Viewabill

Viewabill offers a specialized platform designed to enhance transparency in the billing practices of professional service firms, with an initial focus on the legal sector.

The company originated in 2011 from the direct experiences of its founders, David Schottenstein and Robbie Friedman. Schottenstein, then the founder of a custom clothing company, faced recurring disputes over legal fees. This led to a collaboration with Friedman, a corporate attorney, to create a more transparent billing process for their own professional relationship. This successful experiment formed the basis of Viewabill, which was formally founded in 2013. The founding team also included noted attorney Alan Dershowitz. Prior to Viewabill, Schottenstein had founded Astor & Black, while Friedman had practiced law at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP before serving as General Counsel for Schottenstein's company.

Viewabill operates as a cloud-based web and mobile application that provides corporate clients with real-time insight into their service providers’ time entries and work-in-progress activities. The system integrates directly with a firm's time and billing systems, allowing clients to monitor tasks and expenses as they are recorded, long before an invoice is issued. This proactive visibility helps clients manage budgets and expectations, while enabling service providers to foster trust and improve billing efficiency. Key features include automated alerts for billing activity, secure messaging, and tools for clients to ask questions or request a pause on work directly through the platform. The platform was built to integrate with numerous time-tracking systems, including those from Aderant, Thomson Reuters Elite, and Intuit.

The business model primarily targeted corporate legal departments and the law firms they worked with, including major players like Reed Smith and clients such as LinkedIn, MGM Resorts, and Kia Motors. Revenue was generated through subscription fees paid by the service providers, with pricing structures based on either a per-matter fee or a flat rate for unlimited use. In March 2016, Viewabill was acquired by Mitratech, a provider of Enterprise Legal Management (ELM) solutions, for undisclosed terms. The acquisition integrated Viewabill's real-time monitoring capabilities into Mitratech's broader suite of legal spend management and e-billing tools.

Keywords: legal spend management, e-billing, legal tech, billing transparency, professional services software, attorney-client relationship, time tracking, expense monitoring, corporate legal, law firm billing, SaaS, legal operations, financial software, invoice accuracy, pre-billing, Mitratech, client collaboration, budget management, work-in-progress tracking, accruals management