A critical yet underappreciated complexity in vendor management stems from the way many large global law firms are structured. Many multinational firms operate as a federation of legally distinct entities across jurisdictions. This creates several practical issues: 

• Timekeeper Affiliation vs. Engagement Entity: The individual performing work may reside in one jurisdiction but bill through another. Without careful configuration, legal departments can lose track of who is doing the work and whether they’re covered under the right contract terms or security reviews.
• Office vs. Legal Entity Confusion: Firms may use a single global brand, but operate under different legal entities with separate tax IDs, insurance policies, and regulatory obligations. Many eBilling vendors and their systems do not distinguish clearly between office, legal entity, and brand, making it difficult to enforce entity-specific terms or route payments correctly.
• Security and Risk Fragmentation: A firm may have global information security policies that apply unevenly across its entities. If a firm’s U.S. entity has strong controls but its APAC offices do not, legal departments need the ability to assess and manage those differences, but few systems provide that level of granularity.

Managing these structural variations requires both clear data and intentional design. Most eBilling systems can capture timekeeper office or location, but that does not equate to a meaningful understanding of how that maps to the correct billing entity or contractual relationship.