This article aims to answer common questions about AI-Powered Billing guidelines.

For a detailed overview of the feature itself, please refer to the full article here:

AI-Powered Billing guidelines

LawVu has a company-wide compliance program that meets global information security and privacy standards, including ISO27001, SOC1, SOC2, HIPAA, and GDPR.

Your data is completely secure. Your data remains in your chosen Data Stack location at rest. We do not use your data or your prompts to train our models.

We use Azure OpenAI services to generate responses to your Workspace Intelligence requests. We use Azure Data Zones in the United States and European Union. For customers in these regions, your Workspace Intelligence AI requests are processed within your respective regions.

For customers outside of the United States and EU, we use one of these Data Zones to process your Workspace Intelligence AI requests.

For customers in Australia, your requests are processed in the EU. For customers in Canada, it's the USA Data Zone.

Additionally:

Azure Data Zones allows us to ensure we can offer the latest Azure OpenAI models to you cost effectively.

AI powered billing guidelines honors the same permissions for when working with invoices currently. This means that users will only be able to see Billing guidelines if they have the manage invoices permission or if they are an invoice approver.

Billing guidelines utilizes Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service. This service is provided from within our secure Azure ecosystem where customer data remains segregated and is not used to train any public models. LawVu operates a company-wide compliance programme that meets global information security and privacy standards, including ISO27001, SOC1, SOC2, HIPAA, and GDPR & CCPA. We are also aligned with the new ISO42001 standard for AI Management Systems and actively pursuing certification.

Due to the sensitive nature of our customers' data, LawVu is fully exempt from the standard terms allowing Microsoft to monitor use of their Open AI Service.

Once billing guidelines and approved timekeeper rates documents are uploaded to the LSP profile, the document(s) are processed to create sections of context. Once an invoice is submitted, AI will compare the invoice against sections of context to identify discrepancies.

AI processing includes:

LawVu’s AI powered billing guidelines review won’t run for invoices submitted for those LSPs.

The good news is that you will still get access to the new experience we have rolled out with the feature including

First check to make sure the billing guidelines and timekeeper rates applied to that LSP are correct and specific enough. While our billing guidelines have been created to use plain english. AI still isn’t as smart as we are and needs lots of guidance (think intern/grad NOT senior counsel).

This doesn’t need to stop your ability to process an invoice, simply toggle off the discrepancy in the panel and continue your review.

If it is still incorrect, we need your feedback to continue to improve this feature. If you receive a response that you weren’t expecting or is incorrect, we need to know about it so we can improve the quality of the output. You can contact us via the Support menu at the bottom right of your screen.

Invoices are loaded by the LSP and key information is extracted for the lawfirm to confirm before posting the invoice as a batch. LawVu will notify you there is an invoice/invoices to review when the billing guidelines have run.

The way it works: when the final invoice in a batch has been marked as Handled (against Guidelines + TKR) then the system will dispatch an Invoice Batch Posted notification (in-app + mail) to the Client's nominated Legal Ops User(s).
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​The issue: if something goes wrong, such as the User uploads an unsupported invoice file (where MSFT can't analyse it) or some transient issue with MSFT infrastructure which stops the Identification from running- the system will retry automatically for 3x attempts. After the final attempt, it won't process the invoice anymore. Because of this, the Invoice doesn't get marked as Handled, and therefore the Batch Posted notification will not get sent out.

Yes it needs to be a word document or PDF.

They are there now! simply load the approved time keeper rate per LSP. When the billing guidelines run, it will compare the approved rates with the rates on the invoice to see if there are any discrepancies.

Not at this point. We will review only new invoices posted after the feature has been enabled for discrepancies.

Only the org admins can from the LSP profile.

No, not at at this point. For now, Billing guidelines and approved timekeeper rates will be applied only per law firm to all matters that the law firm has been assigned to.

No, LawVu is set up to apply billing guidelines on an individual LSP rather than system wide.

No, not at this point in time.

Yes, LawVu will currency convert all invoices that are not in the organisation currency using our existing currency conversion feature to make it easier for you to review invoices.

No you cannot, but you can use reporting to review discrepancies at an aggregate and utilise other columns in grids to filter and organise LSPs and their respective discrepancies.

You can click Retry. This will trigger the billing guidelines review to run again. It takes 1 minute to run, so if you click the retry button more than once in a 1-minute time frame, it will still only run once. This applies to approvers in the 2nd and 3rd phases as well.

Yes absolutely.

Absolutely, we recommend that you try these out with invoices and then iterate as needed eg to make them more specific or to add in other things that you might need to look out for over time.

Our new billing guidelines feature is not just an AI powered review, it also incorporates new batch functionality, bulk approval and bulk decline through the LawVu inbox. We have also introduced a new legal operations user who is the first approver (when enabled) of all invoices once the billing guidelines AI powered review has run.

All your existing approval flows still work. Where you have created a legal operations user, this role gets inserted into the beginning of the approval flow as the first reviewer after the AI review. Once they have approved the invoice it will go into your existing workflow.

No. Only newly submitted invoices will be reviewed against billing guidelines.

When billing guidelines is activated, so is the new batch experience. This means that all pending invoices unfortunately disappear from the inbox, you can see them and void them in the spend grid but you won’t be able to approve them from there. You will need to clear ALL invoices prior to enabling the billing guidelines feature.

If there is a positive number in an invoice (eg reducing the amount to pay) and our AI review identifies that it doesn’t meet billing guidelines, it won’t change the value on the basis it is to your benefit.

If it is a Ledes invoice, absolutely you can and even if you want to adjust the AI discrepancy you can, just select the review button and you are away.