E-Billing Cuts Costs and Delays for Phoenix City Attorney

Like many legal clients, the city of Phoenix has a love-hate relationship with its outside counsel.

Phoenix needs outside counsel to defend its interests when the City Attorney's Office lacks the staff, resources and expertise to handle matters. But the city is under continuous and unrelenting pressure to cut costs, including its legal bills. Compounding this dichotomy is the frustrating delay in payment often associated with traditional governmental processes.

Enter e-billing, which is popular among insurance companies, but not as widely accepted in government. E-billing was once an alien concept for Phoenix - but that's no longer the case.

Now, thanks to e-billing technology, the city has improved its billing process by offering timelier invoice review and approval, improved data integrity and prompt payments. These upgrades have improved our relationship with outside law firms.

Bye-Bye, Paper

Before we implemented e-billing, it took a frightening number of steps to process a paper invoice through to payment, including some redundant data entry between the Phoenix City Attorney's Office and the city's Risk Management Division.

Law firms submitted paper invoices to the City Attorney's Office. The invoices were logged in manually, routed to attorneys for review, logged out, and then forwarded to Risk Management for payment. Risk Management would then repeat the process. Each department recorded the same information in separate computer systems.

The City Attorney's Office used ProLaw and a home-built Microsoft Access database, while Risk Management used CS STARS, a risk-management information system from Marsh Inc.

These two systems didn't communicate with each other, however. Consequently there were errors and inefficiencies caused by manual data entry. Time was wasted trying to address billing questions and resolve billing errors. 

The city quickly realized its e-billing system would need to integrate with the city's existing case-management and risk-management information systems.

Funding Fiasco Fixed

Many e-billing vendors price their systems well into six figures. TrialNet's price point for a network of the size required to meet the city's needs was in the mid-five-figure range. Unfortunately the city was experiencing budget cuts and layoffs during this time, and funding wasn't available for innovative new procedures.

Desperate to develop a funding mechanism, the city turned again to the insurance industry and learned that it wasn't uncommon for insurance companies to receive a quick-payment discount: If the insurance company pays the law firm's invoice within 10 days of submittal, legal fees are reduced by 2 percent. The city calculated that the 2 percent discount would more than pay for an e-billing application within the first year of operation. So the city modified its standard contract to include a quick-payment discount.

Implementation Challenges

In early 2006, TrialNet was selected as the preferred vendor. TrialNet was implemented, up and running, and integrated with ProLaw and STARS by July 2006.

A typical TrialNet e-billing implementation is straightforward: A city attorney's office or corporate law department uploads information about its law firms, including rules based on its agreement with each law firm, and TrialNet's team trains the firms to upload invoices electronically via the Legal Electronic Data Exchange Standard format.

In Phoenix's case, however, the three-way integration with STARS and ProLaw made the implementation more complicated.

The city's electronic billing system needed to not only assist in the processing and analyses of legal bills, but also connect the ProLaw system used by the City Attorney's Office and the STARS system used by the Risk Management Division and provide an interface for outside counsel to input information.

Interfaces were developed between ProLaw and TrialNet, and between TrialNet and STARS, with the input of representatives from TrialNet, CS STARS, ProLaw, the City Attorney's Office and the Risk Management Division.