Custom Rules to Avoid Painful LEDES Invoice Rejection

Law firm billing, especially involving LEDES, is the bane of many a billing administrator’s existence, especially for those working with insurance carriers. If that’s your pain, we feel you.

Insurance carriers change their byzantine legal billing rules on an annual basis, making it hard for the law firms that represent them to keep up. The result is invoice rejections, costing firms thousands of dollars in lost wages and inefficient rework.

Here’s the good news: you don’t have to stay in LEDES purgatory. Rocket Matter solves these problems by allowing you to customize your law firm billing to support the needs of your LEDES clients. You can easily configure LEDES invoices and configure audit rules to catch billing issues so that your insurance carrier can’t delay your payment.

When combined with our Paperless Prebills, Rocket Matter offers the most powerful support among legal billing software providers for ensuring your law firm invoicing is quick, timely, and accurate.

Setting Up Custom LEDES Billing Audit Rules to Prevent Invoice Rejection

Insurance carriers update their billing guidelines once a year. When this happens, they typically send a communication to the law firm. Unless the law firm is proactive in updating their timekeepers about these rule changes, the result is a wave of invoice rejection.

Our answer? Rocket Matter’s customizable billing audit rules! Once you create a rule, you can enforce legal billing requirements when someone creates a time entry. You can also validate time and expense entries during the law firm prebill and invoicing process.

As we will see below, Rocket Matter’s time entry fields (and the billing validations) are ubiquitous across our system. Consequently, your legal timekeepers are likely to track their time and expenses more consistently and more accurately.

FREE E-BOOK: How to Solve Your LEDES Billing Headaches

How Rocket Matter's LEDES Law Firm Billing Audit Rules Work

Rocket Matter enforces the law firm billing audit rules your timekeepers enter. It doesn't matter if they enter time on computers, mobile devices, via our calendar entries, tasks. Anywhere our Bill-As-You-Work technology lives, Rocket Matter enforces your rules.

Moreover, they’re doing so within the parameters of your client’s billing rules.

Users on our Premier tier can launch the Billing Audit Rules dashboard. From here, you can add new rules or modify existing ones. You can set rules based on language or billing limits and specify when the rule is applied – at time entry or during prebill. You can also apply rules to specific roles and billing codes within our custom legal billing software.

In the below example, we’re adding a rule that prevents someone from adding the language “Phone call” to a billable time entry.  Carriers can enforce language-based and billable-based restrictions.  This rule is applied to the South Florida Insurance Co.

Another way you can prevent invoice rejection is by preventing users to enter specific billing codes in the first place.  Rocket Matter supports extensive role-based access security, and you can setup atomic-level access so that certain users can’t add specific LEDES codes.

For example, the role as configured in the example below cannot create an entry for A102 (Research) or A110 (Manage Data/files). This functionality requires familiarity with Rocket Matter's role-based permissions, available in our our Premier tier.

Applying the LEDES Billing Audit Rules

Once we create a rule, they are available for immediate use. Here, we try to add a time entry in violation of the rule we just established. In the example below, we enforce a rule that attorneys cannot add a specific LEDES task code. You can see that Rocket Matter does not accept the entry, informing the legal timekeeper of the rules violation.

Imagine how many fewer invoice rejections you’ll get with these protections in place!

Additionally, validation doesn’t just happen while capturing time. It can also happen during the prebill process.

On Rocket Matter’s prebill screens, including the Batch Billing dashboard, you’re able to initiate “Audit Mode” for all of your outgoing billable activities.

This powerful functionality allows you to see any legal billing rules violations across all of your clients and all of your pending billable activities.

The best part? You don’t have to navigate to each matter to change the billable entries. You can fix the entries from the same screen.

In sum, Rocket Matter makes LEDES billing for insurance carriers a whole lot easier. We took what used to be a blind, expensive, and cumbersome legal billing process and made it insightful, quick, and painless.

REFERENCE: The ABA's Litigation Code Set for LEDES

In Rocket Matter, Legal Billing Rules are Everywhere

Additionally, because of Rocket Matter’s Bill-As-You-Work technology, we support the capture of LEDES codes everywhere – in our mobile application, in our Office 365 integration, when you work on tasks, upload documents, and in dozens of other locations and features.

Here, we see LEDES codes available through our Office 365 integration. From within Word, you can bill for a document you’re working on and upload it directly to the corresponding matter in Rocket Matter.

GET: Rocket Matter for Office 365

Below is an image of our iPhone application, demonstrating how you can capture LEDES billing codes from a mobile device. Our Android app features the same functionality.

Bill-As-You-Work means that LEDES codes are available on Rocket Matter’s tasks and calendar items as well.

In fact, whether you’re uploading a document, responding to a phone message, or pretty much doing any activity with billable potential, you can track time and enter LEDES codes. Moreover, Rocket Matter validates those entries against your custom billing rules.

Customizing LEDES on a Per-Client Basis

Rocket Matter allows you to map data fields in our system to the columns on a LEDES invoice. You can set this up globally for all of your clients, and you can override your LEDES configuration at the client level.

One very powerful aspect of Rocket Matter’s LEDES invoicing setup is that you have ultimate flexibility. If you set up a custom field in Rocket Matter, that field can show up on a LEDES invoice.

When you consider that Rocket Matter allows you to set up custom LEDES formats for your clients as well as customize billing rules for each insurance carrier, you really have a lot of freedom.

Getting Started with Our Easy-to-Use Law Firm Invoicing Software

The best part is that this powerful LEDES billing and auditing functionality is not rocket science (no pun intended). Rocket Matter is known for its clean and intuitive interface. And our award-winning support and onboarding team will get you set up and trained at a pace that works for you.

Many insurance defense law firms work with legal practice management consultants to get set up with Rocket Matter. If that’s your situation, or you would like to work with one, we can support that relationship.

REFERENCE: LEDES 98B format specifications

Want to learn more about Rocket Matter's LEDES capabilities? Schedule a free personalized demo with one of our practice management experts today!