eBillingHub®, the world leader in simplifying electronic billing for law firms, today announced that the national law firm Foley Hoag LLP has selected the eBillingHub for its electronic billing solutions. The eBillingHub will reduce the complexity caused by the increasing volume of electronic billing and will produce a predictable, dependable and efficient e-billing process, benefiting both clients and the firm.
Foley Hoag is a leading national law firm, headquartered in Boston and with a global client base. The firm recently joined The American Lawyer's "A-List 2008" of the top 50 law firms in America, a prestigious grouping of firms based on diversity, pro bono, associate satisfaction, and revenues per lawyer. In an effort to control the operational costs of electronic billing, Foley Hoag selected eBillingHub to serve as the basis for gaining not only the operational benefits but also the visibility through reports and dashboards, keys to understanding real-time electronic billing.
I once had a web site called e-statements.com. It was the late 1990’s, when the dot-com bubble was a couple of years shy from bursting. The buzz in the transaction document industry was Electronic Bill Presentment and Payment (EBPP), which meant many things to many people. The hype was that companies substitute their nasty paper statements with snazzy web-pages containing all the customer billing information. Here we are, 10 years later and the take-up rate for electronic statements has only reached the low teens. So what happened?
What is a customer statement of account?
To understand what went wrong, we have to remember what business purpose a statement achieves. First, it fulfills a fiduciary requirement to ‘present a contiguous accounting of all relevant activities and charges associated with the account’. Second, it provides the client with an irrefutable document (i.e. a presentment) that they can subsequently use within their financial affairs. Third, it commits the issuer to the information presented (the courts don’t care what you meant to mail, just what actually was received by the other party). If there is incorrect information, the mailer is either incompetent (see Sarbanes-Oxley for implications) or committing mail fraud. Finally, the mailer must prove 1) that the document was served to the client, or 2) that the document was put into the mail with the correct address (known as the mail-box rule).
Also, in consumers eyes, one of the important values of a customer statement was its longevity; you can throw them in a bankers-box until tax season and feel relatively secure that the information would be there.
In the early 1990s, the relationship between buyers of legal services and outside counsel took a dramatic turn. That’s when DuPont rolled out its seminal Legal Model. By reducing its roster of outside counsel by almost 90%, DuPont found that it could control outside and in-house legal costs by securing significant discounts in return for volume and by reducing the size of its legal staff needed to manage so many law firms. Soon, other corporations followed suit. And law firms that were often less than receptive to client requests quickly recognized that a strategic market shift—characteristic of a matured market with an oversupply of providers—was taking place. From now on, the client would be firmly in the driver’s seat.
“In the 1990s, our business units were decentralized and the attorneys were generally free to work with any number of qualified outside law firms. Recognizing the expense and duplication of effort that goes with that process, the legal department significantly reduced and consolidated the number of law firms and centralized the overall management of them." —Kenneth Bunge, Former Managing Attorney, United Technologies Corporation
Another recent element of this shift has been the change from paper invoicing to Electronic Billing, or eBilling. Although some corporations, such as GE, have had proprietary eBilling systems for years, publicly available eBilling systems did not take hold in major corporations until about five years ago. It is estimated that as many as 25% of corporations with major outside counsel relationships will be using eBilling by the year 2010.
PEARL RIVER – A program launched by Orange and Rockland Utilities, which is designed to encourage greater customer participation in the company’s electronic billing program, has resulted in the planting of over 5,600 trees in U.S. national forests damaged by fire.
O&R’s no-charge eBill service provides customers with a secure means of paying their bills online.
Paperless billing is being adopted at a faster pace than ever because of the benefits it provides to all parties. The biller achieves cost reductions while their customers enjoy the convenience of receiving bills electronically. Best of all, paperless billing has significant benefit to the environment. Billtrust™, a leader in outsourced billing, has been recognized by Plant a Tree USA™ with the Great Green Business Award for their success in converting customers to eBilling. Over the past year, many Billtrust customers have more than doubled their e-Adoption Rate. Not only does this deliver cost savings, it also has a positive impact on the environment.
