Catching the invoice lines an e-billing gate will reject
An insurance defence or corporate client sends outside counsel guidelines, and the invoice goes into Legal Tracker or CounselLink as a LEDES 1998B file with pipe delimited fields and dates written as YYYYMMDD. It comes back weeks later over a timekeeper who was never added to the rate table, a fee line missing a task code, travel billed at the full rate or two tasks blocked into one narrative. Every one of those is checkable before the file leaves. What varies is the guideline set, which is per client rather than firmwide.
The same client name is typed into the conflicts database, the practice management system, the document management system and the ledger, and a conflict is only found later if two people spelled it the same way.
A firm organises everything by matter, and the matter record is created by hand from an intake form. That single re-keying step seeds four systems, and because there is no shared identifier between them, every later reconciliation is a name match against human typing.
- Clio
- Excel
- Outlook
When this is the wrong thing to build
Pick something else if every bill goes straight to a person who pays it, since the work here is passing the automated gate of a third party administrator, and building that check for a firm with no e-billing clients buys a rule engine with nothing to enforce.
The constraint that shapes it
The conduct rules decide what may be automated here, and they are adopted state by state rather than nationally, so specifics have to be checked against your own jurisdiction. More on how this sector works.
Run the rules of the other side first, so the submission does not come back. Read what this shape is, or start from one of these.
- Counting the clock that public marketing starts on a listing
- Checking for a signed buyer agreement before a tour is confirmed
- Checking that a technician may legally take the call
- Filing a backflow test report the purveyor will accept
- Checking a trial balance against the tax grouping before import
- Catching the rejects a return will come back with
- Why did my LEDES invoice get rejected for a timekeeper not found?
- What task code covers drafting a motion for summary judgment?
- How do I check outside counsel guidelines before sending the bill?
- Can Clio export a LEDES 1998B file for Legal Tracker?
- Which entries count as block billing under insurance defence guidelines?
Back to law firms, or see how this is priced and scoped.