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TECH SUPPORT the bills, budgets, documents, status updates, contacts, contracts — no matter what the firm or project — in one place." The ability to compare quality and cost of service across firms would be icing on the cake. This is what Serengeti provides. The company claims it was the first to offer online practice management and e-bill- ing in one integrated tool. Others are now following its lead, says Thomas. E-billing companies are adding matter- management functions, practice-man- agement vendors adding e-billing. Toronto-based Kruger Products Ltd. (formerly Scott Paper Co.), which works with a core group of five outside firms, including Ogilvy Renault LLP and McCarthy Tétrault LLP, has been using the Serengeti service for two years. Kruger actually leapfrogged the extranet stage. Only one of its firms, Gowling Lafleur Henderson LLP, maintained an extranet and it was fairly one-dimen- sional, simply providing a means for Kruger to track the status of its trade- marks. Before Serengeti, communica- tion with outside counsel was by e-mail, courier, and phone. Bills were delivered on paper. Alex Teijeira, the company's legal Starting from $62.50 per month More value for your money! Cases that you can't find anywhere else can be found in BestCase, a new web-based research service from Canada Law Book, containing: • Comprehensive collection of reported and unreported decisions dating back to 1898 and including: • Canadian Criminal Cases – since 1898 • Dominion Law Reports – since 1912 • Labour Arbitration Cases – since 1948 ... plus others! • Renowned case summaries • Case citator eREPORTS included at no extra charge ... continuing legal education delivered to your desktop! BestCase subscribers can now receive our eREPORTS – electronic versions of "paper parts" of our law reports. Emailed to you, the eREPORTS link from the subject index to the full reported judgment (including headnote). No more photocopying required to get copies of decisions exactly as they appear in a law report! Only in BestCase will you find images of reported decisions as they appear in our law reports, in a pdf file, complete with headnotes. Also available are images of original judgments as released by the court, with the official court stamps and signatures. NEW! Disburse your costs! BestCase now allows you to track research, generate reports and manage your passwords using the new Disbursement Manager. Contact your Account Manager to compare BestCase to your current research services! counsel and director of human resourc- es, insists e-billing was not the main reason he adopted Serengeti. Teijeira initially went looking for a web-based tool that would let outside counsel post documents related to a matter in one place where he could easily access them. "But [e-billing] has become a very wel- come tool," he admits. Paying bills before Serengeti was "hell." He received "about two kilo- grams" of paper bills a month and it could take up to six months for them to be processed — including rekeying in Kruger's systems, which introduced "massive" numbers of errors — and then paid. Now, firms "print" invoices to a file formatted using the legal electronic data exchange standard, which is support- ed by virtually all legal billing systems, and upload it to Serengeti. The system automatically sorts and attaches invoic- es to relevant matters. Teijeira credits Serengeti with a 30-per-cent reduction in legal spending. His cost per year for the service: about $2,000. "The invest- ment repays itself very quickly," he says. Most of the reduction comes from better matter management. "Being well managed means instructions are clearer, information back from firms is clear- er, and billing is absolutely clear," says Teijeira. Serengeti, like other e-billing sys- Canada Law Book is a Division of The Cartwright Group Ltd. 1.800.565.6967 CL0110 Bestcase-reduce costs (CL 1-2is).indd 1 24 JANU AR Y 2010 www. C ANADIAN Law ye rmag.com tems, helps streamline invoice review and automates enforcement of rules and policies. For example, a company can establish a requirement that outside counsel submit regular status updates. If a firm fails to deliver, Serengeti will kick out its next bill and decline to pay until the update is submitted. "You can imag- ine how clients love that," says Thomas. "It means they don't have to repeatedly ask for those updates." Making it easy to establish a budget 12/11/09 1:11:04 PM