GenAI is everywhere…including for billing matters. Brightflag, which has been working on improving billing data transparency for some years, has now launched a genAI capability to create invoice summaries for clients. And, as we all know now, summarising is one thing that genAI generally does well (usually….)
The capability will be for a limited number of clients and then roll out broadly later this year.
Visibility on what clients are paying for is great – although this site cannot help but add that it would be even better to get to a point where buyers of legal services didn’t have to wade through complex time entries to understand or evaluate what they’re paying for (see earlier AL article: ‘Time is a management tool, not a pricing tool‘.)
But, we live in the imperfect world that we have at present. So, what does the tool do?
The new Invoice Summaries feature provides invoice reviewers with all the information they need to take action directly from their inbox, including a Brightflag AI-generated summary of the work done by outside counsel.
These summaries give every reviewer the ‘insight and assurance they need to approve invoices directly from their email so they can get back to delivering legal advice to the business’, the company explained.
Invoice Summaries are accompanied by ‘a complete re-imagining of the invoice review experience’, (and who needs to party when you can have a great invoice review experience…?), making it easier to conduct an in-depth review and to explore ‘problematic billing behaviour’.
Plus, given that it’s genAI here, there’s a conversational user interface, which ‘opens new possibilities for managing matters, vendors, and spend’.
Barry O’Melia, VP of Product at Brightflag, concluded: ‘Outside counsel makes up half of in-house budgets, and half of the legal department’s overall contribution to the business, so it’s critical that management of outside counsel be optimized using the latest technologies.’
As noted, this is welcome given the world we are in, but clearly the direction of travel has to be for such tools eventually not to be needed. Let’s work toward a world of fixed fees and not one of Byzantine time-based bills that are so complex we need genAI to understand them. In the meantime, we’re going to need Brightflag until that day comes!
