Foley Mansfield reduces deductions and achieves 600% ROI with AI-powered pre-bill review
"Foley Mansfield attorneys have been able to remain focused on high priority tasks and cases as well as spending much less time reviewing pre-bills. With fewer deductions, it is a win-win for our firm."
- Abby K. Rooney, COO at Foley Mansfield
LEGAL
CASE STUDY
About Foley Mansfield
As a national defense law firm with 13 offices from coast to coast, Foley Mansfield provides legal expertise, creative solutions and extensive trial experience across multiple jurisdictions. Known for exemplary service and legal prowess both in and out of the courtroom, Foley Mansfield is among the leading firms in the U.S., serving clients ranging in size from multi-million dollar corporations to small businesses and their owners.
100+
attorneys
Millions
of annual deductions due to non-compliance
2+ hrs
per month spent on pre-bill review
0.8%
annual deduction count on average
deducted amount recovered via appeals
recovered via appeals
write-offs
Costly write-offs due to OCG non-compliance
As a defense firm, Foley Mansfield faces extensive scrutiny of bills from clients. Insurance carriers are particularly sensitive to enforcing Outside Counsel Guidelines (OCGs) in the eBilling process.
In an average year, the firm contends with deductions of millions of dollars across 55K line items flagged by clients. The Foley Mansfield billing team and billing attorneys spend significant energy and resources to appeal these write-offs. They successfully recover 25% of these deductions via appeals; however, ¾ of the lost revenue is ultimately written off, lowering the firm’s realization rate and profits.
Burden of compliance falls on billing attorneys
Over the last 7 years, the billing team has kept meticulous records of deducted line items. They regularly examine the data and improve internal processes and time entry habits to improve compliance. However, the burden of compliance falls on the shoulders of billing attorneys. When each partner works with many clients, it’s an impossible task to keep 100s of different OCG rules in mind when reviewing pre-bills.
Billing attorneys spend over 2 non-billable hours per month on pre-bill review. Throughout the month, they also spend additional time on responding to appeals processed by the billing team. Despite their best efforts, partners leave non-compliant items on the pre-bill.
Without a paperless pre-bill review tool, the billing attorneys are conducting their manual review on PDF or Excel files. This creates additional administrative work for the billing team to manually enter all changes into 3E, creating bottlenecks and increasing the WIP-to-cash cycle length.
Value Obtained
2x
faster pre-bill review with partners spending minutes instead of hours each month, reducing admin load and focusing on billable work
Faster
WIP-to-cash cycle with more compliant bills going out faster and getting paid promptly
100s
of OCGs processed and billing rules extracted
41%
detection of potential non-compliant entries
"Foley Mansfield attorneys have been able to remain focused on high priority tasks and cases as well as spending much less time reviewing pre-bills. With fewer deductions, it is a win-win for our firm."
Abby K. Rooney Chief Operating Officer
Hercules for data verification was swiftly adopted by the entire firm after fast and easy deployment
The end-to-end deployment of Hercules for data verification took less than 2 months at Foley Mansfield. The IT team was impressed by the speed and ease of implementation, which did not require significant resources on their part. After a pilot spanning 2 billing cycles, the entire firm adopted Hercules, onboarding 100% of billing attorneys. Users reported that the product was very easy to use during training sessions, and some users independently and efficiently trained themselves by watching a 7-minute video.
Robust time savings on pre-bill review make room for more billable work
Partners were able to drastically improve the speed of their pre-bill review compared to the previous manual workflow. Instead of spending 2+ hours per month, some partners finish their review in a matter of 15-30 minutes. On average, the billing attorneys are now over 2x faster to complete pre-bill review. The hours saved allows partners to focus on billable work, which is an added benefit of Hercules.
ROI immediately evident with significant boost to realization rate
Hercules started to deliver value to the firm on day 1. After processing 100s of OCGs to extract and enforce billing rules and on-going fine-tuning of models based on client/user feedback, our system's performance has improved rapidly. The firm can now detect 41% of potential deductions ahead of time, allowing them to fix these entries and ensure payment, significantly increasing the realization rate and profits of the firm. An ROI of 600% is realized within the first year.
Next steps
Foley Mansfield is looking to reduce the burden on billing attorneys by leveraging the help of all timekeeper, including associates and paralegals. Leveraging Hercules to fetch submitted time entries from 3E, the firm will introduce the product to all timekeepers, who can review their own entries for AI compliance and make fixes prior to the generation of pre-bills. This early intervention reduces the number of compliance issues addressed during pre-bill review, positively impacting the WIP-to-cash cycle. Moreover, timekeepers who are most equipped to fix their narratives interact with Hercules directly and, in turn, benefit by developing better habits of writing compliant narratives.
Given the success of Hercules for data verification at the firm, Foley Mansfield has decided to also engage in our platform to solve the root cause of time entry challenges at the point of time capture. The firm has started to deploy Hercules' AI-powered time capture. The capture solution will help each timekeeper capture an extra 120 hours of billable time per year. When time capture is automated and AI generates a narrative and assigns activities to client and matter, having ready-to-submit time entries boosts time velocity by 2x. Lastly, granular and detailed narratives are deducted less often, as they are more compliant.