Legal Aid Billing

Solving Legal Aid Billing Problems

• Fee-earners (insufficient understanding of rules, insufficient time recording whether on paper or electronic file)

• Billers (insufficient understanding of rules, lack of proactively in billing, difficulty in obtaining required documents and information from fee-earners)

• Management (no time to assess, retrain, and monitor poor performance of fee-earners or billers)

The contribution of each to the problems will vary firm to firm. Each of the above requires their own solution:

• Fee-earners: a combination of training, monitoring, reporting and feedback ensures dramatically improved results.  Our training is motivational, not punitive.  We fully understand the pressures fee-earners face, and the feeling of being overwhelmed by costing regulations.  Through monitoring and reward-based feedback, fee-earners are motivated to assist billers in maximising legitimate costs on file.
• Billers:  the same combination of training, monitoring, reporting and feedback, but tailored towards proactively on the part of the biller.  This can go a long way to compensate for fee-earner inattention, for those cases where fee-earners are resistant to training, or where training has not yet been obtained for them. Billers are encouraged to never simply accept the paper content of a file, but to ask whether more documents should be present, to obtain information to increase profitability (e.g. means/capital info on a blank CDS1/2), and to constantly feed back to fee-earners in order to reduce the time spent on proactive ‘chasing’ in the longer term.
• Management:  removing the need to train, assess, and monitor fee-earners and billers, while increasing profitability and gaining reassurance as to contract compliance.