This article originally appeared on Legal Dive.
There is a lot of discussion about the benefits of AI in the legal world, but much of it focuses on the technology's potential rather than its practical applications. While it's true that AI is rapidly evolving and is expected to revolutionize corporate law as we know it, the reality is that there are real business benefits that can be gained today.
To realize these benefits, you need to cut through the noise around AI and understand how it can be used to increase efficiency and optimize business outcomes today. After all, while planning for the future is important, the reality is that corporate legal departments have immediate challenges they need to solve: they need to become as efficient as possible, make legal spend more predictable or reduce, improve case outcomes, and much more.
Let us explain how AI can help with each of these objectives.
Review of legal bills
Increase efficiency, improve accuracy, and reduce missed spending
Ensuring that legal invoices are accurate and free of errors or violations of billing guidelines is important to reduce expense leakage, but putting this responsibility on lawyers is problematic. First, it takes the lawyers away from the business of law and adding value to the business. Second, humans are prone to making mistakes, and the likelihood of that happening increases when someone is spending hours analyzing every line item (and no one wants to do that).
Introducing AI into the invoice review process can greatly improve the accuracy and efficiency of the entire operation. AI can quickly spot patterns in invoices and automatically flag potential violations of guidelines. These violations cannot be addressed by humans until the software alerts them to the problem. A human can then investigate the issue and, if necessary, contact the law firm to make corrections.
This combination of AI and human input is key to reducing legal spend leakage and increasing efficiencies – all of which translates into cost savings and added value, positioning corporate legal departments better as business drivers for the larger organization.
Spend Management
Increased visibility leads to better predictability and reduced manual invoice entry.
In 2024, businesses will continue to look to their legal departments to control costs. Teams need to have better visibility into their spending and be able to proactively and accurately identify savings opportunities.
AI can scrutinize invoices and analyze legal costs to identify areas for improvement, but that's just the beginning: By applying historical analysis to past cases, AI can help legal departments accurately forecast budgets and case cycle times, giving corporate legal teams a more accurate understanding of how much it will cost to litigate a case.
AI can also replace the need to manually enter invoices. For example, invoices received in Microsoft Word or PDF format must be converted to standardized LEDES format, manually entered into a spend management system, or, in the worst case scenario, manually paid and fully tracked outside the system. there is. Fortunately, that no longer needs to be done by corporate lawyers. This software can scan invoices in any format and convert them to her LEDES automatically and accurately.
Case Management
Better company selection and improved outcomes
Corporate lawyers not only need to handle matters efficiently and within budget, but also need the matter to reach a desired outcome.
It all comes down to choosing the right company for the right problem, which requires actionable insights based on data, not intuition or recency bias.
AI can gather and analyze information from past similar cases and recommend to the legal department which firm is best suited for a particular case. Information collected includes how long it took the company to resolve the issue, how much it cost to resolve, and whether the desired outcome was achieved.
With this information in hand before engaging, corporate counsel doesn't have to make educated guesses about which firm to choose. They already know which organization will deliver what they need, and how much it will cost and take. In-house counsel can operate with confidence and work with the company to create accurate budgets, projected timelines, and more. With everyone on the same page, collaboration improves and outcomes improve.
There are now legal, low-risk, and highly effective ways to introduce AI into legal operations, primarily in bill review and case planning processes. As technology evolves, AI may come closer to the incident, but you don't have to wait for it to happen. Corporate legal departments can start using AI today and see an immediate impact on their legal business.
