Guidelines You Can’t Memorize, Enforced for You: Billing Compliance at Preg O’Donnell & Gillett
A Seattle associate on carrier billing guidelines no one can keep in their head, and entries checked against them automatically.
Every insurance carrier hands defense counsel its own billing guidelines: which words are allowed, which tasks are compensable, how a narrative has to read. Attorneys are expected to know all of them by heart. J.J. Doucette is blunt about how realistic that is.
“You cannot just sit people down and explain what words are allowed and what words aren’t. They’re not going to retain it. Even if I write them down, I’m going to forget them in twenty-four hours. There are just too many.”
The guidelines, enforced for you
That’s the job Hourglass takes off the attorney: it knows the guidelines so the timekeeper doesn’t have to. Every entry is checked against the carrier’s rules as it’s written, and anything that would draw a cut gets flagged before the bill goes out.
“Having a little yellow light saying this word is not great is perfect. I can look at it and decide: can I replace that with a better word? And if I actually need the word, I use it.”
Compliance stops being a memory test and becomes part of writing the entry, and the cleanup work downstream disappears with it. “It’s especially useful on the administrative side, because they’re the ones cleaning up the messes of bad time entries all day long.”
The capture underneath matters too. His end-of-day review used to mean writing every entry from scratch. “Just having a number in there saves me so much time compared to going into every single email I sent that day. Mostly, it’s just good.”