It has been five years since Wolters Kluwer ELM Solutions revolutionized legal bill review with the introduction of artificial intelligence (AI). When LegalVIEW® BillAnalyzer was released in 2017, it was the first time that legal departments could benefit from combining AI with human expertise in their legal invoice review processes.
To mark this anniversary, the Legal Leaders Exchange podcast featured two of our key team members – Jeffrey Solomon, Senior Director of Product Management, and Abhishek Mittal, Vice President of Data and Operational Excellence – in a discussion about ELM Solutions' AI tools and how AI fits into the legal ops landscape more generally.
Introducing AI
In the beginning, ELM Solutions’ experts thought that the extraordinary resource of the LegalVIEW Data Warehouse, the largest repository of detailed legal invoice data in the world today at over $150 billion, could be the basis for a powerful AI engine that would help companies improve legal bill review. To test this idea, ELM Solutions started by building an AI model and feeding in sample legal invoices to generate a result in which the AI would indicate which line items were most likely to be out of compliance with billing guidelines.
ELM Solutions then set up two groups of invoice review specialists, being careful to ensure the same level of expertise on both teams. Both groups got the same sample invoices to review, but one had access to the AI results and one did not. When the teams finished and metrics were compared, the experts with access to the AI output generated much higher savings. It was learned that the AI helped reviewers generate as much as three to four times more savings because they focused their attention on the line items highlighted by the AI.
It was clear from these early tests that AI could have a profound effect on the bill review process, so the company continued to develop the AI engine, eventually introducing BillAnalyzer. And ELM Solutions never stopped this testing—a critical part of the continuous improvement process to generate better compliance than human experts can on their own.
The importance of expertise
Over the five years since ELM Solutions introduced BillAnalyzer, it has become very clear that domain expertise is at least as much of a differentiator as technology is. As advanced as AI technology has gotten within the legal function over that time, the need for human experts remains. That’s true on the client side, and it is also true of the team developing BillAnalyzer.
When ELM Solutions began developing AI tools, the AI team consisted largely of data scientists. There were some domain experts on the team but fewer. However, as the company built out the team to support continuous improvement of a more mature, established offering, the balance shifted as more domain experts than data scientists were added. These legal experts have learned a great deal about how to use AI to improve processes and provide better customer experiences.
In this podcast, Abhishek predicts a future in the legal technology industry where “domain data scientists” become just as important to teams as data scientists currently are. He also expects that the next generation of legal operations professionals will have more knowledge of AI technology as it matures until it’s just as common a tool as spreadsheets are now. When everyone uses it, AI will be just another tool for doing whatever you need to do as a legal professional.
To hear the full conversation, listen to ELM Solutions’ AI team celebrates five years of continued success. If you are a podcast app user, be sure to follow our Legal Leaders Exchange show on your favorite app (Apple Podcast, Spotify, Google Podcast, Amazon / Audible.com, iHeart Radio), to make sure that you don’t miss any of our informative episodes.
