We are too small for e-Billing

When talking to general counsel, legal operations teams and CFOs, I seem to hear this comment very often:

We are too small for e-Billing.

Why? What does that even mean. To qualify it – I don’t mean just the 10 person small business, I mean the companies that have 5, 10, even 50 legal team members, spending tens of millions annually on outside counsel and maybe even be part of a public company. Why would they feel they are too small for legal e-Billing software?

Maybe e-Billing (and other tools for in-house counsel) are just for “the big guys” and everyone else has to settle for email and Excel. But that can’t be it, we have e-Billing in our personal lives. Our banks give us the ability to pay online. Many service providers will e-Bill us. Apps like Mint allow us to aggregate our personal finances into easy to use dashboards providing KPI’s, trends, and actionable content. So why is it that a legal team is too small?

Because you are too small for them.

There it is. That’s your answer. You aren’t too small, you are simply too small for legacy vendors. Too small of an account, too demanding, not enough users, etc. Too small for the pain it requires to roll out legacy software that can’t scale. Did you know, some companies will take 1 to 2 years to implement legacy e-Billing solutions? That’s not migrating from an existing product, that’s starting with a clean slate.

Shameless plug… under most circumstances, you will be up and running with SimpleLegal in months, not years. And it’s important to keep in mind that you’re not too small to have data. You’re just too small to line up IT, finance, and legal resources to work on a software implementation for the next 18-24 months. That’s where SimpleLegal can help. We partner closely with every SimpleLegal customer to ensure a positive and valuable experience, from when you first see the product to implementation and beyond.

As an integral part of your organization, you should have software doing as much of the administrative work as possible, so you can focus on what you are good at – protecting against risk, getting new customer deals signed, and helping grow your company – unless you really like chasing down accruals.