Testimonials

Barnes & Thornburg Chooses PortoFormia

Barnes & Thornburg was faced with a problem common to all firms with vibrant IP practices. The number of monthly proformas seemed to increase exponentially as the practice swelled. Printing and distributing the thousands of proformas to review was expensive, time consuming, and inefficient.

When Barnes attended a demo of Mobile Markup by PortoFormia, they found a solution. "When we saw how easy Mobile Markup was to use, we were impressed," says Stacie Gayheart, the firm's Controller. "Empowering partners to use their own mobile devices to review, mark up, and distribute back to their billers was very intriguing." Now partners who travel a lot can enjoy the convenience of reviewing their proformas from anywhere. Once their work queue is downloaded to their devices, they can work on them even when there isn't an internet connection. Gayheart concluded, "Mobile Markup solves a lot of old problems that current technologies weren't addressing."

It's not easy creating a tool that caters to a broad mix of billing scenarios and the complexities of routing proformas to multiple attorneys. But PortoFormia's creators have taken their 20 years of experience in legal billing with top AM Law 100 firms and built a solution that will work in the largest of firms.

"Every step where we can eliminate paper, we did," says John Mancini, Founder of PortoFormia. "One complaint we heard consistently from customers was that all the faxing and emailing back and forth between multiple approvers—the billing department and the attorney—created paperwork that can be confusing and is a waste of time. Mobile Markup keeps a proforma securely within a workgroup to insure that all participants are viewing the same version. Our elegant workflow engine keeps the biller in charge."

Like a traffic cop, the biller controls the document flow and is constantly updated on where a proforma is the approval process. PortoFormia's biller portal provides instant visual analysis of the life cycle of a delivered proforma. A color-coded work queue indicates how long a particular proforma has been out for review and if the attorney has reviewed a bill. A transaction log and history function keeps track of every edit, signature, and travel time of the prebill.

In addition, PortoFormia's sophisticated document management system allows billers to route a proforma to multiple approvers and allows for each attorney in the routing chain to add their own comments. Billers can route a proforma back to a secretary effectively eliminating the need to fax send a copy.

Other features such as mass approval prove very appealing. When an attorney wants to approve several matters at once, Mobile Markup allows instant selection of a group of matters. Then, with one tap of the Submit button, the prebills are instantly delivered to the biller's work queue. What used to take days, takes hours.

Finally, another bonus: all marked up proformas are archived, easily retrieved by either biller or attorney.

Shirley Fleming, Billing Manager for Barnes & Thornburg, expects the adoption rate to dramatically increase as other firms see the potential gains her firm saw. "My billers took to Mobile Markup right away. In fact, the billers were able to train their attorneys on how to use the app. Implementation was easy: less than a week, and the team at PortoFormia fine-tuned the program to work with the unique characteristics of our billing system."

Electronic prebill markup is the wave of the future. Many partners are asking for their prebills in pdf format. But they couldn’t mark them up easily until now. The editing tools are simple to use. Equally significant…. my billers will receive the marked up prebills much faster. There will be less end of month stress on my staff. Printing proformas to 8 remote offices is a nightmare and consumes a tremendous amount of time and labor. It’s taken twenty years to solve this problem.

—Billing manager at an AM Law 50 firm

Our proforma distribution process is at best a rats nest of paper, email, and clumsy binders. We need a better way to cut out the inefficiency that my department has been living with for years. We often don’t know where a proforma is in the approval cycle. I love the ability for my team to know how long a proforma has been in the hands of the partner. I also love the ability to route a proforma to multiple partners. Portoformia has thought of everything we need.

—Billing supervisor at an AM Law 100 firm

We were disappointed when Portoformia first demonstrated Mobile Markup because it only supported the iPad. When they came back to us with the news that it now runs on Windows devices, we were thrilled. Our patent and trademark group loves Mobile Markup. Some partners receive a couple hundred proformas a month. Now they can quickly review and route back to their billers wherever they have an internet connection. Amazing!

—Director of Finance at an AM Law 200 firm