Validate and correct timecard entries for Outside Counsel Guidelines (OCG Compliance)
Clients of law firms often have rules governing what timekeepers may or may not bill time for or how timecard narratives must be formatted. The enormous task of learning, understanding, and recognizing these rules, and of reading through and validating all timecards falls upon billers who are often hard-pressed for time to deliver an invoice.
Solution
The ALP TimeCheck system centralizes all client validation rules and distributes the workload of fixing timecards to individual timekeepers or their secretaries. Administrators define rules to validate timecard narratives, such as Minimum Word Count, Invalid Keywords, and Block Billing. They also define time filtering criteria against which those rules will be applied, such as Work Dates, Clients, Matters, Titles, and Timekeepers, or even custom SQL’s. The system then applies this information by flagging every timecard that violates one or more rules. Timekeepers or their secretaries review their timecards, supplying alternative narratives that meet these rules. Billers have the ability to review users’ corrections, and import the new narratives into the financial system (e.g., Elite Enterprise, Elite 3E, or Aderant).
Timekeepers enter timecard narratives that violate certain conditions set forth by clients
Once the edits are made, the now corrected narratives are rechecked and validated
ALP TimeCheck scans the narratives, flags the violations, and emails timekeepers that corrections need to be made
The timecards are exported back into the financial system by an administrator
Timekeepers (or billers) view violations and make the appropriate edits
Success! All violations have been taken care of and billing can proceed quickly and more efficiently
Limitations of current systems
Time entry and electronic billing systems have validation rules that prevent timekeepers from submitting incorrect timecard narratives.
These systems, however, fall short in a few key areas.
Time entry with validation prevents timekeepers from releasing their time. By separating time entry from narrative validation, billing is able to proceed without the holdup of missing time.
The validation rules contained in time entry and electronic billing are not versatile enough to handle complex client rules.
They lack the ability to apply rules to a specific subset of timecards such as at the matter level, or by using custom user-defined fields.
ALP TimeCheck works independently from time entry and electronic billing so as not to create bottle necks as time is passed from system to system.
Cost Savings
The cost savings of ALP TimeCheck will be realized immediately by:
Stopping client rejection of invoices which results in:
Writing off entries
Wasting billing resources reversing invoices and re-billing
Delays in payment
Improving utilization of billing resources by not spending time searching and analyzing time narratives. This also speeds up the time to bill.
Freeing up attorney resources by not having to manually mark-up entries and send them back to billing.