Best Practices for Creating Billing Guidelines

Creating and evaluating your guidelines

Your legal department demands quality work from your law firms and vendors. Here’s how you can improve that line of communication.

Clearly define your expectations

Provide an outline of what you expect from the project. If you’re evaluating by measurements, pass those along. Your outline should be detailed enough that there’s no ambiguity, but flexible enough to work with unforeseen circumstances that may arise.

Provide definitions & examples

Law firms work with different clients, all with their own taxonomy for defining billing guidelines. Provide detailed definitions of what you expect, and give an example of the correct format.

Pull out important points

If you have an important list, don’t bury it in a block of text. Put your most important billing guidelines on bulleted lists. Those boldfaced and emphasized points should ensure that can’t-miss information isn’t glazed over.

Best practices for creating guidelines

When creating your legal billing guidelines, it’s important that you have a strategic plan in place. Here are some tips for creating quality guidelines:

• Set clear expectations.
• Build a template foundation that has all of the information your clients need.
• Have an e-billing solution.
• Align with your accounting & finance departments.
• Number your invoices and save them in your ELM management system.

How ELM software can help

A legal/spend management solution can start you off on the right foot.  It’ll help ensure that you get your management system up and running quickly, all while using an agile approach to consistently meet and exceed your needs.