For nearly 20 years, the world’s leading companies have used sophisticated electronic billing, matter and vendor management systems to govern large budgets and legal spend initiatives—but in a largely U.S.-centric way. As companies expand their global footprints, they are running into uncharted territory for legal and e-billing policies. It often comes as a surprise to corporate lawyers to discover just how out-of-compliance they are, but the fact is, they are just one revenue audit away from disaster.
The global e-billing process—that of creating, submitting, auditing, correcting and approving invoices for local or cross-border transactions in countries and regions around the world—is subject to stringent reporting requirements, and requires a mastery of intricate and varied jurisdictional rules, policies and laws that confound the very definition of an “invoice.” It is essential that legal ops teams not rely solely on their e-billing vendor who may not understand the inherent risks involved in the complicated web of compliance issues around the globe.
