ELECTRONIC PRE-BILLS DELIVERED TO YOUR iPAD? YES!

Reviewing Pre-Bills is a necessary and a very important evil in every attorney’s practice and is not a task billing attorneys look forward to every month. However, pre-bill review is vital to any law firm in order to achieve accuracy in billing, especially today as corporate clients adopt ebilling and auditing review systems. But timing is also important when reviewing pre-bills. The faster attorneys can turn them back to accounting the faster invoices will go out to the client and helping to shorten the receivables cycle.

Wouldn’t it be great for attorneys to be able to review pre-bills from his/her iPad, anywhere they are, make revisions and annotations (using a stylus or finger) and send them back to accounting? The firm will save thousands of sheets of paper, go truly paper-less, at the same time attorneys are not constrained to be at the office to work on their pre-bills.

iDocExplorer allows ProLaw firms to do that and much more. As follows I describe a workflow any firm can implement in a matter of minutes and is a start to a truly automated paperless pre-bills review.

- Accounting will run pre-bills for each attorney and instead of sending it to a regular printer, they will send it to a PDF printer. There are many good PDF printers for free (I’m serious). My favorite is PDF995 (http://www.pdf995.com/)

- Save the pre-bills to an admin matter in ProLaw for each attorney to access. You can choose one general admin matter or each attorney’s admin matter.

- From iDocExplorer, attorneys will be able to immediately access those pre-bills from their iPads by navigating to the appropriate matter.

- Use the “Open In” feature of iDocExplorer to access apps such as neu.Annotate (free!), iAnnotate or GoodReader, and start reviewing and annotating pre-bills with a Stylus or just a finger.

- Email pre-bills with changes to Accounting or to any other attorney for further review.

- Done, that’s it! This can be done while in the airport, waiting in court or on a Saturday from home (not from the office).

There is big difference in efficiencies by doing this from your iPad, versus trying other electronic mechanisms or software. The greatest advantage using your iPad for this function is that it can be done anywhere and it resembles the simplicity of doing it in paper, but with portability and without having to carry tons of paper.

Now, how about Conflicts Reports? You can apply the same workflow and get the most out of your iPad and your time.

If you are interested in learning more, please contact us at info@bellefield.com and our support team will be happy to step you through the entire process so attorneys at your firm can successfully star reviewing pre-bills totally paperless.