The life sciences sector is one of the world's most important industries, but just like any industry, it's not immune to cost concerns and legal pressures. Life sciences corporate legal departments (CLDs) might be under even more pressure than other legal operations teams and in-house counsel to deliver exceptional outcomes as efficiently as possible.
After all, life sciences CLDs face some unique challenges. They protect intellectual property (IP), manage supply chain risk, navigate complex regulatory matters, and more—all in a market that can quickly change based on the latest laws or fluctuations in product demand. Like all CLDs, they have limited budgets and must do more with less.
That's why it's important for life sciences CLDs to manage their legal spend strategically and efficiently. One of the best ways to do this is by leveraging AI.
Improving and expediting the bill review process
Life sciences organizations have always been at the cutting edge of research and development, so it’s no surprise that they’re using AI for everything from drug discovery to medical imaging and beyond. But AI doesn’t have to be relegated to life sciences labs. There are many potential AI use cases for life sciences CLDs.
Bill review is an excellent example of how AI can improve a time-consuming and potentially expensive process. It can take hours for bill review teams to comb through invoices. The process is costly, tedious, repetitive, and pulls valuable employees away from higher-value tasks.
Here, AI shines. Why make humans stare at invoices, line item by line item, when a machine can scan them in minutes? AI-enabled bill review can also find patterns in invoices that an attorney might miss, including potential billing guidelines violations that could cost the company significant money.
Worse, some firms may still need to submit non-standard paper invoices, which limits a CLD's visibility into their legal spend. To avoid this, attorneys must convert the invoices into Legal Electronic Data Exchange Standard (LEDES) format. The manual conversion process takes time and is error-prone—but AI can do it in minutes, equipping legal teams with standardized invoices that provide total visibility into what's working, what isn't, and where spend leakage may be occurring.
With AI doing the work, attorneys and legal operations professionals can spend more time adding value to their organizations and helping them move forward. That's an important benefit for life sciences organizations whose main driver is continuing to push the envelope.
Reducing litigation costs by improving law firm selection and matter management
According to a report by Burford Capital, life sciences companies are among the biggest spenders of litigation services. Ensuring these organizations choose the right firm for certain matters is an excellent way to streamline legal costs.
Fortunately, life sciences CLDs have collected years of information about their firms and matters. With AI, they can receive predictive insights from that data to help them manage their legal spend and ensure they are selecting the correct firms at the right price. They don’t need to rely on “gut instincts” or recency bias. The AI will provide recommendations based on past performance.
Furthermore, CLDs can use AI to develop estimated budgets and timelines based on historical data for improved matter management. With this information, CLDs can have open conversations about costs and expectations with their firms.
AI: Powering life sciences CLDs today and tomorrow
There's been much discussion about AI's place in the legal industry, and understandably so. The industry hasn't changed much over the past few years, and corporate attorneys are used to doing things a certain way.
But life sciences companies live at the nexus between yesterday, today, and tomorrow. They are used to learning from the past and using that knowledge to inform today's and tomorrow's medical and pharmacological breakthroughs.
AI does the same. It uses historical data to help corporate legal teams become better and more efficient at what they do now—and what they will be doing next week, next month, next year. It will continue to become more capable. Today, it’s bill review, invoice conversion, and law firm recommendations. Who knows which lower-value tasks it will take off attorneys' plates tomorrow?
