Data Accessibility, AI Guidance, Operations Management
LegalView Bill Analyzer.
AI-Assisted Invoicing
The Challenge
Understanding Legal Spending Quickly with Context
Wolters Kluwer offers expert services for law firms and businesses across diverse sectors. In this project, I led the end-to-end design of an invoicing analysis tool for ELM customers which assist in invoice processing, assignment management, and performance tracking.
Our challenge was to build a consolidated invoicing tool for customers using a competitive spend management platform, who want to outsource the bill review operations without transitioning out of their existing spend management platforms and increase team performance by leveraging AI analytics. Currently this process involves more than 5 different platforms each needing to be managed and organized independently without any cross-connections.
How might we consolidate our various research and invoice platforms into a single source of truth. How might we improve our team’s research and invoicing speeds with AI auto-assignment rules, and risk analysis.
The Outcome
Information Consolidation, and AI Prioritization
We built a single platform for reviewers, operation leads and management to track and review all legal invoice spends across there organization. Additionally we empowered each group with 3 different AI processes to enhance each team’s workflow. For reviewers we provided in-line risk analysis to prioritize review items, team leads can automate assignments based on specialization and volume and admins have a custom operations dashboard with predictive volume indicators to track large incoming workloads.
Increased the operation efficiency by 60%
Reduced used platform from 5 to 1 (LBA Workbench)
Up to 20% increase in billing guideline compliance
Currently 12,000 law firms are active users of BillAnalyzer Expert Service.
UX Discovery 1
Understanding the team use-cases for multiple platforms by role
PowerBi - Reviewers Researching Rules by Customer
PowerBi - Reviewers and Leadership Researching Lawfirm Cases (Matters)
Leadership - PowerBi Team Legal Team Audit Tracking
Reviewers - Passport Invoice Auditing Platform
Reviewers - Ty360 Invoice Auditing Platform
Leadership - Tableau Customer Performance and Volume Tracking
Leadership - Tableau Customer Performance and Volume Tracking
UX Discovery 2
Understanding the current invoice review process
Solution
Invoice Context
Any additional invoice content to help with reviewers adjustments should always be to contextual to the invoice they are working on, along with the clients latest SLA requirements.
Content
When reviewing an invoice all actionable information should be easily accessible. Visuals should guide users with clear color coding and hinting to where additional information can be found.
AI Insights
Using AI to quickly process and scan invoices that get delivered into LBA Workbench. We want to assist reviewers in identifying critical points of interest and common trends found among submitted invoices.
Customization
Working with a number of customers and reviewers each with their own workflows our system should be flexible to display content that they care about most and need to prioritize actionable information.
Our Solution is a Unified Workbench that can be used by both new and existing customers and their law firms. From this workbench users can review, and adjust invoices collaboratively leverage AI risk scoring and ML task distribution for invoice management. Team members are also provided internal metrics on team performance and customer invoicing trends.
This is unique in that it creates a universal offering of the best-in-class AI technology paired with expert review, 1) expanding our addressable market, 2) creating earlier time to revenue for new customers, and 3) creating delivery savings among existing customers.
Design Principles
System Userflow
When building LBA Workbench we worked iteratively with both our subject matter experts (who would be using the tool) and the leadership. After going through the current workflows, requirements the team members needed, and the competitor features we wanted to leverage in our platform I created our high level site maps to demonstrate how we would combine 5 platforms into one. This structure was a set of swim-lanes based on the individual users goals. For example, if you need to research customer information you can go into various accounts, we have a section dedicated to Legal Service Agreements (LSA), or Customer Law firm payrolls. At the same-time, invoices are grouped by various pre-set groups to expedited reviewer workflows so they can get started immediately.
Customers can also jump across internal segments using a unique sidebar component I made so while working on an invoice you can find particular research topics which link back to the active customer.
Developing the LBA Workbench Sitemap
Developing the LBA Workbench Sitemap
Core Features of LBA Workbench
There are 4 key features of LBA Workbench Enhancing the Invoice Process
Cross Customer Account View
Users can see and manage LBA review workload across multiple customer accounts in a single queue.
AI Invoice Assignments
Embedded Invoice Pre-work
A routing engine will auto-assign a percentage of invoices based on predefined rules and team specializations
Production Guidelines, Legal Service Agreements (LSAs), Exceptions, and Standard Operating Procedures are embedded into the workbench and users’ workflows.
Personalized Ops Metrics
The Metrics section of the workbench will provide visibility into key success metrics for customers, individuals, and teams.
Home Dashboard
The home dashboard allows for users to quickly orient themselves to todays workload as well as primary assignments and notifications
Highlight user/role specific KPIs which can be customized
Team notifications for shared workloads
Classification & Extraction
Team leaders can assign and manage invoice assignments to refine AI automatic assignments
Invoices are automatically assigned to team members based on role, capabilities and workloads
Workload distribution and Deadlines visualizations for team management and mitigate delays
Contextual Invoicing
From the invoicing page adjusters can review a projects details, timesheet and line items
Expandable invoice details for context key information, allowing work on the primary dashboard
Quick links to relevant sub-content such as client, law firm or matter specific rules
AI grade insights to highlight adjustment priority items
Rule Validation
Operational and Performance metrics for evaluation of team KPIs and business insights
Provides a scorecard for analytics on SLA loads
Show evaluation and workload distributions
Invoice Details Flyouts
By selecting the invoice details when working on an invoice this opens the nvoice details flyout. Here you can find additional contextual invoice information including: matter information, firm information, assignment history of the invoice, and invoice and adjustment totals and our AI review score. This is also where you will find attached documents or receipts. While the flyout is open you can still adjust and work on invoices as previously. Any overflow information can be found by scrolling vertically in the table.
Visual Design
Using light colors and segmenting content into deep tables users can take advantage of colorful iconography and hidden contextual flyouts to make sure what they are working on has all needed details and requirements meet.
Live Showing and Presentation
Project Retrospective
“A number of the lines I review are communications with/calls with/work done specifically at the direction of the IP in-house attorneys and their names are referenced frequently compared to most of our other clients. This simply reduces the number of lines that we can consider for adjustment. ”
Currently LBA Workbench is being used by 12 customers and since it’s release in December 2022 it has a valuation of 20 Million dollars as it has dramatically improved our internal teams capabilities and processing times with a combination of AI suggestions/identification and new workflows.