LawVu’s AI-Powered Billing Guidelines Review provides organisations with an efficient, automated first line of review for their legal invoices. It helps teams speed up invoice processing, improve compliance with agreed billing terms, and reduce the risk of unnecessary or incorrect charges.
The feature operates in two phases:
Loading billing guidelines and/or approved timekeeper rates, where rules are extracted.
Reviewing invoices against those extracted rules to identify discrepancies before approval or payment.
1. Loading information & extracting rules
When you upload billing guidelines and/or approved timekeeper rates for a Legal Service Provider (LSP), the system automatically processes these documents.
During this phase, AI will:
Read the billing guidelines and timekeeper rate documents
Use OCR for text recognition
Break content into semantically similar segments
Extract relevant rules and expectations to be used later in invoice review
Human workflow analogy - Think of this like assigning a junior team member to review your billing guidelines and timekeeper rates. Their first task would be to read through the documents carefully and extract every rule, requirement, or constraint they need to look out for when reviewing invoices. The AI is doing precisely this: creating the checklist.
Formats supported: Word documents (.doc/.docx) and PDFs.
Who can upload: Only organization administrators, from each LSP profile.
2. Reviewing the invoices
Once an LSP submits an invoice, LawVu automatically compares it against the extracted rules and approved timekeeper rates.
The AI reviews each line for compliance and flags any discrepancies, such as:
Breaches of billing guidelines
Use of unapproved timekeepers
Incorrect or inflated rates
Charges outside agreed parameters
When the review is complete, the invoice batch appears in your Inbox → Actions → Invoices.
You will see:
Number and types of discrepancies
Adjusted totals for payment
Ability to toggle discrepancies on/off (turning a discrepancy off = accepting it)
For LEDES invoices, any non-compliant amounts are automatically removed from the total payable.
For PDF invoices, values are flagged but not automatically adjusted.
Read more about this process here: How Billing Guideline review applies to invoices
Human workflow analogy - This is the same as your junior staff member going line-by-line through an invoice, checking every detail against the rules they extracted earlier, and highlighting any issues with a short explanation. The AI becomes your digital review assistant.
Checking for accuracy & troubleshooting
As with human reviewers, the AI may occasionally interpret a guideline incorrectly - especially when:
Rules were written ambiguously
A guideline wasn’t included or was not explicit
PDFs are complex or hard to read, even for humans
The invoice file is unsupported (AI will retry 3 times before stopping)
First step: Re-examine your uploaded billing guidelines or timekeeper rates.
AI relies entirely on your documents: they are the single source of truth.
The good news: It is extremely easy to update your documents, re-upload them, and re-run the analysis.
If the AI still produces unexpected results, you can:
Toggle off the discrepancy and continue your review
Contact Support through the in-app Support menu
Provide feedback via the “Updates & Feedback” button or email
