Financial Times

The Latest in Desk Dining

January, 2001 - Profits and dotcoms may come and go but the culinary rituals of the American work place remain - like the habit, so prevalent among American lawyers, of deskbound dining.

Now a start-up internet company has all but cornered the market for the desktop feeding of lawyers in New York City. Sixty of the city's 100 largest firms use seamlessweb.com to link overworked associates (among the most habitual desktop diners) with 450 purveyors of takeout meals.

Online ordering cuts out the greasy middleman - the grimy takeout receipt that lurks among the chow mein cartons, only to emerge many meals later to mystify the accountants. Now all that egg foo yung gets billed directly to clients - associates enter the client's billing code online, right next to their request for extra soy sauce.

SeamlessWeb's lawyer clients say they love the wide choice of restaurants, providing everything from gourmet to salsa.

But the accountants like it more. They get one monthly bill, complete with client codes, saving many tedious man-days reconciling receipts with invoices, chasing elusive billing codes and negotiating hundreds of corporate accounts with separate restaurants.

"It's a brilliant product. It really takes a big burden off administrators," says Phyllis Bonsignore, director of administration at the New York firm Salans Herzfeld Heilbronn Christy & Viener. "When you're eating out of a carton every night, you get tired of ordering from the same place." But to open individual corporate accounts with 450 restaurants would be, for her, a full-time job.

Jason Finger, who founded the firm with his law school classmate Paul Appelbaum, says his company does what the internet is supposed to do: it saves money, increases efficiency and permits greater financial controls.

At the New York firm of Morrison & Foerster, that means checking the timing of staff meals: legal support staff are allowed to order a meal only once they worked 2 1/2 hours' overtime. SeamlessWeb makes it easier to keep them honest, says Liz Broadbent, assistant office administrator.

Finger's company, having cornered the legal market, is now branching out into financial services, accountancy and public relations - other professions that practice desktop dining. And the prospect of recession does not faze him: "We do breakfast and lunch, too," he says. "I don't think people are going to eat less."

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