Read the pre‑bill the way your client's system will.
Your practice management system knows your time entries. It has never read your client's billing guidelines. BillingLens compares the two before the invoice leaves the firm, so the reduction conversation happens on your side of the send button.
- Works from a CSV or PDF export
- No change to how you capture time
- Every decision logged
- Recorded
- $18,640.00
- Flagged
- $3,745.00
- To review
- 4 of 5
| Date | Entry | Hrs | Amount |
|---|---|---|---|
| 09/04 | Review file; call with adjuster; revise answer; correspondenceR. Kimura · AssociateGuidelines §3.4 — one task per entry. Suggested split sums to 3.10. | 3.10 | $1,302.00 |
| 09/05 | Legal research re comparative faultJ. Alvarez · PartnerGuidelines §5.1 — research capped at 3.0 hrs per issue without approval. | 4.80 | $1,272.00 |
| 09/07 | Organize exhibits for mediation binderD. Osei · ParalegalGuidelines §4.2 — exhibit organization not billable at paralegal rate. | 1.90 | $247.00 |
| 09/09 | Draft memo re coverage position (AI-assisted)R. Kimura · AssociateGuidelines §9.3 — AI use must be disclosed and the program named. | 2.20 | $924.00 |
| 09/11 | Prepare for and attend mediationJ. Alvarez · Partner | 6.40 | ✓ $1,696.00 |
How this works with your firm
File in, file out
Export your pre-bill as CSV, XLSX or PDF. No integration project, no change to timekeeping.
Separated by construction
Firm data is scoped at the database layer, not by convention. No shared queries across firms.
Append-only decision log
Who changed what, from what to what, and when. Nothing is edited in place or overwritten.
Every flag cites its rule
A finding a partner can't trace to a clause is a finding they'll override. So each one names the provision.
Where this sits
Three different things get called billing software.
Your practice system does the first two well. The third needs a document it has never been given.
Producing the invoice
Time capture, assembly, PDF generation, trust accounting, sending. Mature and well served.
Clio · MyCase · Smokeball · Tabs3 · PracticePanther · Aderant · Elite 3EReviewing your own draft
Every practice system has a pre-bill screen showing the billing attorney their own draft, in their own format, with their own rate table applied.
Compares the draft to the firm's rates. Not to the client's rulebook.Checking it against the client's rules
Caps, class restrictions, staffing limits, approval thresholds, task-code validity, narrative requirements, disclosure obligations, submission windows.
The guidelines arrive as a 40-page PDF. We encode them as rules and run them over every line.Your client's reviewer is already automated
Insurers and corporate legal departments run line-item compliance on invoices as they arrive. Your bill is read by software before a person sees it. You should see what it sees first.
The blanket haircut
Without knowing which lines are at risk, billing partners discount broadly to keep a bill uncontroversial. A specific flag list lets you cut the three entries that matter and bill the rest with confidence.
Decide anything for you
Overriding a flag takes one keystroke, same as accepting one. A tool that makes it easier to write down your own work than to defend it is working against you.
The rules we run
The easy four, and the ones nobody else advertises.
Narrative quality, rates, task codes and expense caps are table stakes. The checks below them are arithmetic against clauses most tools leave to a human reading a PDF.
- Rate above approved
Billed rate against the client's approved rate for that timekeeper class, including notice periods on increases.
Partner $310 · approved $275 - Block billing
Multiple tasks in one entry, with a suggested split that sums to the original hours.
4 tasks · 3.10 hrs · split proposed - Narrative requirements
Minimum detail, named document, stated purpose, banned phrases such as "attention to file".
"file review" · §3.2 banned - Staffing limits
How many timekeepers may bill an internal conference, a deposition or a hearing without prior approval.
2 attendees · 1 permitted - Research caps
Hours per issue against the cap, summed across entries and timekeepers, not just per line.
4.80 hrs · cap 3.00 per issue - Restricted tasks
Work that may not be billed above a stated class, or not billed at all.
"organize exhibits" · max paralegal - Approval thresholds
Tasks needing written pre-approval, optionally above a dollar figure, with no approval on record.
Expert retained · §6 threshold $2,500 - Billing increments
Entries that aren't a multiple of the permitted increment, and rounding patterns across a timekeeper.
0.25 required · 0.30 billed - Task and activity codes
UTBMS validity, allowed code lists, and task-activity pairs the client rejects.
L250 with A103 · not permitted - Expense caps
Per-page copying, hotel per night, meals per day, mileage source and rate, markup prohibitions.
Hotel $310 · cap $275 - Submission windows
Invoice dated outside the billing period, or submitted past the window the guidelines allow.
Entry 08/28 · period September - Generative-AI disclosure
Where the client requires AI-assisted work disclosed in the entry and the program named. Tuned for precision, not recall.
Drafting entry · no disclosure token
Rule coverage depends on what a given client's guidelines actually say. We encode the document you're working under, then show you which of its provisions became machine-checkable and which still need a human.
The screen that matters
Forty findings, cleared faster than reading the pre-bill.
Ten screens in this product are ordinary forms. One decides whether your billing attorney keeps using it. The review queue is built as a keyboard application, not a table: each finding shows the entry, the rule it cites, the exposure and a suggested fix, and one keystroke resolves it.
Accepting a suggestion and overriding it cost the same single keystroke. That is deliberate and it is enforced by a test, because a tool that makes writing down your own work easier than defending it will quietly cost you money.
Decisions are applied optimistically and reconciled against the server, so the screen never stalls between keystrokes. Undo appends a reversal rather than deleting a row, which is what makes the log defensible later.
- j / k
- Next and previous finding
- a
- Accept the suggested fix
- e
- Edit the narrative inline
- w
- Write down, with a reason code
- r
- Re-rate to the proposed class
- n
- No charge
- o
- Override, one keystroke, no dialog
- x
- Select, then shift+key for bulk
- u
- Undo, as an appended reversal
- <100ms
- Keystroke to visible state change, by design budget
- <2s
- First render of a 500-entry pre-bill at p95
- 1
- Round trip per decision, totals returned with it
- 0
- Rows deleted, ever. The log is append-only
Performance figures are the product's design budgets, measured in testing rather than customer averages.
How it fits your cycle
Between the pre-bill and the send.
We encode your client's guidelines once
Send us the billing guidelines document. We turn it into a versioned rule set, each rule citing the clause it came from, and show you what we encoded before it runs on anything. Where a carrier publishes guidelines that apply across their whole panel, that encoding is already done.
Export your pre-bill and upload it
CSV, XLSX or the PDF your system already produces. Column mapping is confirmed once per format and remembered. Files are keyed on content, so re-uploading the same export doesn't double-flag anything.
Your billing attorney clears the queue
Findings ordered by exposure, each citing its rule. Accept, edit, write down, re-rate or override. The running total updates as they go, so they can see what leaving the flag in would cost.
Send, and keep the record
Export the corrected pre-bill for your billing system, plus a findings report showing what was changed and why. If the client reduces something anyway, you have the clause-level record to appeal with.
Pricing
$49 per active timekeeper, per month.
Priced below the practice management system that runs your whole firm, not above it. Seats are counted from people who actually recorded time in the period.
- Unlimited clients, matters and pre-bills
- Guideline encoding for your first client included
- Review queue, findings report, corrected pre-bill export
- Append-only decision log and realization reporting
- Roles for owner, billing admin, billing attorney and read-only
- Everything in Firm, at no cost, with a written end date
- We encode up to three of your clients' guideline sets
- In exchange: twelve months of invoices, plus what your clients actually reduced
- Conversion price agreed up front, so there's no surprise at the end
- Guideline encoding, reviewed clause by clause with you
- Timekeeper roster and rate cards loaded
- Column mapping for your export format
- One cycle run alongside your existing review
Talk to us
Book a walkthrough on your own pre-bill.
Send us one pre-bill export and one set of client billing guidelines. We will encode the guidelines, run them over the export, and walk you through what came back — including the provisions we could not make machine-checkable.
- Your own pre-bill, not a canned demo
- Every flag traced to the clause it came from
- An honest account of what we missed
What firms ask first
The awkward questions.
Won't this just make us bill less?
It can, if you let it. Some flags are real violations and fixing them does reduce the invoice, though that money was unlikely to survive review anyway. The larger opportunity runs the other way: entries that are fully billable but written in a way that invites a write-down. Rewriting those preserves revenue rather than giving it up. We measure ourselves on collected dollars per hour worked, not on how many flags you accepted, because optimizing the second is how a tool like this destroys value while appearing to work.
Do we have to change how we capture time?
No. BillingLens reads the pre-bill your system already produces. Nothing changes in how your timekeepers record time, and nothing is installed alongside your practice management system.
Who else does this?
Several vendors, and we'd rather you heard it from us. Aderant, Thomson Reuters' Elite division, Intapp and a handful of newer entrants all sell billing-guideline compliance to law firms, mostly to firms above a hundred lawyers and mostly starting at the time-entry stage. We're built for smaller firms working under carrier and corporate guidelines, at the pre-bill stage, with deterministic arithmetic on the rules most tools leave to a human. Ask us for a comparison on your own guidelines and we'll show you where we're stronger and where we aren't. Vendor names are used to describe the market and imply no affiliation or endorsement.
Can a partner override a flag?
Always, in one keystroke, with no dialog and no required justification. The override is recorded so the pattern is visible later, but nothing blocks it. A compliance tool that fights the billing partner loses.
What happens to our data?
Firm data is scoped at the query layer, so a request that fails to identify a firm raises an error rather than returning rows. Analyses are written once and never edited; human actions are appended as separate records. We'll send you our security documentation before you send us anything.
What does it not do yet?
It doesn't integrate directly with practice management systems, so pre-bills move as files. It doesn't generate LEDES for submission. It doesn't encode guidelines you haven't sent us. And it won't tell you your catch rate until it has run a few cycles on your own invoices, which is the number we think you should judge us on.
Five places, three months
We'd rather show you a number than an argument.
We're taking five firms as design partners. Free for three months, with an end date in writing. You get the product and the guideline encoding; we get to measure what we catch against what your clients actually reduced. If the answer is unimpressive, you'll be the first to know.