SimpleLegal Taps AI To Find Billing Errors For Legal Departments

SimpleLegal, which provides spend and matter management software for legal departments, debuted its SimpleReview artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled offering. The technology helps with simplified invoice review “by analyzing, identifying, and highlighting billing errors,” according to a Monday (June 28) announcement.

“Our goal is to give attorneys the ability to conduct focused invoice review with a high degree of rigor,” SimpleLegal General Manager Mark Weidick said in the announcement. “SimpleReview streamlines the tedious task of reviewing invoices and allows attorneys to be diligent without burning out.”

The AI models of SimpleLegal comprehend the context of bills and line items by harnessing natural language processing and machine learning (ML). Furthermore, the infrastructure that fuels SimpleReview keeps learning with every bit of information it handles to find “outside counsel billing guideline violations,” according to the announcement.

The breath of law firm work for legal departments in companies leads to long outside counsel invoices and many line items. Billing guidelines, along with people looking over invoices, can help find fees that are beyond outside counsel guidelines.

Even so, the amount of work and various descriptions of similar services can present difficulty, providing AI with the chance to find more “non-compliant charges,” according to the announcement.

The news comes as corporate legal spend has been on the uptick, fueled by different factors, ranging from pandemic-related business interruption matters to data privacy issues.

An AlixPartners survey found that companies in Europe and the United States grew their legal budgets with over one-third of polled firms reporting that legal budgets have risen during the last year.

Companies have been challenged for decades with sufficiently evaluating the complicated and voluminous invoices that outside counsel and other external legal vendors have provided, bringing about inefficiencies and overspending.

In a conversation with PYMNTS, Onit CEO Eric M. Elfman explored the largest hurdles to ensuring that legal departments are sufficiently linked with accounts payable (AP) personnel and that their legal B2B payments are going to the right services.a