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Comment by grabeh | Hacker News Reader

How does this interact with lawyers' terms of engagement? Under terms of engagement you'll be incurring fees and by the nature of an invoice you can't necessarily contest this after the fact.

Unless of course you agreed with your lawyers that any invoice would be subject to review by SimpleLegal although I would suspect there would be some opposition to this. Although of course doesn't take away from the value of the service in allowing a company to monitor legal expenditure and to gain greater insight into this (possibly with a view to obtaining leverage for future fee discussions).

On a final point, your privacy policy already assumes that you will use data to improve your service and to provide external reporting. This would seem to imply a degree of aggregation. Although as stated this would be on an anonymous basis, the very fact it happens may be off-putting to certain companies.

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Right now it's a buyer's market for legal services. Regardless of what the retainer says, if you call up the relationship partner and point out that you were just billed $1500 by a second year associate for photocopying he will work with you.

Beyond that larger clients are negotiating (imposing really) explicit conditions into thier agreements to prevent abusive billing. Things like minimum detail requirements (no more "5hr - lgl resrh"), no first year associates, no clerical work, etc. Then there's capped and flat fee billing.

Definitely a time of big changes.

Good points. It would definitely be a good feature if explicit retainer conditions could be fed into the system to analyse bills, and certainly a client is in a strong position where associates are photocopying.

The more interesting point would be like in the example provided in the article (billing half an hour for mailing) where the system considers the charge for the stated work to be excessive but the client may not be in as strong a position to question it as with the clear cut example you gave.

Definitely interesting times though!

Most large companies (banks, insurance companies, large retailers) do have strict billing guidelines as to what firms can charge for.

We (SimpleLegal) will work with those guidelines and train our models accordingly.

Example: Walmart's Outside Counsel billing guidelines http://www.acc.com/advocacy/valuechallenge/toolkit/loader.cf...

You know your way around a legal bill!

As bradleyjg points out, some charges make their way onto a bill when they shouldn't. It's usually not malicious.

The problem is that legal bills don't get enough attention from the law firm. They rely on the client to tell them when something is a problem. We make that process easier. And hopefully everybody, even the law firm, is happier.

As for the privacy concerns, we use data to train our machine learning models. The outcome of those models includes categorization by activity (internal meetings, phone calls, legal filings, etc.).

The "shared" component is for training purposes. At no point do we share invoice content. The key to convert a numeric vector back into a partial view of the original text changes every day. Security and confidentiality of customer data is a big area of concern for us. We also provide our customers with a named list of people with access to the content.

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