Many of today’s corporate legal teams still find themselves buried in busy work, manually chasing lost invoices, double-checking rates, and updating spreadsheets. These inefficient processes gradually steal time away from the more strategic, impactful, and interesting work lawyers would prefer to pursue. Their simultaneous lack of reliability also leaves legal departments struggling to provide the kind of operational transparency and financial accountability that the wider business expects. Brightflag was founded to transform this dynamic, helping in-house legal teams bring greater visibility, productivity, and value to their operations. “Through our modern software and expert team, Brightflag is partnering with its customers to raise the bar for what’s possible in legal operations,” begins Ian Nolan, Co-Founder & CEO, Brightflag.
Brightflag’s legal operations management platform consists of three main modules. It comes with a Legal Service Request mode for streamlining internal engagement with the business, moving away from email to standardize intake, triage requests, and ultimately understand the demand for legal services. There is a matter management component to providea single system of record for in-house teams and their work, centralizing key data and documents, increasing productivity, and facilitating collaboration. Whereas, the spend management functionality digitizes and automates all aspects of legal invoicing, giving visibility into vendors and spend, and ultimately identifying opportunities to gain more value.
All of this is underpinned by Brightflag’s AI engine that makes the routine work easier than ever. It also generates brand new data sets to describe the legal services being delivered. This quantum leap in transparency and accountability is transforming how in-house legal manages its outside counsel and relates to its internal business stakeholders. “The patented AI technology we’ve been refining for the better part of a decade immediately unlocks new layers of insight for in-house legal teams, and our modern design and supportive team make it an easy innovation to adopt,” adds Nolan.
In a nutshell, Brightflag helps to bring corporate legal teams into the data age. This is the fundamental first step in transforming how the legal ecosystem works, as traditionally many decisions and investments have been made on assumptions or relationships rather than facts. Brightflag’s patented AI creates a structured, actionable data set upon which better decisions can be made about whether work should be insourced or outsourced, which vendors’ pricing models are most appropriate, and how spend is correlated with results and value.
Since 2014, Brightflag has been training its patented learning engine to read and interpret legal invoices with increasing accuracy. By transforming narrative descriptions into structured data, it provides customers with practical insights they can use to make stronger strategic decisions and confidently manage legal spend. “With over 100,000 hours of learning, our artificial intelligence solution rapidly reads invoices as they are submitted and classifies the work described in line item narratives and compares them against billing guidelines. The accuracy of these classification decisions is ensured by a steady supply of example inputs and outputs to analyze and our team of legal analysts continuously refine the system with human feedback,” states Nolan.
As a result, the software can be trusted to automate many of the most tedious elements of legal operations. Any pricing discrepancies or apparent billing guideline violations are flagged for review or can be automatically processed and sent to an AP system via an API, so the legal team only spends time on high-impact work. For example, Ocado, an online grocery retailer, was able to achieve 150% of the annual cost control goal while saving 1,470 hours of admin time (an 80% reduction) within just a year.
Since its inception, Brightflag remains dedicated to helping in-house legal teams by providing the best technology paired with outstanding customer support and guidance. “We will be soon launching our new Legal Service Requests module which is designed to assist corporate legal teams to more effectively engage with internal business stakeholders. More broadly, we plan to continue to embed predictive AI recommendations throughout the entire legal operations management process,” concludes Nolan.
Company:
LawCloud
Management:
Ian Nolan, Co-Founder & CEO
Alex Kelly, Co-Founder & COO
Description:
Brightflag was the first company to apply artificial intelligence and machine learning to legal operations management software and has invested more than 100,000 hours in its development. Using Brightflag, in-house legal teams achieve visibility into their operations, streamline internal workflows, and engage with outside counsel more efficiently. Brightflag serves a global community of in-house legal professionals and their outside counsel partners from offices in New York, Dublin, and Sydney.
