SimpleLegal, a legal operations platform offering e-billing and spend management tech, has launched an application that will ‘auto correct’ legal bills and rearrange invoices to meet client billing guidelines prior to any human review.
The application provides legal operations teams, in-house attorneys and finance departments with the ability to create programmatic and configurable rules to better enforce billing guidelines and alternative fee arrangements.
The system then ‘can programmatically make changes to an invoice based on a given set of criteria before the invoice is passed to an attorney for review’. I.e. the actual bill sent by a law firm is changed by the system in accordance with the client’s stated guidelines.
The California-based company said that ‘by automatically resolving violations instead of just flagging or rejecting invoices, which forces end-users and their vendors to spend valuable time trying to verify violations, SimpleLegal removes unnecessary and time consuming human involvement.’
Sounds interesting, and is also guaranteed to stress out some law firms who may worry their bills will get hammered by an automated platform. However, on the flip side, law firms could perhaps tap the system to automatically rejig their bills before they send them out to make sure they don’t send non-compliant bills to inhouse teams?
The system will also help to support more complex billing arrangements such as the use of blended rates and volume discounts. The company added it can also enforce monetary thresholds, set department-specific rules and matter-specific approval chains.
Nathan Wenzel, co-founder and CEO of SimpleLegal, said: ‘Intelligent Invoice Workflow helps businesses manage, automate and control their entire legal invoicing process to drive efficiency, save time and streamline costs.’
‘By quantifying the return on legal initiatives, freeing up attorneys’ time and visualizing invoice violations, SimpleLegal delivers automation and simplicity to an industry that’s historically had to rely on tedious, manual processes. Intelligent Invoice Workflow was designed to allow legal teams to move past convoluted payment workflows and instead focus their time and intellect on what matters most: protecting and growing their business,’ he added.
This is further evidence of the demand in the legal market for improved matter and cost management/approval, with a raft of tech companies now providing solutions that go beyond what older e-billing systems have offered in the past.