Serengeti Enhances E-Billing/Matter Management for 12,000 Legal Counsel Worldwide

Bellevue, WA – April 05, 2004 – Serengeti Law today announced the release of Serengeti Tracker 6.1, which adds more than fifty enhancements to the legal profession’s leading electronic billing and matter management system. In-house counsel can now analyze spending, results and performance; law firms can post multiple e-bills with a single click; and all users can improve efficiency with new collaborative features. This release is immediately available without charge to the more than 4,000 corporations and law firms who are currently working together on Serengeti’s Web-based platform in over 100 countries.

In-House Counsel Manage Results, Generate Savings

Generally, e-billing systems only process fees and expenses and do not track results achieved (i.e. settlements, verdicts, and other amounts received or paid by the corporate client). The financial impacts of such results on the client are usually much greater than the legal fees, and are critical to both corporate planning and efforts to control overall legal spending.

Tracker 6.1 gives corporate law departments a systematic way to track and manage the results achieved by their outside counsel. From simple online forms that capture matter resolution details like the date, phase, and outcome, Tracker automatically compiles and analyzes results across multiple matters. Then with Tracker’s powerful reporting engine, in-house counsel can generate online reports that present results by matter type, law firm, individual attorney, business unit, and product line. The reports calculate average spending and results, compare budgets to actual outcomes, and summarize lessons learned. Tracker’s drill-down capabilities allow companies to go from high-level analysis to specific matter details with a single click.

In-house counsel will use this organized information to create benchmarks, predict outcomes, and uncover developing trends in their legal work. In addition, this data will help in-house counsel assign work to those outside counsel with the best track records. A specific lawyer’s efficiency, predictive accuracy, time taken to resolve matters, and results obtained are all readily available, and can be compared with the performance of other lawyers handling similar matters.

“For the first time, in-house counsel can efficiently evaluate the results that their counsel have achieved,” said Tom Melling, Serengeti’s Vice-President of Product Development. “Law departments using Serengeti can generate significant savings by analyzing objective benchmarks, creating alternative fees that induce better than average performance, and sending more work to outside counsel who consistently deliver the best results.”

Law Firms Submit All E-Bills with One Click

Serengeti Tracker’s ability to accept both LEDES and non-LEDES bills in any currency has made it the fastest growing and easiest to implement legal e-billing system worldwide. In Tracker 6.1, Serengeti continues to enhance SpeedPost™ with bulk billing, which enables law firms to combine all of their LEDES invoices into a single file and upload them with one click. The system automatically allocates the bills to the correct matters, provides alerts for online bill review, screens bills for audit violations, and populates report databases. With enhanced SpeedPost™, law firms submitting large numbers of bills will experience significant savings over paper billing and other e-billing systems. As before, there is no cost to law firms for the use of Serengeti Tracker.

Collaborative Features for Both In-House and Outside Counsel

Online collaboration between in-house and outside counsel is enhanced with more than fifty other features in Tracker 6.1. For example, new diary functionality permits users to keep track of key developments, search for similar types of events within a single matter or across groups of matters, and generate e-mail reminders in advance of important events. These features incorporate the best practices of the thousands of legal professionals who are using Serengeti Tracker to work together more efficiently.

About Serengeti Law

Serengeti Law provides Serengeti Tracker, a web-based electronic invoicing and matter management service for law departments to work more efficiently with their law firms. Serengeti Tracker includes electronic bill auditing, online document and contract management, automated budget management, and performance tracking. In-house counsel can also create customized management reports online to analyze trends in spending, track budgets and results, and create performance benchmarks. With only an Internet connection and an hour of training, thousands of in-house counsel are able to receive electronic invoices and work securely online with all of their law firms, which currently include over 4,000 firms in more than 100 countries worldwide. More information is available at: www.serengetilaw.com.

Press Contact:
Rob Thomas
Vice-President, Strategic Development
Serengeti Law
(425) 732-5555
rob.thomas@serengetilaw.com

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