Wolters Kluwer’s ELM Solutions, has launched LegalVIEW BillAnalyzer to help corporate legal departments and insurance claims organizations to more efficiently manage their incoming legal invoices and improve cost management. The LegalVIEW BillAnalyzer service manages the entire invoicing review process through a combination of advanced technology, machine learning and expertise to ensure outside firm compliance with billing guidelines, while offering clients an average cost savings of 6 to 9 percent in legal fees, the company claims.
The LegalVIEW BillAnalyzer offering provides “consistency and accuracy across all invoices plus continuous improvement through the use of supervised machine learning and natural language processing.” LegalVIEW BillAnalyzer effectively codifies hundreds of pages of legal service agreements and analyzes millions of lines of invoices, looking for hidden patterns to flag potential violations, the company explains. With machine learning, self-learning models are built and regularly improved and enhanced using a combination of input from ELM Solutions’ proprietary LegalVIEW® database, the client’s billing history and guidelines and input from a team of expert bill reviewers.
The new offering also provides “detailed, expert driven invoice review for billing guideline compliance and reduced complexity.” Experienced, highly trained legal professionals based in the U.S. perform reviews of invoices down to the line-item to pinpoint adjustments and compliance issues, and if necessary, rectify disputes via the appeals process, Wolters Kluwer adds.
Other functionality includes cost management, as invoices are benchmarked against the LegalVIEW® database of more than $82 billion in legal spend, providing visibility to rate and resource planning opportunities. LegalVIEW BillAnalyzer utilizes this database to provide analytics, dashboards and insights.
Users will also benefit from outside counsel relationship management. The firm’s attorneys will work directly with outside counsel to manage the negotiation and billing appeals process and Wolters Kluwer says its “team will onboard, educate and advise the outside counsel of best practices to ensure compliance.”
“This newest customer driven offering is a natural extension of our best in class Passport and TyMetrix 360º platforms and further demonstrates how we collaborate and innovate with our clients to create solutions to solve their challenges, while saving them time and money. Our consultative approach and expertise with clients regarding best-in-class billing processes make LegalVIEW BillAnalyzer a logical next step for our business,” noted Glenn Paredes, executive vice president and general manager at Wolters Kluwer’s ELM Solutions.
It is not unusual for large corporate legal and insurance claims departments to process millions of dollars in legal expenses each month. As these departments may have hundreds of firms to manage, often the quality of invoicing is inconsistent and may be non-compliant with agreed-upon guidelines, resulting in significant additional expense for the legal department. Further, the need to review and appeal thousands of monthly invoice line items can be a burden on in-house staff resources, Wolters Kluwer notes.
“With more than 85,000 law firm connections using our solutions today, we are uniquely positioned to help corporate legal departments better manage and have meaningful conversations with their law firms. LegalVIEW BillAnalyzer fundamentally streamlines and improves the billing and appeals process in order to accelerate timely payment for law firms,” Paredes adds.