Digital White Papers

I L T A W H I T E P A P E R | T E C H S O L U T I O N S 35 have different rules for different practice areas, so there are different guidelines on, for instance, employment law, corporate law, property and litigation. It translates into dozens of sets of OCGs. Add in the fact that OCGs are invariably delivered in the form of unstructured Word documents, firms are having to deal with a growing and unwieldy mass of rules and instructions. The OCG documents themselves can also be of considerable length: they have been known to run to more than 20 pages and can change regularly. It is not uncommon for these documents to grow organically, sometimes beyond their original intended scope, as clients add new undesirable behaviors from their legal vendors that they want to prohibit. The cost of compliance is opaque and measured in the time it takes to aggregate, order and disseminate the rules to the timekeepers working on any given matter. The complexity of this task is significant and can leave law firms scratching around to find best practice on how to achieve this. The impact of non-compliance Meanwhile the impact of non-compliance is also considerable. Even a minor infraction of a billing rule, where for example a line item on an invoice is flagged for further scrutiny by a manual reviewer, costs some delay. Where the invoice is taxable, (everywhere other than in the US), it cannot be amended or adjusted, even for small infractions. Therefore conceivably a 300-plus line item invoice for tens of thousands of dollars may be failed on submission, or rejected, due to a single incorrect bill code, or a banned word in a narrative on one single line item. The time to take corrective action and resubmit adds significantly to the payment cycle. Also, whereas once a minor breach of billing rules would slip through the review process unnoticed, now, in the age of e-billing, legal spend management and increasingly, legal bill review, this is certainly no longer the case. With each billing rule codified in a legal spend management system employing an automated invoice testing process, every infraction, big or small, will be captured as non-compliant and cause the invoice to be failed on submission before it even gets to the manual review process. The emergence of legal bill review introduces another layer of scrutiny using a manual pre-review by a third- party company, aided by artificial intelligence, to rank line items on legal invoices for likely non-compliance and write downs. The artificial intelligence refines its methodologies using feedback from the manual reviewers. This is helping corporate legal teams capture block billing and vague narratives in a way that a traditional spend management system checking binary rules cannot. It is therefore clear that the challenge facing law firms is not only large but growing. Moreover there "The artificial intelligence refines its methodologies using feedback from the manual reviewers."

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