Aggressive auditing of bills, by third parties or employees, is the wrong way to go

To have non-employees (or their software) scour bills of your law firms for reductions makes for a poor practice (See my post of Dec. 3, 2006 for my arguments on this assertion and references cited.), yet many bill auditors make a living doing exactly that (See my post of Dec. 4, 2006 on this cottage industry.). A mystery to me, it is, and not just because the auditors have an incentive to find allegedly improper billing practices.

Even employees, if charged with responsibility to comb through invoices, will go too far to find improprieties.

My mantra is to devote time before the law firms bill – manage what they do before they do it and bill time – and you needn’t be so scrupulous about reviewing daily entries on bills.