App-makers are seeking new ways to add value to corporate
legal departments. Businesses routinely
object to charges by outside counsel associated with vague descriptions of
large blocks of time. Seeking to address
this problem, one service, Viewabill, offers a way to monitor the amount of
time/cost billed by hourly service providers such as attorneys and accountants. As time is input into the system by the
attorneys, reports are available to the client immediately.
I appreciate the transparency of the concept, but, in my
experience, keeping track of billable time is inefficient even with the best
system. Keeping track of billable time
and then reporting it real time strikes me as doubly inefficient. I am
biased in favor of value billing or a flat fee for a project and against the
billable minute. (see post for my
discussion of this topic). It seems to
me even worse to spend billable minutes on the exercise of reporting billable minutes.
