Telefónica GERMANY
SIMPLER, BETTER, FASTER
WITH LEGAL SPEND MANAGEMENT
PROBLEM PRE EBILLING.SPACE: MANUAL, SLOW, COMPLICATED.
challenges
WIP PROCESS
The finance department required accrual information ahead of invoice receipt and payment. Law firms had to submit the Work In Progress (WIP) by Excel spreadsheet. With many firms being mandated across the legal fields, the legal department was dealing with multiple WIP spreadsheets that needed to be checked, consolidated and sent to the finance department.
INVOICE REVIEW
REPORTING
Telefónica Germany reporting requirements are sophisticated. Reporting on WIP and external spend must be broken down by business unit, matter, legal field, status and numerous other variables to aid the finance department. Compiling and consolidating this information was also a very manual and time consuming process.
The legal department needed to revise these processes to both free up legal counsel time spent on admin and reduce the chance of errors. In addition, they needed visibility of all legal spend across all business units, and for that data to be available at any time.
solution with EBILLING.SPACE: co-creation of legal spend management processes
After careful review of the existing working processes, Telefónica Germany decided they needed a paperless, data driven solution for their WIP, invoice review and reporting. This solution would house all WIP, every legal invoice and various other data points of a project or matter to provide a “single source of truth” in an accurate and timely manner. At this time, BusyLamp approached Telefónica Germany’s legal department. After detailed discussions in which the General Counsel, Mr. Marcel Ritter, among others participated, Telefónica Germany decided to proceed with eBiling.Space for a number of reasons:
wip
Law firms submit their WIP directly into eBilling.Space for review and comment by the legal department. Line items which may have been missed by a human reviewer can be flagged by the system automatically based on billing guidelines. WIP no longer needs to be collected, consolidated and sent to the finance department, as they receive automated reports adjusted to their needs.
invoice review
These are submitted into the system directly by the respective law firm and checked automatically against the approved WIP. A lot of time is saved on checking invoices. The integration of eBilling.Space with SAP means that once an invoice is approved in eBilling.Space, it is automatically flagged as “approved” when transferred into SAP.
reporting
eBilling.Space out-of-the-box reports are used for the most common spend reports as well as specially designed reports for Telefónica Germany. These are available any time and can be configured to send automatically to stakeholders. Custom reports can be built on any number of variables held in the system using the report wizard. Telefónica Germany had a specific requirement for litigation spend which was not out-of-the-box. BusyLamp built a custom report to meet these requirements. Any report can be exported to excel to share with relevant stakeholders around the business. The requirement for counsel to regularly receive, update and compile spreadsheet reports manually has completely disappeared.
outcome – simpler, better, faster with eBilling.Space
The implementation of eBilling.Space and streamlining of legal department admin processes has saved time, standardised information and provided a single source of truth for legal invoice and other relevant data. Counsel have more time to spend on legal work instead of admin, resulting in a more efficient legal department that can deliver more value to the business. Stakeholders around the business can receive up-to-date important information and reports quicker than ever. In a nutshell, legal spend management and reporting is now Simpler, Better and Faster.
results
simpler: paperless
better: one source of truth
faster: end-to-end digital
