Onit, Inc., a provider of enterprise workflow and artificial intelligence platforms and solutions, including enterprise legal management, contract lifecycle management and business process automation, introduced InvoiceAI, an artificial intelligence offering for first-pass legal invoice review and analytics, to its customers. InvoiceAI is analysing historical invoices to train its models, while continuously learning from invoices to identify potentially non-compliant charges against a company’s billing guidelines and spend management best practices. This provides an opportunity to guide and retrain outside counsel on the corporate customer’s billing expectations and to demonstrate immediate savings in outside spend to internal stakeholders.
After testing just a few models with a select group of Onit Fortune 100 customers, InvoiceAI uncovered an average of 6-11 per cent of unactioned errors for invoices submitted in 2020. As these datasets were previously processed invoices, these savings surpassed what had already been found by traditional billing rules and the standard review of the invoices.
InvoiceAI from Onit will have general availability in Q3 and is available on a select basis for existing corporate legal customers. Artificial intelligence for invoice review will also be available within the SimpleLegal solution offering cost-saving technology for legal departments at every stage of maturity.
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“Traditional legal invoicing and invoice review fail to show a law firm’s value or reveal the compliance and savings sought by corporate legal departments. Even when COVID-19 severely restricted travel in 2020, InvoiceAI identified an average of six figures of savings in travel-related billed time and expenses submitted to customers. It transforms the entire invoice lifecycle, lowering friction and aligning law firms and corporations on expectations and performance,” said Eric M. Elfman, Onit CEO and co-founder. “Expect more AI innovation from us this year, with further enhancements and a general availability launch for InvoiceAI coming in Q3.”
InvoiceAI represents the fourth AI offering from Onit in seven months. In November, the company introduced its AI-based platform Precedent and two AI products for contract lifecycle management, ReviewAI and ExtractAI.
AI, Invoice Review and Corporate Legal Departments
The volume and collective dollar total of invoices have challenged corporate legal departments for decades. Corporate in-house legal teams often struggle to find all the errors and violations in the influx of invoices.
Beyond enforcing outside counsel guidelines, a recent poll of Onit customers revealed that some of the top invoice review issues were vague or insufficient details, block billing, improper coding of invoices and work being done by the wrong staff class. All of these issues are difficult for traditional billing rules to uncover and sort.
With corporate legal departments pressed to accomplish more in less time with fewer resources, legal professionals often lack the bandwidth to chase corrections or parse a large number of warnings.
InvoiceAI uses machine learning models to find issues such as administrative tasks and improper billing for time during travel and then integrates these findings with existing rules engines for a more intelligent review that continuously learns.
As a result, attorneys can quickly review invoices; legal operations can identify non-compliant billing guidelines and harvest early savings; and general counsel can gain greater visibility into law firm performance and legal spend metrics.
