Legal billing becoming an open e-book

By ADAM GIFFORD

A lawyer arrives at the Pearly Gates. St Peter looks at him grumpily. "About time you turned up," he says. "According to the hours your billing sheets show, you're 300 years old."

Legal billing may be an arcane and mysterious art, but it is unlikely to be so for much longer as technology allows clients to see more of what their lawyers are doing.

Neil Cameron, the new director of product strategy for legal practice software company Keystone Solutions Group, says clients "want to feel they are in control or at least have full knowledge of what the lawyer is doing on their behalf."

The present generation of legal practice software grew out of demands by United States corporates for detailed bills, so a law firm's services could be measured against their competitors.

"To provide that information cost-effectively, you had to bring in time measuring systems. The Americans wanted not just who did how much work of what type, they wanted to know if they were in a meeting, what was the meeting about; if they were generating a document, what document was it. So you had to add narrative to time."

Law firms are looking at the next step - allowing clients to electronically view what work is being done before the bill is sent.

"There are only two law firms on the planet doing this, I know of - Walker Morris in Leeds with an application they built themselves and D J Freeman in London, who are using a new Keystone module called OpenBook," Mr Cameron says.

As soon as a fee earner logs billable hours with the firm's time-recording system, the client can see the information through OpenBook.

Mr Cameron says creating that level of transparency helps to get bills paid. "By the time you send the bill to the client, they're aware of what you have done. Most law firms take time off before they bill, so why not let the client see that?"

Mr Cameron believes the practice will spread once clients of other law firms start asking why they cannot have similar information.

Billing is just the beginning. Rather than have lawyers go away and then come back to the client with an answer to a legal problem, Mr Cameron says communications are getting to the point where the client is able to take part in the whole process of reaching a solution.

"Some lawyers will say 'I don't want to lift my skirts that far.' The clever boys will say 'What a fantastic opportunity to tie the client so far in they won't want to go anywhere else for advice'."

Mr Cameron says lawyers need to smarten up the services they offer, because much of the bread-and-butter work, such as production of boilerplate contracts, is becoming available for free on the internet.

"If legal services can be commoditised, they will be. If you commoditise, you introduce massive price competition and then someone decides they can make more money giving it away."

The New Zealand-developed Keystone OpenBook, as well as allowing client access to billing records and workflows, allows clients to update their own contact details.

"I wrote an article two years ago saying one of the perennial problems law firms had was keeping their client contact database up to date."Mr Cameron, who joined Keystone in August after a 20-year involvement in technology for law firms, is now involved in turning that idea into practice.