Foley Mansfield cuts pre-bill review from days to minutes with Zero Systems' Verify

Foley Mansfield's partners were spending an enormous amount of time each month manually reviewing pre-bills for compliance with client outside counsel guidelines (OCGs), checking for issues like block billing, vague narratives, and excessive time entries. Industry-wide, firms typically collect only a portion of what they invoice due to OCG non-compliance, and pre-bill review is described as one of attorneys' most hated tasks.

The firm deployed Verify, a generative AI pre-bill verification tool from Zero Systems (part of its Hercules.ai revenue optimisation platform), firmwide. Verify analyzes OCGs and historical billing data from systems like Elite and Aderant to flag pre-bill entries that violate policy and suggests compliant alternatives that reviewers can accept or reject with one click. The system runs LLMs (including Mistral 7B, Llama, and fine-tuned RoBERTa/transformer models) locally so billing data never leaves the firm's security perimeter.

Foley Mansfield's managing partner Joseph Rejano said reviewing pre-bills now takes minutes instead of days, letting partners focus only on the items AI flags. Director of technology services Terry Pressley said deployment was fast and Verify is now seamlessly integrated into the firm's processes. Zero Systems' CEO said the tool typically recovers around 6% of revenue that would otherwise be written off and cuts pre-bill review time by about 50%.

• Generative AI can compress a multi-day manual compliance task (matching pre-bills against OCGs) into minutes by flagging violations and suggesting fixes.
• Keeping LLM processing local/on-prem addressed law firms' reluctance to send sensitive financial data to external APIs.
• A human-in-the-loop design (accept/reject suggested fixes) helped drive full firmwide adoption rather than a limited pilot.