Capped Fee Enforcement for LEDES Invoice Submissions (Client Article)

Do you have agreed capped fee arrangements with your vendors for certain types of legal work? If so, you can use the Brightflag capped fee feature to monitor compliance with your capped fee arrangements.

Brightflag's Capped Fee feature can automatically monitor compliance with your capped fee arrangements with vendor law firms. Many clients have a capped fee agreement in place for certain types of legal work.

Contained within this article:

• Why use Brightflag's Capped Fee feature?
• How to configure your company's Capped Fee guidelines?
• LEDES Invoice Template Fields
• What do my vendors need to know?
• What will I see on my Invoices?
• FAQs

Why use Brightflag's Capped Fee feature?

Capped fee agreements can be checked against clients' rate cards at the upload point of a LEDES invoice. It also helps vendors to identify any errors prior to completing their invoice submission, and also allows vendors to upload invoices for the agreed fixed fee amount.

How to configure your company's Capped Fee guidelines?

Your designated Brightflag Customer Success Manager (CSM) will assist you in configuring the Capped Fee feature. They will provide you with a template that you can populate, similar to the example below:

LEDES Invoice Template Fields

Task Code (required)

• • These codes can be specific to your organization or based on a standard like UTBMS
  • The task code on the LEDEs invoice must be an exact match to the task code on the customer capped fee rate card

Task Description (required)

• • The task descriptions can be specific to your organization
  • The start of the task description on the LEDEs invoice must be an exact match to the task description on the customer capped fee rates card - the vendor can add additional detail in the line item
    • Example: "US Prov Application - Revised and submitted the application"

Vendor A - Billing Amount (required)

• • Enter the specific amount agreed for each vendor and stipulate the currency in the capped fee rate card
    • Currency format: ISO. For exact currency symbols, please reference the list here: https://fixer.io/symbols

Vendor X - Billing Amount (optional)

• • If you have different rates for different vendors, provide a specific rate for each vendor
  • You can have as many vendor billing amounts as required

What do my vendors need to know?

• Please ensure you communicate this requirement with your vendors. Your customer success manager can guide you on communication with your firms.
• If your vendor fails to include the correct details while uploading their LEDES invoice, they will receive an error message. For more details click here: Warning Errors Uploading a LEDES Capped Fee Invoice
• Vendors: for steps on uploading LEDES invoices with capped fees, see this article: Uploading a LEDES Invoice with Capped Fees Enabled

What will I see on my Invoices?

You will get a flag on your invoice when the vendor charges more than the agreed capped fee threshold for a specific task code and description. See the example flag below:

In the above example, the line item total specified in the LEDES file was USD 675. The agreed capped fee was USD 500.

You can configure auto rejection of these invoices for all scenarios, specific departments, or invoice thresholds.