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Serengeti Doubles Scope of Legal Electronic Billing Technology By Capturing Unbilled Law Firm Work: New Workflows Enable In-house Law Departments to M

Bellevue, Washington (PRWEB) October 20, 2007 -- Serengeti Law today announced the release of Serengeti Tracker 8.0, which includes groundbreaking new functionality for the most widely used and highest-rated e-billing and matter management system. This release includes a new module for collecting unbilled time and expenses directly from law firms, which is required for company accrual-based financial statements. Additional enhancements improve law department fiscal year budgeting and reforecasting, and streamline law firm invoice submission.

This release continues Serengeti's innovative expansion of legal electronic billing technology into new areas which have included: foreign currency bills and taxes, both LEDES and non-LEDES bills, electronic budgets and matter management information (status updates, documents, deadlines, exposure estimates, etc.). The new accrual functionality is immediately available without charge to the more than 65,000 corporate law department and law firm professionals who are currently working on Serengeti's online platform in over 125 countries, as well as the 2,000+ new users who are connecting to Serengeti each month.

Responding to an Urgent Need

With the enhanced scrutiny of Sarbanes-Oxley and other financial regulations, most corporate law departments are required to produce detailed accrual-based legal spending reports. These accrual reports must include not only pending law firm bills, but also spending for work completed by outside counsel but not yet billed, as well as estimates of work that will be done through the end of the accounting period. A recent Serengeti survey of Association of Corporate Counsel members found that eighty percent of the law departments must report such accrued spending at least once a year, with 40 percent reporting every month.

Until now, the only way to collect this accrual information, even for law departments receiving electronic bills, was manual: issuing letters and emails to law firms, following up with phone calls, and then re-entering the information into a spreadsheet or database. With hundreds of active matters being handled by many different law firms, corporations spend significant time trying to collect timely accruals -- an inefficient exercise that many law departments must repeat every month.

Leveraging the E-billing Connection to Collect Accruals

With this release, Serengeti gives corporate law departments an efficient way to request and collect accrual data online from law firms that are already connected for electronic billing. Law firm billing managers can either input accruals for individual matters, or upload accrual data for hundreds of matters with a single mouse click using Serengeti's innovative SpeedPost? technology.

The accrual data flows directly from law firm systems into the client's Serengeti databases, and is immediately available for law department reporting without the delay and inaccuracy of data re-entry. In addition, built-in workflows provide all required notifications, response tracking and law department adjustments to accrual estimates. As with other functions in Serengeti, data integrity is ensured with a system audit log of all data that is submitted, modified, or deleted.

Integration with Law Department Budgeting and Financial Reporting

Additional workflows automatically incorporate the accrual information into fiscal year budgets and reforecasts. New reports also allow law departments to easily compare prior unbilled spending, the current month's predicted spending, and the accrual balance remaining for the year. The process is completed with online transmission of accrual data directly to a company's finance department or accounting system.

"By capturing unbilled time and spending estimates, we have effectively doubled the usefulness of our e-billing system," said Tom Melling, Serengeti's head of Product Management. "In extensive interviews of our customers, we found that some are spending as much as a week a month compiling accruals, which will now be accomplished by this logical extension of their e-billing system. This is groundbreaking technology for the legal profession -- no other system that I'm aware of has attempted to address the complex issues involved in collecting and reporting on accruals."

Additional Features

This release provides many other new features for Serengeti law department users, including the following:

- Ability to require periodic status updates from outside counsel at the same time that accruals are collected

- Auto-updated calendar of required events and workflows throughout the fiscal year

- Acceptance of new patent and trademark expense codes, and new timekeeper types

Finally, because Serengeti believes that a matter management/e-billing system works best if it addresses the needs of both corporations and their law firm partners, this release also includes the top three feature requests of law firm users:

- Simplified invoice submission (including a "delivery on hold" feature during the accruals input period)

- Ability to designate client relationship attorneys, who automatically have access to all matters for a client (with email and dashboard alerts of new matters)

- Improved notifications and workflows regarding new client implementation

As with all major Serengeti releases, users can review detailed release notes and online help files regarding all new features. In addition, there are live training sessions for system administrators which are recorded and available any time online. Finally, users can download a brief tutorial that describes the new accrual functionality.

About Serengeti Law

Serengeti Law provides Serengeti Tracker, the most widely used and highest rated matter management and electronic invoicing service for corporate law departments to work more efficiently with their law firms. Serengeti Tracker includes online document and contract management, electronic bill auditing, automated budget management, and performance tracking. In-house counsel can also create configurable management reports online to analyze trends in spending, track status and results, and create performance benchmarks. More information is available at: www.serengetilaw.com.

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