A small part of what we saw in the Fani Willis trial was the interrogation of Nathan Wade when he was discussing billing. He has 24 hours of work on a single bill and the bill was inelegantly written so it looks like all the hours of work were completed on the same day. A lot of lawyers have a difficult time with billing. Issues with billing are common with lawyers all over the country.
We have been talking about AI a lot in class and the incorporation of AI in the legal field. I was looking to see if there are new advances in AI that can help lawyers with billing. There are now apps, like BillerAssist, Effortless EasyCodes, and BillerAssist EasyCodes Edition, which can be added to a firm's already existing billing system. These apps use AI by making it easier for lawyers to bill the longer the lawyer uses the app. The app learns the lawyer's specific needs. Perhaps what's most important is that these apps can help lawyers maintain ensure compliance to billing guidelines.
This is an excellent area for further exploration. There is no substitute for contemporaneous recording of time, yet most lawyers are really bad at it. I use an old time/billing program called PCLaw that allows you to open a timer when you start working on a matter and then you can stop the timer when you are done and it will prompt you to create a time entry. It requires commitment to work that way, and many lawyers are unable or unwilling to adjust their work processed to manually enter time slips.
ReplyDeleteThe best option would be an AI based system that would see what you are working on using your computer, whether in Word, Outlook, Acrobat, or a browser and automatically track your time to assign it to a client or matter. It will not be perfect and like all AI systems, the lawyer will have to review and correct errors. However, it will be a huge improvement over what lawyers often do, which is trying to remember at the end of a day or worse, a week, what they worked on and try to create time entries from memory. That is probably what Nathan Wade did. I am sure lawyers lose a third of their billable time doing it this way. That really affects a law firm's bottom line.
One of the best law office technology blogs is Bob Ambrogi's LawSites. Here is a post from October 2021, a full year before the ChatGPT revolution, about an AI-powered program to automatically track lawyer time from what the lawyers is doing on his/her computer. https://www.lawnext.com/2021/10/zeros-new-product-automatically-captures-billable-time-on-a-lawyers-desktop-computer.html
DeleteThe use of AI to track billing is a great tool for lawyers. Many legal management softwares out there now have easy ways to keep track of billing. AI has the capability of doing the same and integrating itself in a similar way.
ReplyDeleteYou raise a good point that how that billing appears is something lawyers must pay close mind to. The bill clients receive is ultimately going to be looked at very closely. If there are errors or tasks not clearly defined issues will surely come up. As long as attorneys do not solely rely on AI to track billing, it can and should be a great way to help manage attorneys time.