Litigation Costs Management Software

Saves Precious Fee Earner Time & Helps Firms Keep Tight Control of Litigation Costs

The LAWFUSION Costs Management Module is an extremely useful tool that helps law firms manage estimated costs against actual incurred costs. The LAWFUSION Costs Management Module empowers firms to easily provide accurate cost estimates as matters progress, quickly identifying when matters are likely to exceed their estimate. Ultimately the software is designed to reduce the likely write-off at the end of the matter. LAWFUSION users can create the Precedent H quickly and easily, they are warned in real-time when a case is nearing stage budget and the software makes it very easy to make adjustments if time has been allocated to the wrong stage.

Select Legal Systems Limited were one of the first to launch a brand new costs management module back in April 2013 in light of Lord Justice Jacksons’s reforms. The software authors continue to develop this module in line with user demand, and it has become a highly comprehensive piece of software for litigation costs management providing many benefits to law firms. This is a key example of the kind of software functionality that sets Select Legal Systems and LAWFUSION apart from other suppliers.

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Key Features

Auto-Produce Precedent H, R & S

LAWFUSION users can auto-produce the Precedent H (cost budget), the Precedent R (the Budget Discussion Report) and the Precedent S (the new Electronic Bill of Costs) in Excel format straight from the LAWFUSION Costs Management Module.

Costing Templates

LAWFUSION users are able to customise litigation costing templates on a case-by-case basis and allocate time budgets against the ‘Cost Stages’. Users can also choose to save an existing case configuration as a template for specific ‘cost styles’.

J-Codes

The LAWFUSION Costs Management Module also provides functionality that enables firms to use of litigation codes (born out of the original J-Codes theory) for litigation ‘tasks’ and ‘activities’.

Budget Breakdown

The Budget Breakdown template in the LAWFUSION Costs Management Module allows you to produce a report that includes all the information your costs draftsman will need to prepare a precedent H costs budget or bill of costs. This includes the cost phase and task and activity codes, if used by your firm. The benefit of this report is that it enables users to easily summarise their time and disbursement entries by phase, as well as exclude entries that are not recoverable ‘inter partes’. Of course this report can be exported into Microsoft Excel.

Legal Team Member View

The Legal Team Member view or ‘LTM view’ screen in LAWFUSION will tell you at a glance which fee earners have recorded time to a matter as well as their grade and the hourly rate used. Importantly, this screen will also tell you if the grade or rate for that fee earner has changed and when it changed, during the lifetime of the matter. Using this screen, you can check that all fee earners working on the matter have the correct fee earner grade and hourly rate assigned without checking the grade and hourly rate for each fee earner in separate records individually.

Budget Rates

The authors of LAWFUSION appreciate that as a practice, you may have different hourly rates which apply for the same fee earner depending upon the type and complexity of work they do. Often, the hourly rate that can be recovered ‘inter partes’ will not be the same as the rates stored in your LAWFUSION database. The Budget Rates functionality in the Costs Management Module caters for this situation. Using Budget Rates, you can apply ‘inter partes’ rates to the budgets calculated using the Costs Management Module without affecting any other rates stored within your LAWFUSION system. This allows you to view a complete and accurate picture of how your actual costs incurred compare to the cost budget that has been set by the Court.

Traffic Lights

Users are given traffic light style warnings when booking entries and allocating them against costs if they are getting near or going to exceed a limit allocated.

WIP Management For High Value Cases

For firms that carry high value Work In Progress LAWFUSION offers milestone management for high value civil litigation cases. Well ahead of time the system highlights cases that could potentially slip so the firm can allocate extra resources to keep them within cost and on track. This means firms not only have the functionality to record to the precedent H sections but they can also record to their own case milestones.

Time Recording & Disbursements

The LAWFUSION time recording system has been enhanced so that both private and legal aid time can to be recorded quickly against the relevant cost stage including all automated case tasks. Users can also allocate disbursements and expenses against ‘Cost Stages’.

Suitable For Other Areas Of Law

The LAWFUSION Costs Management Module can be used for more than just litigation matters which are subject to costs management by the Court. Using the Costs Management Module you can create cost budgets for all different types of work across your practice, for example Legally Aided matters, Court of Protection work and fixed fee matters.

Intuitive & Flexible

In true LAWFUSION style the costs management module is incredibly intuitive and flexible. The software allows users to easily re-assign entries across stages and gives a graphical display of progress. Users have the option to base a new case entirely on a previous one, in terms of its cost budgets.