June 16th, 2008 by lbrennan
One of the first things we did on founding Discovery Mining was join the Yahoo Litsupport group. This was, and still is, though to a lesser degree, a very useful insight into the issues facing litigation professionals. One of the topics that always intrigued us was how much people seemed to like TIFF images; as pioneers of native file review, it was a mystery to us why someone would wish to see a “picture” of a file rather than the real thing.
Another favorite topic was vendor-bashing. Many of those posting to the group would go to great lengths to make sure that they prevented vendors from expressing opinions, even if those opinions were based on experience and likely to be useful. No doubt some had been “burned” by unscrupulous providers, shamelessly claiming to resolve every complicated issue at a fraction of the price of their competitors by “first thing tomorrow morning” but it seemed the resentment was often much deeper than that.
It’s a pity that we all get lumped into the same category; at Discovery Mining, we pride ourselves on the quality of our customer service. A team of professional project managers and customer service representatives, headed by our VP of Client Services, provide on demand support at no charge to our customers. Internally we take this role so seriously, we have dubbed our VP as VP of Customer Happiness!
So I certainly will avoid any generalized client-bashing, but I would like to offer up some thoughts for improving cooperation and trust.
Law firms tend to be slow and disorganized when it comes to paying vendor bills. Often an invoice will sit on a partner’s desk for any time up to several weeks before it is re-billed to the client, and our invoice may not be paid until the law firm’s bill is paid. Many of our bills never seem to find their way to an accounts payable department, so tracking their payment status can seem like a job for a private investigator. And how many times do we hear “I never received your invoice, please send a copy”? Aren’t we all such Discovery experts that we can tell exactly when our email with the attachment was delivered?
The result of all this is that it represents a great victory for us when we keep our accounts receivable under 90 days. Unfortunately, however, that is a lot of working capital to finance, and distracts from our main focus of providing timely cost effective discovery services!
Prompt payment allows better cash management, which in turn allows prices to fall. I know I am speaking for the whole vendor community when I wish for the reduction of payment friction, and the benefits we all reap when any type of vendor/firm friction is reduced.
