For law firms to get smart about bidding on work they need a legal management infrastructure with deep knowledge and understanding of their matters, staffing resources, billing rates and spending data. This knowledge infrastructure, or business intelligence, goes beyond a stand-alone matter management application to include historical and real-time information on billing rates, invoices and costs, and incorporates a facility to calculate alternative fee arrangements and use third-party data to compare law firm metrics to the larger legal industry.

A legal management infrastructure also requires integration with existing firm systems dealing with accounting, billing, human resources, and more. Although law firm BI tools from the likes of LexisNexis, Thomson Reuters and Wolters Kluwer support a legal management infrastructure, the tools presuppose firm resources contain sufficient data to extract and analyze to drive law firm decisions.

Software offerings to manage the lifecycle of matters in law firms range from midsize to large firms. Offerings to manage matters in corporate legal departments are slightly different due to the nature of the corporate client. Third-party data services market to law firms and corporate clients.

Read more: www.lawtechnologynews.com/id=1202677427889/Law-Firm-Billing-Gets-Smart-With-Tech#ixzz3KeEdwmbw

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