Welcome to Elite Innovation. This new Exchange article will cover recent developments and upcoming trends in legal technology. In this column, I am looking forward to exploring Thomson Elite's ongoing commitment to innovation.

One of our great strengths as a company is how we deliver best-of-breed products and services to our customers through partnerships with companies that specialize in specific areas of business optimization software. Time Builder® and eBillingHub® represent an interesting new trend in financial management: invisible, intelligent technology.

Improve Cash Flow, Enhance Client Services, Lower Expenses
In the past, when firms issued an electronic invoice to clients for validation and payment, a certain amount of manual handling and processing was required to complete the transaction. To make this process more automated for accountants and end users, we are now offering eBillingHub to our Enterprise clients.

With eBillingHub, billing departments can validate, deliver and track the status of all their ebills from a single, easy-to-use Web portal. Powerful prebill validation capabilities eliminate errors before invoices are actually submitted, resulting in faster billing cycles. Custom invoice formats can be prepared and firms can easily track real-time status. By streamlining and reducing the complexity of the process, eBillingHub accelerates billing and collections resulting in improved firm cash flow, enhanced client service and lowered or deferred staffing expenses.

Is Your Firm Leaving Money on the Table?
In the area of time tracking, firms cannot account for billable time that is not properly recorded and tracked. Time Builder intelligently captures and analyzes billable activity that might otherwise be missed or underbilled.

Time Builder works in the background, invisible to the attorney, automatically monitoring the key applications timekeepers use throughout the day. Tracked systems include document management, email, calendar, phone and mobile devices. When they are ready to enter their time, attorneys can view an accurate, consolidated daily journal of billable and nonbillable activity. Time Builder makes educated guesses regarding how time should be recorded based on past activities. Attorneys can accept defaults or adjust as needed. These adjustments become information Time Builder can use for more intelligent correlating in the future.

Both of these applications require minimal or no input from end users. They represent a growing trend in invisible, intelligent technology. Time Builder and eBillingHub perform a large amount of manual, repetitive tasks along with rudimentary analytic functionality. Going forward, we expect to see an even greater degree of automation in Thomson Elite's enhancements and offerings for 2008 and beyond.