People, Process, Technology and Data: Revolutionizing Legal Ops

Thank you so much for inviting me today.

You know, I actually did not grow up thinking I was gonna be the e billing expert. You know, I thought I was gonna be a forensic pathologist and go to medical school. And, you know, unfortunately for saying this, dead people don't talk back. But yet here I am at a conference talking to everybody. So it's quite an interesting journey in that aspect.

For me, I think, really, my role at Walter Skloor is to facilitate the communication and the information between our technology as well as the industry, our clients, people that we can reach. And really to be somewhere, like, at running legal right now is to just engage and to find out what's going on and what's gonna help because that's important. We don't want technology for the sake of technology. We want to really understand the problems.

So I'm out there. I'm at events. I'm having the conversations, and I'm really trying to facilitate those conversations so more people feel comfortable to speak out about what they're doing. Not only their successes, but the roadblocks they're having because those are the challenges that we can really try to help with.

You're right. I think there is a little worry there. I go back. You know, you said leads, and all I could think about from my days of implementing e billing is legal electronic data exchange standard and explaining that.

And that came from, by the way, the nineties, I think. And you go back to it and the understanding of leads and the YouTube EMS codes, it really was trying to get the same data in. Right? The whole purpose of that was to get a standardized way that we could look at invoices, we could understand the invoices, we could review them.

But when you start looking at, like, the task codes, YouTubeMS task codes, nobody's using them the same. And guess what? Ebilling solutions and I probably e billing solutions come in, right, and they allow you to do custom task codes. So we're already deviating when we're talking about task codes.

But it all came down to how and who were creating, you know, the entries for those time entries and billing. And you look at, you know, invoices coming from law firms, they have the ability to use the task codes. Are they required? Yes or no?

A lot of law firms don't use them because corporate legal departments didn't always require them. I sat back in, I'd say, twenty sixteen when I was managing very large accounts. They did not require expense codes. They would have two million dollars of absolute unexplained data and expenses, not knowing where it is.

So how to me that relates to AI, it goes back to data, data, data. You have to know where your data is. You have to have a process behind it. Goes to the age old people process technology.

You have to make sure that whether it's your in house lawyers or your outside counsel are on board with wanting to give you that data in that outside counsel are on board with wanting to give you that data in that process way or in that, you know, more standardized way.

And I think AI, we're taking that away a little bit in the aspect that we can go and we can read it without the coding. But where's the data coming? Who's actually putting the data in? And this goes really far back but if you go to law firms and invoices, who's putting the data in those invoices?

It's not always the attorneys doing the work. Who know the best about what kind of work that was? It could be their paralegal. It could be the billing clerk who just needs to get it in because they need to get that invoice in to get it approved to get it paid.

So that goes again to you have to get back to the foundation of the structure and how you're gonna get that data.

I think it's uniform task based management system.

I don't know if I got the s right though. But the idea really was to be able to classify and to categorize the work in order to, you know, be able to look at it and see what's actually be done. It's to help review the invoices. It's helped to review the budget. Hopefully, it would get you to a phased budget or some other way to move forward with those hourly rates.

I think both do. I think if you look at e billing and what law firms would say is, well, it's clearly all for just the corporate client. But honestly, when you're having those conversations, everybody is going to benefit when you have clear and transparent communication and you're on the same page. So I think it's everyone. I'm not gonna say that it's just the corporate legal department that benefits.

But there are a lot of companies, to your point, that don't enforce the requirement for outside counsel to fill that out. And then when they don't fill that out, to Eric's very good point a moment ago is, like, if we're gonna talk about AI in the context of e billing and getting to a better place, you just made an excellent point a moment ago to Eric's question, which is data, data, data. But if there's this idea that this is so important and it's also not being enforced, then we have this conundrum here where AI can only confuse things because we're dealing with bad data.

And really it's those corporate legal departments that haven't enforced it, that haven't structured the data, that haven't been rigid with our law firms on how they're bringing that data in the invoices that are looking for AI to be that, I'm not gonna hit the table here today, but that easy button. Right? And they're looking forward for that, and they're not gonna have that. That's where, Eric, that's where it's gonna fail because you don't have that structure. And if you're not pushing back on your law firms to get that data, how are you gonna continue to go forward and to have a better view of it?

I'm gonna go back to the KISS acronym, keep it simple, you know, with the other s at the end of that. And I say that because depending on your maturity, you can go back to basics, and you don't need all the data in the world. You just need certain pieces of data to get to the answers that you are looking for. So to me, it really goes back to that.

Regardless of your maturity, it goes back to what am I ultimately trying to get at and how am I helping to foster that through. And I think that's the big process or that's the big, you know, kind of query that people have to really think about. If you don't do that, then you just pull everything in, you have a mess. If you don't pull enough in, you have nothing.

So you really have to get back to the simplicity of what do I need. I'll be honest. I don't know if you need task codes all the time, and I know that sounds horrible. And I know there's other task code sets that have been out there that have tried to, you know, come to fruition.

There's the LEDES codes as well, which are way more extensive when it gets down to what are you actually doing. You have certain providers that said, don't worry about the task codes. We know that's a burden to you. We'll classify it for you.

But what does that do? That introduces more. That introduces more confusion when that happens. So we really need to get back to basics of what are we looking at.

We need to know how much we're spending. We need to know the work that's being done and we need to know how we can move forward and do this in a more efficient way. So I do really think that you have to get back to the basics and really work with your law firms to at least get it right for that data accuracy and AI can play into that. AI can definitely help with the accuracy of data.

I don't think we're gonna go anywhere. You know? People have said that, you know, AI is the death of the billable hour or the hourly rate. I don't know that that's gonna happen.

It can't happen if we don't do that. And so I think for me, it really gets back to you have to have trust in the AFAs, and you're only gonna have trust if you have the data to back it and if you have the good transparent conversations to understand it. Corporations don't always have to have all that data, by the way. The law firms could be bringing that data to the table as well.

They work with a lot of folks and they also have ways to track it. So I think that there's a lot of that. It gets back to that communication. So if we go back to people, process, technology, we've been harping a lot on the process today, and we've talked a lot about the technology, but you have to get back to the people too.

And where is that burden? I think the burden falls on both sides.

No. And I think it's already happening. And I say that because if you look at managed bill review services that are already leveraging AI, and that's not even, you know, generative AI and agentic AI. Right?

That's just leveraging your large language model AI and really training that, and the algorithms are getting better. That's already doing things like catching VEG or block billing, those kind of things. And it's forcing it back. Right?

Because that's things that attorneys don't catch so they don't have the data in house. It's forcing that back to the law firms to say this is block billing. This is a violation. We can either discount you or you can redo it and send it back to us.

That's going back to the data accuracy. That's feeding the data back into the system. Right? So you might not have saved anything by doing that through that managed review, but now you have better data So you can move towards exactly getting to, you know, really looking in the type of works being done.

How's it being, you know, staffed? How's it being you know, how fast, how efficient is it being done? Because you have now good accurate entries. And I think that's a big piece of the puzzle is going back again to the data and needing to have the clean data, the accurate data.

So I think it's there. I think, you know, a lot of people are looking for that easy button to say, I don't have to do bill review anymore. But I think you do have to block it out into different ways. What aspect of invoice review are we looking to help or are we looking to change?

You know, are we helping attorneys with reviewing the invoices? That's a different solution than helping to look for block billing and vague entries in order to get better data, which is completely different in my opinion from looking at outside counsel guidelines. And that's where I think you can really start, you know, really picking off how you're gonna help corporate legal departments and how you're gonna push back and help the law firms as well. And I know there are systems out there right now that are trying to help the law firms to come out with, you know, good invoices so that way they're not having to do the back and forth in the appeals process.

So I don't think it's like one AI is gonna do all invoice review answer. It's looking at those different pieces and figuring out and it goes back to people processing technology. Those are all individual processes, The submission of the invoice, the compliance of the invoice, and then the review and the approval of the invoice. And then, of course, you have the review of the data.

I agree. I actually think in instead of people process and technology, we should be doing people process technology data. And that should be absolutely there. Maybe we even put that early. But, you know, I definitely think that that is the key link, and that is where the use cases of AI are going to be swimmingly amazing is when you have that data.

It's the depth of the content. I mean, the content to me is like no other, event that we have. I think that there maybe are couples that get really close, but they really spend a lot of time curating that content and bringing great people to the table. And whether that's a sponsor like myself or whether that is, you know, folks within the legal ops teams.

And the big thing is too is they foster a safe space for people who have never shared before, who had never spoken. If you go up to those panels, there's a lot of first time conference goers and there's also a lot of first time speakers. And that's what's really important because the purpose of a conference like this is for people to learn from each other and share. And that's beneficial not only for the corporate legal departments, it's just as beneficial for us, the vendor.

And that's important for me to listen to because, again, it gets back to my role of taking that back to our organization and really trying to help our teams, whether it's our product team or our sales team, understand the needs and understand the solutions that we can provide and maybe how we need to pivot to provide them.

Absolutely. It was a pleasure. Thank you for inviting me.