Category: General

2025 Holiday Greeting

Every year GLE makes a donation to World Central Kitchen.  WCK is an extremely worthy and beneficial global organization focused solely on providing food in areas that have been stricken by natural or other disasters impacting the availability of food.  We love this organization and applaud their mission.   

Happy 30th Birthday Legal Ebilling

The legal ebilling industry was born on November 28, 1994, when I started as the first employee at what later became known as TyMetrix.

TyMetrix founder Bob Heinemann and an insurance GC believed that legal invoices contained information that was impossible to distill because of how it was presented, leading to little understanding of the services provided by outside counsel. They believed there had to be a better way, and I was hired to help turn the idea into a business.

We viewed ebilling as more than just a pipe to receive and pay invoices. We believed that combining billing data with matter information would create rich reports to provide insight into how different approaches to handling a matter can result in different outcomes.

Bob fostered a collaborative environment and our early team members (Steve Zielinski, Nancy Doyle, Scott Holliday and Frank Mikulak, among others) were key to our success. I am enormously proud of the decisions we made with the product in those early days: we created functionality that is foundational to legal ebilling today.

So happy 30th birthday legal ebilling, and my thanks to all who contributed to moving the industry ahead over the last 30 years.

 

One Less LEDES Creation Tool Available

We were sad to learn that Wolters Kluwer ELM Solutions will no longer be selling its eBillingDesk product as of 1 June 2021. It was perhaps the most versatile of the stand-alone LEDES invoice file generator/editor tools available in the marketplace. We learned that they will honor existing subscriptions to the end of their subscription term, but no new subscriptions will be available for purchase. 

Organizational Donation

GLE has been fortunate to work consistently throughout the 2020 pandemic year at a time when so many are struggling. As you may have noticed on our 2020 holiday card, GLE made the largest donation in our 9 year history to World Central Kitchen and Chef Jose Andres. In addition to the obvious synergy (we are Global Legal Ebilling and they are World Central Kitchen), we have enormous respect for the mission of WCK.  Imagine formulating and then executing a plan to tackle hunger on a global scale!  You can learn more about the work of this very worthy organization here.

Update on Bogus Industry Awards

Those who are regular readers may recall that I published a post on the crazy awards that are basically pay-to-receive distinctions. A real award isn’t something that you pay for.
And while I continue to receive award notifications from all kinds of organizations, I saw a really great article echoing my comments on these non-distinctive awards in the ABA Journal, June/July 2020 edition. Here’s the link.  
It seems that Lucy Davis of Davis Law Group in Seattle won an award as Lawyer of Distinction in the personal injury field in 2017.   Lucy is a poodle.  In submitting her application for the award, Lucy’s office mentioned that she had “Juris Dogtor” and was a member of the King Country Bark Association.
To those at Davis Law Group, I salute you!!  And to Lucy, you’ve got my vote.

Pandemic Update

While the pandemic impacts businesses around the world, we are fortunate to have work underway and have not closed our doors.
Our best wishes for good health for you, your families and friends, and our thanks to all who continue to provide essential services and medical care during this time.
Please stay home to flatten the curve, wear masks if you need to go out and wash your hands!