Peer to Peer Magazine

36 PEER TO PEER: THE QUARTERLY MAGAZINE OF ILTA | SUMMER 2017 FEATURES Forget About Robot Lawyers…This Is the First Way AI Will Affect Legal Practitioners winning at trial. Success is sometimes seling. Success is sometimes losing at trial less than you originally thought you were going to lose. Overall, you're looking at billing insight, early case insight — not assessment, actual insight –– and budgeting insight." Advantages for Corporate Legal Departments It's easy to see why a corporate legal department would like to get a handle on all its data to drive beer decisions. For many departments, this also means reducing the amount they spend on outside legal counsel. The benefits can be seen in a variety of scenarios: » Score Cards: Technology gives corporate legal departments a way to correlate the amounts they are paying their outside counsel with the results they are geing for their money. Leveraging data analytics and AI, corporations can create a score card that compares each of the law firms and lawyers they have used in the past and use that to guide their decisions about future work. » Budgets: Hoffman-Childress asks: "Can you imagine being the CFO of a corporation and having one department take a stab in the dark as to what their budget is going to be for the year?" She has worked with corporate clients with legal budgets that were off by as much as $5 billion. While AI might not reduce that to zero, it is one tool that can be used to make the corporate legal budget more predictable. » Relationships: "What we find is that customers, especially in the insurance realm, really value their law firm relationships," says Chris Tessier, Manager of Communications for Wolters Kluwer. "One advantage of the service we provide is that there is a human element. Our staff and our team can help broker these conversations between the client and the firm, and a lot of clients have asked us to because we have experience with that." Advantages for Law Firms AI-based cost containment might seem like the latest blow to the already fragile world of law firm economics, but Tessier disagrees. "This technology is about compliance," he says. If corporations are able to reduce their spend, "it's because they're holding people accountable to guidelines. If they're spending $2 million, they're still going to have to spend $2 million. AI is preventing those costs from growing to $2.2 or $2.3 million because there is leakage or slippage in these guidelines." IBM's Hoffman-Childress agrees that law firms should not fear an increase in AI in the billing realm, noting that law firm CFOs are already familiar with the problems involved with billing their clients. Everyone wants the truth; everyone wants transparency. Work Assignments When tasks that could be done by lower-cost paralegals are done by higher-cost associates or partners Block Billing Clients want to see the details of the work they are paying for, not a high-level summary Support for Expenses Clients might need to provide expense report details to auditors Disallowed Expenses Charges for meals, travel or other items excluded in the outside counsel guidelines Here are four things that corporate legal departments might take issue with on your law firm invoices:

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