How E-billing Has Evolved Since the 90’s
Eric Smith on March 5th, 2010
I have been thinking about legal e-billing and spend management for a long time now. My partner and I implemented the first really successful e-billing systems in corporate legal back in the late 1990’s. At that time, corporations were dealing with invoices the size of phone books from their outside lawyers. They were simply too big for busy inside lawyers to review.
The goal with our product was to identify waste. Everyone knew the waste was there. They knew that their invoices were too high. They also knew this was not because the firms were cheating them but because no one was reviewing the invoices for mistakes made by their firms.
Many of the Fortune 500 were the earliest adopters of the technology and the earliest success stories. We designed our product with their requirements in mind. We developed big hairy systems to get invoices electronically from law firms to their corporation customers. We wanted to help them save time and money and eliminate waste.
We at Onit are in the process of developing a new e-billing system that will work for BOTH small and large corporations. One of the first things we learned was that scale matters. Smaller firms and workgroups have very different problems and barriers to adoptions than the largest corporations in the world. Trying to implement software designed to squeeze pennies out of every line item will not work for you unless you have lots of line items.
We have a philosophy about how, why and when you should adopt e-billing and spend management systems and this collection of blog posts, I hope, will articulate some of that philosophy.
The Importance of E-billing
Eric Smith on February 26th, 2010
Before I start discussing e-billing, let me tell you a story to illustrate how important it is.
I remember walking through a large bank’s offices in the late 1990’s. As we walked back to the conference room to give our sales pitch on why they needed a e-billing system we had to squeeze past boxes four feet high.
I asked “What’s in the boxes?” They said legal bills.
During the sales pitch I asked several questions:
How much do you spend in legal bills? Answer: we don’t know.
How many law firm vendors do you have? Answer: we don’t know.
Home many legal bills do you get a year? Answer: we don’t know.
I knew then that the software we had designed was going to sell itself. In the next series of posts I will be explaining why e-billing is so important and why we at Onit have spent so much time designing a system that works for you, no matter how big or how small your company may be.
The Downfalls of the Waterfall
Eric Elfman on February 16th, 2010
In our last post we briefly mention waterfall development and why in client work, it’s important to avoid that method when managing a project. To explain why, we want to go into a little more detail on what waterfall development really means.
It is typically defined by seven linear stages: conception, initiation, analysis, design, construction, testing and maintenance. Some of these stages can last months and are usually marked by big milestones. It is only upon the completion of these milestones that the customer or client is reengaged for review.
The advantage of this method is that the customer has to really think about what he wants before software engineers spend time coding. And it allows for predictable, top-down management of engineers from the project manager’s perspective. But the biggest disadvantage of this method is that if the product starts to veer, or if too many project interpretations are wrong, it is a long time before the customer knows it. There is the potential for vast amounts of rework and very unhappy customers.
Agile Project Management
Eric Elfman on February 1st, 2010
In the software engineering world, they use a disciplined project management process called “agile” The agile method is based on teamwork, frequent inspection and adaption, self-organization and accountability, and a business approach that aligns work with customer needs and company goals.
We think those tenets should be applied to all project management systems, not just the development world, so the agile method was central to our thinking when we designed Onit.
Agile project management, unlike more traditional systems, is neither linear nor marked by complete specifications being written up front. Agile project managers work in much smaller chunks of time, 2 weeks for example, and fast iteration is key. Yes, specifications still need to be well understood but that doesn’t have to happen up front. Since you are moving fast, you can change those quickly and incorporate new ones as needed. These constant updates also keep everyone in the loop and save time.
We think agile lawyering makes sense. My lawyers and I should iterate more frequently on my projects. Onit allows you to define your goals clearly and up front and then through “discussions” in the service, you can iterate to make sure the project gets completed with the least rework. And you have a running transcript of decisions and conversations. Imagine having one place where you can see everyone’s updates, rather than having to call a meeting to discuss them!
Another online project management system?! Another project management blog?!
Eric Elfman on January 28th, 2010
The answer to both of your questions is “no.”
At Onit, we recognize that the discipline of project management could play a valuable role in the average lawyer’s practice. None of the tools currently out there are a good fit so we spent the last year studying lawyers and trying to determine what was missing in the market for them. What we created is not the “building a freeway,” heavy, top-down project management that most people think of when they think of project management. Rather, we think what they need is more akin to lean project management, which is collaborative and is focused on eliminating waste as it’s primary function.
We have applied what we learned into a flexible, online project management tool based on lawyer’s specific needs. But a funny thing happened on the way to the legal industry: we discovered that lawyer’s project management needs are no different than most people. Perhaps the scale is a little different, but when we stepped back from what we had built, we realized that we created a tool that anybody could get value from. The reality is we are all project managers, whether we have that in our title or not.
We will continue to post on topics that are important to us and that are the foundation of how we think about project management. Next will be a post about our borrowing of concepts from software developers about iterating and frequent status updates.
On Monday, February 1st, we’ll be debuting Onit at the LegalTech 2010 conference in New York City so stop by and visit us! Onit will also be available for beta testing and we encourage you to sign up and try it now. Your feedback is important to us, so please leave comments and interact with our community forum!
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