i'll explain that process in a moment but this is then the adorant has processes that will combine these billion entries into our detailed billing reports in various formats for the attorneys to review at the end of the month so the the beauty of foundation ip is that it has a very robust api web service component and with that we're able to leverage that to get entries into that system that don't always require it to have to be manually entered and it also allows us to intake entries from other origination tools and get them into foundation ip because that's the main where everything accumulates that will eventually go into the accounting system so fip has a process that will download the billing entries at the end of the month or whatever points of the month we deem we're going to do a download and it puts it into an excel format and then we can take that excel format we then reformat it with our middleware into a format that can be uploaded into the accounting system via their importer routine so we've got a very nice workflow to take it out of foundation ip make sure it's formatted properly and then upload it into the accounting system and it's a pretty seamless process it does require a couple button pushes at the end of the month but other than that it flows pretty easily on next slide please so how do we keep track of work and enter it into our system so we do have several methods in which we can track and upload billing entries into the main entry system obviously there is a we can manually enter it into foundation ap and with that um the fip interface is relatively straightforward and it's also designed to facilitate entry by matter or you can do it from a billing screen if you want to enter several matters consecutively so it does give you several options and also different ways to view it once you've entered it so you can look at it in a list form in a grid form in a calendar form where you can view how many hours you've entered for each day for that month so there's there's a variety of ways that you can can view that once it's in there we also do provide a um a designated excel template that can be used [Music] to to enter your time for the month and then we will take that spreadsheet at the end of the month and upload it in bulk using the api and fip to to get it into that system another way that we have is we allow people to actually email entries to an email address so we've created a format that can be used in an outlook email with the necessary information such as the rate the timekeeper the hours a description and what action code you would like it to go into into fifth the matter number goes in the subject line so it's pretty straightforward and then you email it to a specific email box where it is picked up and processed once it's processed the confirmation of success or failure in creating the entry is then communicated back to the sender and just recently um an attorney has actually made a little widget that can run on a pc or a mac that is more conducive to not having to repeat the same information in the outlook email all the time so you can default in your timekeeper and your rate and those types of things and then and then it will actually create the email and send it on to the proper email address next slide please and lastly we do have automated billing entries um these aren't the norm necessarily but they do when we do have certain fixed fees that that get applied um based on the completion of certain actions such as an office action or whatever else the case may be we can we can at the end of the month look at all of those that have been completed and um upload the in bulk we can upload the fixed fees to those specific actions in foundation ip again using the api and that's time entry jill and i guess at this point move over to bob yeah i don't um you can pass this slide steve are you going to talk about oh yeah sorry i guess i've got a slide here uh basically here so what jill has been talking about is putting time entries in from you know in an automated way or transferring time in an automated way from our foundation ip system into our accounting system um what we've found is try as we might to provide task coding that matches up with our clients [Music] rules for billing we inevitably find that long tax codes are getting chosen by some of our staff when they are performing certain tasks and there's always a little bit of um i guess we call it shaggy uh coding going on and so what we realized at firm was you know we've got we're submitting these invoices into electronic billing systems which are for the most part that's how the tax codes are checked against their billing rules and we realize we should probably have our own computerized review on our end that can help make sure everything is getting coded correctly which you would hope it would go incorrect but there's so many different codes for so many different clients that are constantly evolving um it's hard to keep up with any one person you've got maybe if you've got 120 30 attorneys trying to teach them every nuance of all the clients that they may work on is very difficult even the staff have a hard time keeping up with it that are working those clients so we've developed some tools and um kind of in the i guess the beta test mode right now where we load in our clients rules and then we use automation to check to see if the tasks that are coming out of our billing systems match up with the appropriate tasks that are permitted to be built on and uh we're working on it and we we figure it's it's if if we have one computer that can figure out what to what to give to the next computer that's better than people trying to tell what to give to the computer so they can have conversations hopefully in the future and negotiate um over our fees and with that i'll turn it back to bob and let him kind of uh introduce his piece which will talk a lot about these coding things and what happens when you don't get things coded correctly all right so my name is bob brace i'm the executive director at schweigman lindbergh wisner and in this portion of the presentation we're going to talk about the accounting systems you know how they've evolved through the through time over the course of my career and where they're at now um um the other people are going to speak during this time is going to be kelly ebert who does our billing and cena divine who is our accounting manager and kelly will be going over the billing indeed in a little bit more detail and sheena will be going over the payments over the past 25 years i've witnessed many changes to how county departments process work and those changes will continue i think it was a greek philosopher 2500 years ago that said change is the only constant in life permanence is just an illusion today change is happening exponentially so it takes constant effort to stay competitive one of the factors driving a lot of change in the intellectual property space is pricing power in the current market and over the past few decades ip law has been under tremendous amount of pricing pressure because of the pressure firms practicing in the ip space must adapt in our firm the pressure has helped create a culture of change acceptance and automation to address the pricing pressure it has been my goal and the goal of the firm's leadership to automate as many processes as possible and to contract with third parties to keep our head count in low to flat this in turn will help keep our overhead down which allows us to compete in a tight market as a philosophy i don't like plugging in long-term expenses such as employees and i hate to say that but that is how i view employees from a financial aspect i don't like plugging in long-term expenses to short-term problems or problems that can be automated um in law firm finance your biggest biggest expense will always be tied to your employees the only way to stay competitive in an environment where you have limited pricing power is to fund automation to keep the head count you know flat and to a minimum so i'm going to talk i'm going to talk a little bit now about the the evolution of the enterprise software systems um one of the first changes that i saw coming into the business was this move from these character-based systems to uh graphical user interfaces or gui interfaces um this change really created a lot of challenges um there was a decline in productivity increase in system complexity more hard work to support internally system maintenance requirements much more expensive the list goes on and on i'm going to focus mostly on the decline in productivity because i think it drove a lot of a lot of the software that has been developed uh and that can be add-ons to these enterprise systems um character-based systems were faster for doing manual input work you could memorize keystrokes so that you did you never had to look away from your source documents when the gui interface was introduced everything took twice as long to do because the mouse was introduced which forced people to look away from their documents click tabs and there were lots of tabs when these systems first came out it just didn't flow well um character-based systems were also very stable we had very few issues and a lot of these systems ran on unix to address the productivity shortcomings created by the gui systems many businesses started producing software add-ons that could interface with the enterprise software systems and streamline aspects of your accounting process invoices were being generated through word processing systems you know companies were just doing macros they were selling systems you know there was basically macros pulling information out of your accounting system and doing all the formatting in order processing um expense expense systems that allow invoices to be directly uploaded by vendors reducing the need for manual input that's another uh way they've streamlined it once uploaded ai pulls the necessary information and presents it to an internal approver after the approver it flows directly into the accounting system system and with covid this has even become more accelerated and much more commonplace um it is uncommon that your vendors now and your clients now will just everybody wants to upload directly into your systems to get rid of that manual entry our firm uses concur as its expense system invoices credit card transactions and and receipts are directly uploaded approved and flow directly into the accounting system our clients use many different billing slash expense systems and in my opinion this has been the biggest challenge for law firm accounting departments billing has become extraordinarily complex in i.p firms over accounting our county department billers are asked to work in and work and learn in multiple expense systems billing systems they must address rejections formatting issues new new client rules and they must enter a lot of back office information that wasn't the responsibility of companies like ours in the past so streamlining this work is our biggest concern i have going well yeah let me look back up there so this is my biggest concern moving forward is the billing process and so to address this we have uh contacted atarant who jill mentioned as our accounting system it's really uh our total enterprise system um but so we we we contacted atarant and we're going to go with a software called billblast and it's designed so that we can upload all of our leads and voices into one system that communicates with all the other outside expense systems you know that our clients are utilizing which should help our billers out they don't have to learn multiple systems they don't have to check multiple systems load into multiple systems um bill blasted they're going to take care of all the rule changes from our clients and we will also not have to deal with that internally and once all the bills have been uploaded they are sent to various expense systems then rejections pull back to the bill blast so now you can see all the rejections in one place and instead of going through multiple billing systems which it was just it's so inefficient and you you can miss a lot of of things that you need to to get addressed um so and it also will provide us a dashboard so that some of the people in leadership can actually check and see you know where everything is at what the rejections are doing where the invoices are at and so we'll be able to have a lot more transparency into that process we're hoping with the yep maybe i just interject too i mean the um one of the downsides of of the electronic billing it has many upsides which is fast processing but when something does get i know you mentioned this but what's something we've seen cases where you know like a a discrepancy over a photocopy charge or something which is probably a bad example because we don't charge for photocopies but something of that nature um holds up a large invoice and uh i've even seen some pretty big invoices that if you don't resolve that item before the end of the client's fiscal window um we've not been paid for like uh an amount of money that's a hundred times what the discrepancy was i just mentioned that how important this bill blast is yeah absolutely i mean that's absolutely right and that's that's one of the things we really have to address that can slow down your your you know your revenue cycle if you're not out there addressing all the rejections that you're getting but you have to depend on people that are you know very busy doing all the uploads and they're you know and sometimes they get uh you know bad messages back where they don't realize it's rejected and yes and things get rejected over you know very minor issues so they all get the same level of importance as far as the uh billing system is concerned it doesn't sort of give you a break for tiny discrepancies right and you do have you know clients now that are requiring uh you know in 90 days they have to have everything in front of them otherwise you can no longer bill for that and so you know you have to get this under control and when i say it's it's my biggest concern that's why it is the one thing that can really slow down your revenue cycle and and you know cause you to have cash issues short term um i'm going to talk a little bit about the additional productivity increases that occurred through the credit card processing companies um they take all the data storage uh issues surrounding confidential information and they will place buttons on your website for electronic payments uh the confidential information alone is reason enough to work with one of these credit card companies it removes the liability of a data breach of confidential information so we don't keep any credit card information and so forth in the firm that's just stored elsewhere on a on our with the company that we work with um and this model is just more commonplace with subscription services now another productivity boost has been from the banks themselves because of the low interest rate environment over the past 20 years banks have to find different revenue streams and many banks have started to develop new products to reduce the manual entry still occurring in some accounting departments one type of product being offered is the ability to for the bank to match your outstanding invoices with payments that way you can have all your payments flowing directly into the bank they do all the processing match everything provide you a file they send it to us and you upload it so you're not dealing with sitting there and entering checks um matter by matter and you know some of your clients can have 100 matters let's see here and the same thing can be done on the ap side uh we so on the invite invoicing side and on the ap side you simply will upload your files into the bank and the bank will just watch make sure everything matches that flows back through and so on the ap side we upload all of our checks with with the amounts and they have to match in order to clear and yesterday we actually had someone try to cash a 48 000 check against our account and the check looked completely professional and if we didn't have this in place that would just got it rejected automatically it probably would have cleared our bank so it's you have to talk to your bank and put these things in place with the cyber issues that are going on now it just makes sense and i'm just the final thing i'm going to talk about is you know where i see things currently um and what i'm seeing is now you're just moving from this internal system that you've been hosting to these subscription web-based enterprise systems and the downside to that is you might have some increased costs annually to maintain your accounting system but those should be offset by costs associated with buying hardware maintaining the hardware storage your cloud storage maintenance contracts and so forth will go away and you should be able to get more robust security under one platform because it's it's just too expensive for all these companies to buy that on their own so if you can go through a web-based solution that has a lot of good security uh you remove a lot of liability and plus you can you should be able to access your data from anywhere and with that i am going to pass it over to helen thank you bob so currently we have about a hundred clients that are uploaded into e-billing systems the most used e-billing systems that we currently use are legal tracker simple legal cooperati time metrics 360. and some of our clients even have created their own c billing system next slide we work with the client to make sure timekeeper information phase task codes matters reference numbers are uploaded into the e-billing system before we can submit the invoice some of the pros of working with emailing systems are the invoices can be uploaded directly to the client as opposed to email or snail mail it's a good tracking or budgeting tool for the client where they can track spending as a whole client or per matter and it also improves the speed of payment once the invoice is approved the invoice is then sent directly to ap for payment some of the cons of e-billing are rejections due to timekeeper information or matters not being in the e-billing system this then creates a lag for us to upload the invoice and then subsequently payment or extra time it takes for us and billing to upload the invoice we might have to make many manual changes to tap days and task codes get additional invoice backups in order to get the invoice uploaded properly and now sheena will talk about accounts receivable hey kelly can i ask a few questions real quick you know like how often um are you waiting for information to be put in maybe from a client you know because i know that's another issue that we're having with systems like this is that you know your clients have to put in information so that we can put in information and sometimes that can bottleneck i just actually had a client this morning that i was uploading an invoicing for and i'm waiting for about five matters to be uploaded into their email into their system so i can submit the rest of the invoice for this month so it happens quite frequently we're with a lot of our clients yeah and and that's a that's a that's a tough one to address because you know these are our clients and we're trying to provide a good service to them and so you have to really kind of kid gloves with with this kind of stuff yeah you don't want to be snagging either with them so yeah all right gina okay um thanks kelly um so just as we've seen a shift in billing and technology we've also seen a shift in the way clients are paying their invoices um we have seen a drastic decline in the amount of paper checks we are receiving and an increase in the electronic payments that come in this shift really started in 2018 and 19 when we saw a high high volume of more electronic payments than paper checks um we saw that it was important to have several payment options available to accommodate our clients needs um which is why we added an e-check option and a paypal option to go along with our credit card wire and ach payment options just so there was an array of of ways that clients can get payment to us the check payments then really started to dwindle in 2020 when we had many people working from home we went from depositing checks daily to just once a week and we also requested that all our clients if possible pay us electronically in setting paper checks through the mail as the mail had gotten delayed and that delayed our our check payments for our payments to our to us uh we saw a 40 increase in our credit card payments in 2019 which that continues to increase at an average of 30 per year um so we see a lot of even larger clients starting to use credit cards now as a way of making payments um on large invoices so in order to meet that demand and as bob had said we use a third-party credit card processor called law pay formerly they were called client pay that way clients can go onto a payment portal and they can make payments on their own on their own time and through that payment portal we can accept credit cards debit cards e-checks and paypal and it's not on that portal is not only convenient for our clients but it also has also freed up time in the ar department since we had seen a volley uh increase in volume of credit card payments it was increasing our time that we spent um processing those credit cards and playing that occasional phone tag with clients to get their credit card information um also using lock pay for this service as bob mentioned has helped us create a secure system for collecting payments and staying pci compliant and having that secure way for clients to make a payment um to us in order to inform all of our clients of our payment options we added an electronic payment information on all of our invoices that go out all of our statements of accounts that go out as well as links in our signature block for clients just to click on and make a payment quick on their invoices the collection of payments has changed changed as e-payments evolved um e-billing and e-payments have led to a reduction in our collection time and has reduced our age and aging significantly especially that over 150 days we no longer have to wait for mail time for invoices to go out and for checks to come in we see a majority of our clients who pay on our payment portal they tend to pay within 30 days of less of the invoice date again i think that it's easy we send them an email with their invoice with a link to our payment portal so it's easy for them to just hop on and pay that invoice quickly so that um that payment portal has really brought down um the amount of time it takes to collect on an invoice and then a majority of our email clients they tend to pay 60-day within 60 days of a successful invoice submission to their e-billing system which again is really important that we get that successful submission so that they can pay in in their payment terms some of the benefits we see by using e-billing and e-payments are more timely payments a heightened security a better access to data for both us and our clients and i think client satisfaction will also be a benefit to the e-billing and e-payment systems that we've put into place next slide slide please so some projects that we are working on in ar to automate these processes and i know bob has touched on a couple of them um but one is vantage point which is um it's a u.s bank automation tool that matches up our ach and wire payments that come in daily to our outstanding invoices in aderant which can then be imported into adorama for allocation this takes away a manual step in our cash receipt process which will reduce our time spent and during cash receipts another project is with law pay and integrating that with adorama which is once that gets into place it's going to be a huge time saver for us um this is where clients they can go into the payment portal and they'll be able to see a big picture of all of their outstanding invoices if they go in to just pay one invoice and they have more outstanding they're going to be able to see all of their outstanding invoices right there and be able to hopefully click on all of them and pay them or choose which ones to pay through this integration we'll also be able to send our clients a specific payment link for a specific invoice so if we know a client pays by credit card a majority of the time and they miss an invoice we can just send them a link they can click on that link and it'll go directly to pay that specific invoice that we were talking about and lapay will also be able to send out reminders on our behalf that then can be automated sent out automatically until that payment has been received um so that'll be a time saver as well and then at the end of the day laws pay will import those credit card and e-check payments into adderant for allocation which again will take away that manual process for us saving us time and then finally uh bill blass will also help on the ar side um you know that's just that collective view of all of our outstanding invoices that are built through the e-billing systems that kelly mentioned um we'll be able to see when the invoices were rejected reduced disputed or sent to ap all in one place which will really help with collections on those specific invoices and it'll help us realize the rejected invoices sooner so that we can submit resubmit them and collect faster so those are the exciting things happening in accounting you know everything that happens what we're talking about we're talking about an increase in our productivity you know we're just being much more efficient and that will just help us keep our staffing down and some of these things that sheena mentioned with credit cards these things aren't going away a lot of these big companies are using credit cards they're getting cash back and so forth uh we do the same thing with the fees that we pay to uh the u.s patent office you know we're using credit cards and we're using that carry time and we're getting cash back for it so these these methods are all going to you know stay around i think that it will increase some of your banking expenses definitely going to increase your credit card uh charges but this is the wave of the future and you know i'm i just sheena are we going to put bitcoin in place that's next so i guess thank you very much that was a very informative presentation everybody um i guess somebody uh posited the question of how is work from home uh you know affect any of these topics that we've discussed and right off the top of my head nothing comes to mind um i think the accounting department as a rule uh tends to come into the office because of you know the systems and procedures they use uh more often than anybody else in fact i think you guys are probably in the office the most during the pandemic but um any any other panelists have any thoughts about that question you know the only thing that it really affected just accelerated um you know this transition to electronic billing payments uh just getting rid of all that paper and that's actually been a blessing it's just it's much nicer to to you know to get things that way it's faster like sheena said and you know when you're trying to all these uh productivity and efficiencies you're putting in place is really to shorten your revenue cycle and you know your revenue cycle every day that you go out it costs your company cash so the first year you can really shorten that you will capture that cash that would have been pushed out into other years and you should have a you know a much better year well with that see no further questions i'm going to just thank everybody again and turn it back over to michelle to wrap this up thanks steve thank you for joining us everyone and thank you to our speakers the last episode of the digital transformation series will take place on september 9th when we discuss an slw digital transformation case study in recruiting onboarding training and firm communications you can find the registration page on the slw institute on the slw website and please keep an eye out for the email invitations as well and please do join us for the last episode of the series thank you again for joining us and be well