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Orion Prebill Survey Shows Law Firms Are Troubled by Inefficient, Paper-Heavy Prebilling Processes

By Kevin Harris
April 01, 2019

As law firms strive to become more efficient and technically savvy, it's clear that some inefficient processes are easily streamlined while others are more stubborn and entrenched. Prebilling, the process of generating invoice drafts and circulating them for annotation/adjustment, is one of the most important monthly tasks a law firm conducts. Since prebilling involves bringing money into the firm, the more efficient the process becomes, the better off the law firm is financially. However, when Orion recently conducted its first-ever Prebill Survey, the study revealed that prebilling is the very opposite of efficient and instead is an exceedingly manual, paper-heavy and antiquated process.

At the core of prebilling delays lies a big stack of paper. The Orion Survey found that more than 71% of law firm accounting and billing departments were not using electronic tools to manage prebilling. Instead, they were printing out, passing around and marking-up paper prebills by hand. Only 12% of firms surveyed were using electronic PDF prebills.

Although all timekeepers now have keyboards on their computers, not to mention also on their smartphones and tablets, 82% of survey respondents said they were marking-up paper prebills with handwritten notes. Billing and accounting personnel said the handwriting was frequently hard to read, illegible in some cases, causing them to constantly ask the writer for clarification, costing them extra time.

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