6 Signs Your Legal E-Billing System Needs an Upgrade

How do you run a legal department at maximum efficiency? Ask any legal ops professional, and you’ll be sure to hear about the importance of an e-billing system.

Here’s the catch: simply implementing an e-billing system isn’t enough. Your legal team also needs to regularly evaluate its performance to ensure they’re getting a solution that meaningfully reduces administrative tasks and helps control spend. Because if it turns out your in-house team needs to update their legal e-billing tool, waiting to implement a new one could mean leaving time (and money) on the table.

Worried your current legal e-billing management system might not be up to scratch? These are the six red flags that confirm it.

Red Flag 1: Outdated E-Billing Technology

If your legal e-billing system isn’t leveraging the latest technology, it can be harder to track and manage costs accurately. With tools like A.I. constantly pushing the boundary of what’s possible in legal tech, your team must re-evaluate their tech stack and ensure they’re reaping the benefits.

In addition to automating processes such as invoice review and reporting, newer AI-driven legal spend management solutions also provide unprecedented visibility into legal department data. That includes real-time spend insights, clear-cut vendor performance data, and predictive budgeting and spend forecasts.

Those capabilities help your team stay on top of their legal work and spend. That way, you can track the right benchmarks and optimize your critical relationships with both internal teams (like finance) and outside counsel.

Red Flag 2: Decentralized Spend-Tracking Data

E-billing software for legal departments shouldn’t be siloed. If you’re still relying on a combination of manual invoice review systems and patchwork data scattered across spreadsheets and emails, bringing all that data together is vital.

After all, how much time could your team free up if they didn’t have to chase down the data they needed? How many cost-saving opportunities could they unearth if they had greater visibility into how resources were being used?

A robust legal e-billing system changes that by integrating all your spend data in a single repository and then allowing you to view precisely what you need in one dashboard. Using AI, more advanced systems like Brightflag can even interpret line item descriptions from every invoice, classify the work performed, and check if work is in compliance with your outside counsel guidelines. This ensures everyone has access to the most accurate information on spend, and you can pull detailed analytics to steer your team in the right direction.

Red Flag 3: Lack of Granular Data Insights

The impacts of legal data availability don’t just affect legal spend — they touch upon many other elements of your legal workflows as well. Everything from vendor performance metrics to time spent per matter data can inform how effectively your department delivers legal services. And even with an existing legal e-billing system in place, it isn’t always easy to generate insights.

Implementing the right e-billing system, however, can help you analyze these data points more easily, and understand their impact on spend and performance. In short: The more granular the data your system collects, the more easily you’ll be able to optimize every aspect of your legal operations and legal spend management.

Red Flag 4: Too Much Manual Work

It’s a universal truth: the more people involved in your legal workflows, the higher the potential for delays. If your team is spending all their time hunting down signatures and trying to navigate reporting bottlenecks, it’s time to reconsider your approach. And your e-billing software.

Here are three capabilities your legal e-billing system should have built in:

• Automated invoice review
• Compliance verification (e.g. for financial controls)
• In-depth legal spend reporting

These features are table stakes for a legal e-billing system, as they provide opportunities to refine your legal spend and add real value back into your business.

Red Flag 5: Billing Guideline Compliance Isn’t Automatically Enforced

Your billing guidelines were put in place for a reason: to ensure that outside counsel firms are billing you correctly, and at the agreed-upon timekeeper rates. However, they aren’t much use if you don’t have a way to track their compliance. And let’s be honest: this is another task that your team simply doesn’t have time to do manually.

With the right legal e-billing system, however, you can fully automate the process of reviewing invoices against billing guidelines. AI adds value here, as newer systems can understand nuance and context, enabling them to interpret billing data correctly, and flag billing guideline violations consistently, every time.

That, in turn, allows your legal e-billing management system to flag invoice violations quickly and to identify costly billing issues automatically. This means reduced manual labor and invoices that move through the pipeline efficiently, or get automatically bounced back to law firms for revision as needed.

Red Flag 6: Weak Reporting & Forecasting Capabilities

If your legal e-billing system lacks robust reporting capabilities, it can be challenging to accurately track the legal department’s spend against budget and make strategic resourcing decisions.

However, with the right software in place, you can get full visibility into your legal team’s financial health, allowing your team to:

• Increase budgeting accuracy
• Predict spend accurately
• Make forecasts that actually hold water

These capabilities enable the legal team to contribute meaningfully to helping the business achieve its objectives, positioning your team as a valued strategic partner to the broader business.

How Brightflag Transforms Legal Spend Management

To summarize: a legal e-billing system upgrade can be crucial to the financial health of your organization. That’s because the best legal e-billing platforms help optimize your legal department’s workflows, show you where your resources are going, and provide the functionality to highlight where you can improve your legal spend management. But not all e-billing systems are created equal.

Brightflag’s AI-driven platform does more than just monitor your e-billing—it’s a complete enterprise legal management (ELM) system. With Brightflag, you get:

• Complete visibility into legal work and spend
• AI-powered invoice review
• Agentic AI to answer legal queries and wrangle your data

With over 11 years of experience implementing AI for in-house legal, Brightflag also has a proven track record of keeping our partners on the cutting edge of legal tech developments. No more jumping between tools. No more worrying whether your system is out of date. Just everything you need in a single platform.

Want to learn more about how Brightflag can help you master spend management? Let’s chat.

Legal E-Billing FAQs

What Is a Legal Spend Management System?

A legal spend management system is a technology platform that automates legal e-billing and matter management, providing in-house teams with visibility into their legal spend. The best systems simplify e-billing for legal departments, ensuring that internal teams can focus on more valuable work.

What Improvements Can an Upgraded Legal e-Billing System Offer?

If your legal e-billing system isn’t performing optimally, the result is often wasted time and lost opportunities to save costs and contribute to business strategy. By upgrading to a system that automates invoice review, compliance and reporting, you free up time for your team and empower them to make proactive, data-driven decisions.

Why Is Centralized Data Important for Legal e-Billing?

Searching through emails, spreadsheets and PDFs for the information you need is a poor use of your team’s time. E-billing software for legal departments is designed to simplify data access and management, making it much faster and easier for your team to find what they need. And to use that information to make informed decisions about your budget and spend.

How Often Should a Legal Ops Team Evaluate Its Legal e-Billing System?

Ideally, you shouldn’t have to. The best legal e-billing systems will do this for you by continuously updating their technology and keeping you informed about new capabilities and offerings. That leaves your team free to reap the benefits of more time to devote to strategic work and greater insights into what’s really making the legal department tick.