Name: Pleading the Case for Automation: Legal Spend Without the Risk
Uploaded: 2025-06-17T16:46:09.575Z
Duration: 59 min 56 s
Description: Pleading the Case for Automation: Legal Spend Without the Risk

Transcript for "Pleading the Case for Automation: Legal Spend Without the Risk": Hello, everybody. Give everybody a minute to join here, before we get started. See some people trickling. Happy Tuesday. Alright. Well, thank you all for joining, our webinar pleading the case for automation, legal spend without the risk. My name is Taylor Decorte. I am on the North American events team here at Emburse and your host for today's event. We're excited to bring you some valuable insights on how leading law firms are transforming expense management, streamlining workflows, strengthening compliance with client billing guidelines, and improving financial visibility firm wide. Just a few housekeeping items before we get started. We will be recording today's webinar and we'll send a copy to everyone tomorrow. We've included some additional resources relative to today's discussion in the documents tab under the engagement area to your right. At Emburse, we do encourage you to ask questions throughout our webinar. You can do so under the q and a tab at any time. Chat is also available today, so feel free to engage with us and your fellow webinar attendees. Today's webinar is eligible for one CPE credit. In order to earn that credit, you'll need to answer three poll questions throughout today's event. So definitely keep an eye on those and be sure to engage as they come up. So with that, we always like to start our webinars with a couple of poll questions here, so we'll jump into our first one. And while I'm opening that up, our first poll question here is going to be around where is your firm currently in your expense journey? So go over the answers. Think about what best fits you. And that poll is open if you want to, submit your responses. Alright. Looks like we have a couple starting to come through. I'll share some of those results with us. Looks like you a lot of people are actually using solutions, like Emburse and Aderant, if not, are customers of ours already. So that's awesome news. Glad you could join us. For those that haven't, fully integrated their solution yet, definitely have some interesting takes for you today, to learn about how you can improve those processes. And I'll give you guys just about thirty seconds here left to kind of get those answers in. As a reminder, you do need to submit those to earn that CPE credit, so make sure to get that in here quickly. Alright. And with that, we'll open up our next poll question here. So our next poll question, is a multiple choice. We wanna know what's your firm's top priority for improving expense management over the next twelve months. So we have several options for you to choose from. If you want to go ahead and, I have opened that for you as well. Again, that is multiple choice. Feel free to select one or multiple options. And there is an option for other. If you don't see, your top priorities here, we'd love to still learn what that priority is if you wanna throw it in the chat and share with the group. Looks like, we have some pretty split results here around reducing reimbursement and billing delays, gaining better visibility and reporting, and improving the attorney user experience, all really good ones to focus on. Ensuring compliance and client billing guidelines is not far behind either. And, again, I'll give you about thirty seconds to continue putting those answers in, and earning that CPE credit, and then we will close this one out as well. Perfect. I'm gonna go ahead and close this, and we'll move on. Alright. Well, I am very pleased today to go ahead and introduce our wonderful speaker lineup. First off, I'm going to introduce Elan, Emerson from Aderant. Joining us from Aderant is Elan. Elan has been with Aderant since 1998, initially serving in the professional services group and subsequent subsequently leading the solutions consulting team. Prior to joining Aderant, Elan worked within law firms managing accounting and financing departments. So definitely very knowledgeable on the subjects we'll be covering today. Also joining us from Emburse is Tyler Emery. Tyler is a senior enterprise accountant manager at Emburse, specializing in helping, AMLOF 200 firms modernize their expense management processes. He works closely with legal and finance teams to drive compliance, improve billing efficiency, and align spend strategy with firm wide goals through automation and analytics. We are also hoping, that Karen Keegan may be able to join us later in the webinar. Karen is experiencing some technical difficulties. However, do not worry. If Karen is unable to join us, she has shared all of her information on and her background with us, so we would love to still talk and share that story with you. But I do apologize for the inconvenience there. We are still working on the background to try and get her to join. So, hopefully, she'll make an appearance later. In the meantime, though, I am going to go ahead and kick off our webinar, and hand it over to Elan. Thanks. Thanks, Taylor. I, I appreciate the introduction. So, today, what I thought I'd do is is and and to for many of you, it will probably be hearing the obvious, but sometimes hearing the obvious, really helps to set the stage for where and how technology can really advance the firm's goals and objectives. So controlling spending is an objective of all businesses. It's not a uniquely legal, objective. But there are certain, shall we say, truisms or realities that make, spend management inside of a law firm, a little more challenging. The first being that expenses can either be recoverable, from a client or, charged directly to the p and l impacting profitability directly. So there's sort of two forks in the road that firms always really have the opportunity to assess when they're, when they're, incurring expenses. Now on the billable expense, standpoint, those expenses these days are subject to so many, constraints, limitations, rules, all by virtue of these lovely outside counsel guidelines that firms have to adhere to or even other engagement protocols that they have entered into with their, with their clients. And these constraints, while, you know, we're all well aware of what what many of them are, vary dramatically between and amongst, the different OCGs that that you're dealing with. So, for example, costs may or may not be allowed. They may be allowed in some cases and not in others. Or there may be certain conditions placed on the, allowability of a certain cost, against a particular, case or matter, meaning only if it's approved or only if it's under a certain dollar amount, only if it's accompanied by certain, backup. So so there are sort of different layers of, complexity around the, the the allowability, as I call it, of of expenses, against that are, you know, potentially recoverable. And and then couple that, the sort of the recoverability of it is that the law firms don't wanna really be in the business of bankrolling, large outlays of cash, that they only then have to, wait, for the client, to reimburse them, but rather they, they want the ability to be more cautious and thoughtful about that spend so that they, don't necessarily, outlay that cash until they they had some until the client has already reimbursed them. So that's a sort of an element that allows them to control, the cash flow and not, be potentially at risk of of uncollectibility. With respect to the the, the the firm absorption expenses, so the expenses that, that have to be, taken to the to the p and l, ownership structures of law firms, partnerships are the the equivalent of it, by definition, require, a heightened degree of accountability. Now this ensures that there is, you know, like, real or perceived, equitable distribution of of expenditure, across, shareholders, partners, even, practice areas, offices, all of the all of the, the the data elements that firms, evaluate each themselves on. All of those sort of elements, require that level of of, objectivity, and accountability. And and along that line to sort of create that accountability and visibility, is potentially the need to have multiple layers of approvals. So and approvals can get gnarly because they could be based on the dollar amount. They could be based on the the the matters practice area. They could be based on the office specific rules. And so or or the different, policies internally that a firm may have, to ensure that there's oversight, and, and visibility into who and how, can, can approve certain expenditures. And then sort of adding to these sort of basic sort of legal, idiosyncrasies, if you will, are some general realities in today's economy. One is that, well, rising prices, are making it, you know, more important, than ever to be smarter, to be more economical, to make more economical decisions about the the things that you're spending money on and how you're spending that money and, and what places you go to make sure that you're getting the best bang for your buck. And, also, with that becomes the the need for, with the the prevalence of of fraud and and other security risks, so we say. It results in a heightened need for for vigilance, over and around the the authenticity, of invoices, and, and and spend. So, so those those altogether, basically, open up the the the the door for technology to be leveraged to combat, potential fraud, to mitigate risk, to ensure compliance with both internal policies and external policies that, and forces, that that firms have to comply with, and that that really sort of becomes that next natural step for firms to take to address all of these, areas that could potentially, cause revenue leakage or, or or increase their the the cost and and, and, and reduction in in profitability. So, basically, you know, these four tenants of of the the landscape really, you know, summarize, some of all all of these things that that sort of make up the, the the ecosystem that we're in. Controlling the spend to to, to, protect the bottom line, mitigate risk of all of all sorts, whether it's whether it's from, bad actors or, you know, whether it's, it's just from the, you know, a changing security posture of the firm, ensuring that, that policies are are, not just, applied, but can be applied in such a way that doesn't require a great deal of human effort or potentially error prone processes, that it could be more, you know, leveraging technology, leveraging AI, leveraging things that, that will, you know, ensure the consistent application of the of the policies that Affirm wants to wants to invoke. And all of that will improve the visibility and accountability, both from the owners of the business to the clients of the business, and everybody in between to ensure, that there are no surprises and that there are sort of, no, nothing out of the ordinary that people would have to be, that would have they would have to answer to. So with that, I'd I'll turn it over to, to Tyler to really, you know, walk us through, how that technology can be applied in practice. Great. Thank you, Alain, for setting the stage and the foundation because, really, it's a critical thing. We all understand in the legal vertical exactly what Alain was saying, but it's such a critical component to take a step back and understand why the legal industry and professional services at large are unique, compared to many organizations. And, Alain did a very great job of setting the stage for, okay, great. All of that is a reality of the situation. You know, specifically, why does automation matter and why does it matter now, especially in this competitive landscape, given really what we're looking at in 2025 and beyond? First and foremost, of course, it's about minimizing manual tasks and making things as efficient as possible. Right? Looking at how do you first and foremost digitize the process, get all of your receipts and invoices and data, all of that rich and dense data into a centralized system that will really be a system of engagement of getting things approved and through the system and having visibility and ensuring accuracy throughout that process. Right? The goal here is to remove any, putting out fires in the organization, you know, especially on the AP side. Right? AP should not be focusing their time on putting out fires or tracking down lost invoices or trying to figure out, you know, gaps or finding fraud twelve months later. They should really transform the organization into being a much more proactive and efficient, but also effective in various aspects of managing the spend. When we talk about data entry, getting out of that mundane level of data entry, whether we're talking about receipts or invoices or in some rare cases in law firms, purchase orders for IT folks out there. Really, it's reducing errors with artificial intelligence. For example, having optical character recognition, which, you know, is a common thing in the industry now, but not all OCR products are are built equally. And what I mean by that is some OCR products and what OCR is is it's a data extraction technology that will read a receipt or an invoice or a purchase order and extract the data off of that to minimize the data entry on your end as an AP team in the back office or anyone who's out in the field, etcetera. All OCRs are not accurate. And in order to optimize that accuracy, at Emburse, for example, we have applied artificial intelligence, next generation AI, to apply to the AI OCR to increase the accuracy upwards of 95% because that AI is able to really add some intelligence to what the OCR is scanning and to ensure really just, straight up accuracy, across receipts and invoices to capture and validate that spend data, minimize the manual entry involved, and having greater accuracy across all of your processes on the client side and the firm side. And so when we think about dedigitizing the receipts and invoices, first and foremost, automating the data extraction off of that receipt and invoice. And then from there, it's all about having a system that is very complex and able to support the needs of of a law firm because law firms, to a a land's point earlier is they're a unique beast in that they have such complex approval routings. They have such complex things when it comes to specific matters and cases and and so on and so forth. In order to address that, appropriately, you need a flexible and commercial business rules engine for approvals that can really take into account, various aspects and context of what's going on on the expense report side as well as the AP invoice side. So really when we're talking about complex routing and approvals and things of that nature, You want a technology that can support the needs of going super complex and if then logic. If this is the scenario, please do this. If the these sets of circumstances are happening or these dollar thresholds or these types of department level spend or these types of the list goes on and on, then please do this, technology platform. Right? And so there's a balance to that too because you don't want to get too complicated. You don't want to get too complex where it can hurt the overall speed of the process and the end user experience. So for example, we've had a lot of customers that, you know, implemented implemented our software, Emburse Enterprise, and maybe ten years later, they realized, okay, all of this complexity is great, but it's really slowing things down. Is there an opportunity to need to improve the process and maybe remove some of these layers or streamline some of these approval pathways? In addition to what I just mentioned, it's really all about giving executives the ability to, make approvals quickly and in the format they like. Executives are very busy people. The approvers out there in the field or in the office, you know, or at the airport, they wanna have the flexibility of being able to approve straight from their phone, their laptop, their iPad with the same amazing user experience. And so we while we offer approvals within the platform itself by logging into the software, we found that most of our executive approvers, they like getting emails with all of the relevant information, on the expense report or the invoice, all of the relevant details of what's going on, the context of it, any notes or attachments, and then simply able to they're able to approve or return with some notes straight from their email inbox. And so a combination of all of these factors really come into play when you're looking at a best in class system. And when we talk about AI, the accuracy of the data extraction with AI is truly just the foundation because when you have extremely accurate data that is extracted, we're now able to start implementing AI models on top of that. For example, on the expense side, we're able to automatically code up to 39 expense categories, on the expense side now. And then beyond that, you're able to look at additional AI layers, to do things such as looking at ways where we can code the matters, which is is take it with a grain of salt. Right? Because when you think about it, your people know your matters the best, and AI won't necessarily always know the right fit or the right thing. So we're applying AI as an organization where it makes sense, right? And we're doing so in a way that truly will help automate the end to end process so that your finance teams are as as efficient as possible, number one, but also effective in managing your spend. Because when it comes to resiliency during financial volatile markets, especially with high interest rate environments. Right? CFOs we talk to all the time, it's all about managing the cash flow efficiently. It's all about minimizing your waste, fraud, and abuse and your exposure as an organization, because ultimately getting out of putting out fires and moving towards the overall, managing the process is really what we're getting to here. So I'll I'll talk a little bit more about reactive fixes to strategic alignment and really what that shift looks like. Without automation, of course, we're looking at a couple things. Fraud risk is number one. Audit risk is number two. Billable rules could definitely get missed in a manual or semi automated process. Policy exceptions will go unchecked. Your your policies are really only as good as your enforcement's and the technology, you're able to code in all of your policies so that really it's the first stop of protection as an organization. But then of course, you need your human auditors, to really do a good job of enforcing your policies because ultimately your policy is what's getting approved, not necessarily the rules in the system, although that is very much a way to protect your bottom line. And then, of course, reimbursements can stall. Right? When whether we're talking reimbursements or payments to vendors, lost invoices, the list goes on and on. It it can be a little bit of a nightmare when you're managing everything and trying to grow the business, and that's really where automation can come in to really just streamline, automate, and simplify the process for you. For example, real time flagging, looking at non compliant spend before it hits the client invoice, ensuring the accuracy, ensuring that you're being a a good, fiduciary to the, client, making sure that you're looking at ways to minimize the cost exposure and to maximize the business relationship. Client billing rules are embedded into the technology so that the attorneys aren't guessing what's chargeable and or not. And then, of course, from a billing perspective, you're getting that clean data to have faster billing and easier audits, which I mentioned a little bit as well. I'll wrap things up just by saying that some of the areas I'm noticing, that clients are heavily invested in, they're looking at ways to reduce their overall travel spend, whether that looks like a reshopping process where they're looking to reshop their airfare and reshop their hotel bookings because they're noticing that the managing partners, they're starting to spend $13,000 on a first class flight to London where a couple years ago it might have been 5 or $6. Right? Looking at the travel spend, making sure that they're minimizing that, maximizing their audit efficiency, using AI solutions and looking at ways to really just minimize the waste, fraud, and abuse. And lastly, looking at client development spend, which marketing people in law firms love, which clients are you over invested in, which clients are you under invested in, can you is there an opportunity to invest more in particular clients to have more profitability or less in other clients to reduce your costs? These are some of the things that we talk to law firms about all the time and look, I greatly appreciate everyone's time here. I'm just trying to give you some knowledge and feedback so that when you go back today to your normal job, you're thinking about some of these things that are very common and very high level information that all law firms have top of mind. So thank you very much for the time. Thank you, Tyler and Elan. I appreciate you both. I do have some unfortunate news. Karen is is unable to join us today, but we are not stopping here, guys. So stick around. I, we are very appreciative in the fact that, Karen did create some wonderful slides and shared her story with us. So she's asked that I share that with all of you on her behalf today. So to give you a little bit of context in as to who Karen is and why, we're so grateful to share her story, Karen is assistant controller at Nixon Peabody, a mutual client of both Aderant and Emburse, and has been working with, Nixon Peabody for eighteen years. So she has a very, elaborate and extensive background with them and has shared some of the firm's main pain points and why they chose to go with Emburse and Adderant and how they've adopted their solution over the years. So I'd love to go into that journey with you all. So the challenge that Karen and Nixon Peabody were facing, was initially a very paper based solution. It was very much, she talked about how everything was paper, how having to be handed off from one person to the other, and how a lot of the times they had to even mail things between offices. So some of the things that, she described are outlined here. Receipts being stapled over detailed, Excel sheets, reports traveling from office to office, central accounting, having to remove those documents and, sort through them to organize them in the way that they needed, and then really noticing that that led to a lot of inconsistencies within the approval and policy enforcement because those, receipts and those documents were being misinterpreted across the different teams. So the biggest challenge, that Nixon Peabody faced was really that a lot of it was very paper based, very manual, and having to ship documents to different departments in different offices led to a lot of time, expensive or time slowdowns for them. And in some cases, Karen also shared where they would have to resend documents back to other offices, to rectify errors in that approval process. So as you can imagine, not only is that a big waste of time, when you're looking at all that shipping processes, but, it also can get a little bit costly when you're having to, send mail back and forth. So one of the other, challenges Karen shared with us was around invoicing. So, again, very much a paper manual based process. They have they did have a centralized AP system, but it lacked efficiency and visibility. Invoices entered at local office level and then were sent to central AP in a different location. Some invoices traveled from office to office for approvals, kinda how I mentioned how they had to go back and forth a lot there. And then Central IP filled those in filed those invoices until ready to pay. They scanned all their invoices, and then they scanned all their invoices once they were paid. There were plenty of room for inconsistencies and lots of room for error as you can imagine. If anybody has experienced similar issues, I would love to hear about it. That was one of the things I found very interesting from Karen was, her journey moving into a more digital aged solution. Now with that, she did start looking into a a solution to become a more digitalized and automated process here to help kinda streamline some of these issues. So, when I initially asked Karen what made you change, what made that move happen for you, it was really, the time of the economy and where the digital movement was moving. But, really, a a big key factor was that the solution they have that very manual process was just not working for them anymore. So, thankfully, somebody, introduced Karen to Emburse, where where it was formally known as Chrome River, and they eventually became an Emburse client. Now one of the things that Karen said she liked most about Emburse is that we were designed for law firms, and that's very true. We're very proud of that is that, the Emburse solution was actually really built for the law industry. So we have a very good understanding of what those needs are, how your processes work, and the solution is really designed for you. Emburse she said here, Emburse also understands the nuances of law firm accounting. So like I said, yes. We are built for law firms, and that is how we got our start. Now Adderant has, also has the ability, to export capabilities in both classic and export AP, to import files from Imburse via generic importer. So one of the things that Karen was talking about was how seamlessly, the Emburse and Aderant Aderant platforms work together, talking about how there are certain capabilities and features in, Emburse to kinda hold, those payouts for your clients and how those naturally flow into Aderant and the ability to kind of export those was very crucial in that in that relationship. Couple other things that highlighted the implementation and the ability to go to and the reason that they chose to go with Inverse was that there is a test environment set up to facilitate all phases of implementation testing, and, we do accommodate for that hold for client payment functionality in Aderant. So kinda touched on that a little bit there. But, Tyler and Elan, I know that Karen also shared her story with you. Is there anything that you think we should expand upon here or anything I didn't touch on that Karen would want us to mention? I I can jump in on that, with the caveat that I I'm by no means speak speaking for her. But I from my understanding from her side, she really feels great about the fact that she has a best in class solution as the system of record in Aderant and then the system of engagement in Emburse. When you combine a lot of the functionality of Aderant being really one of the greatest, ERP systems for the legal industry and the best of breed solution in Emburse Enterprise, that was designed for law firms, in back in 02/2007, by, a team that was very much, related to, Thompson Reuters back in the day. It's really her perspective is that it's really looking at two best in class systems coming together, integrating, and really just she loved the fact that the whole ecosystem that they are leveraging, is truly best of breed, for both the ERP side and then also the, system of engagement side to actually get everything through the system and approved. Anything else you would add, Alain? No. I think that, I think that the, the the close integration between the two systems made it so much easier to, to handle from a both an implementation standpoint and then from, downstream for, you know, interoperability when it comes to doing upgrades and and updates, that the, the understanding of both systems and how they integrate with each other, made it, more seamless for, for the firm to attend with. Absolutely. Yeah. And that's and for that's feedback we've, heard from lots of mutual clients. I just attended the Aderant Global Momentum myself and got to speak to a couple of clients there who shared similar feedback. But I think it's important to also kind of keep in mind that while we are talking specifically about Emburse and Aderant today, our key message here is really about automation. And so having that automated process, that allows you to work seamlessly in multiple solutions and allows you to kinda carry over those policies throughout, all of your roles is really the crucial key component we wanted to take away for today. But speaking of, the importance of automation and having those solutions in, implemented. The key here is really what what happens when automation is working successfully, and and Karen is really a true, success story of that. So some of the impacts and results that she shared with us were, the biggest one, of course, being that they are, fully paperless now, so no more mail being sent back and forth. But they also were able to, automate their routing processes. So that also eliminated a lot of guesswork, misapprovals, a lot of that, human error that you you see in those manual processes. It also provided a 100% visibility, which is huge. The ability to see, across departments and across roles, as and throughout that expense management process, is one of the main benefits to having an automated solution. It also improved their efficiency and accuracy. We touched a little bit on both of those, but it also, allowed them to have noncompliant it also allowed them to flag, noncompliant spend on the front end. And it eased a lot of frustration for both the users and the approvers. It also reduced their accounts payable headcount. Now I whenever we mentioned reduced headcount, people do freak out a little bit. So I wanna stress, Karen did say that the way that they were able to reduce, count headcount there was as people were leaving the firm, they just felt that they were able to, combine and eliminate some roles where needed. And so as people kind of left the firm, they were able to reduce that workload across multiple roles there. So it became a very natural reduction, but definitely a benefit as they saw those improved processes. They also were able to take on, more invoices being held for client payment, which resulted in better cash flow. And I know that I saw, quite a few questions around, that hold for client payment feature. So, we'll definitely touch on those a little bit more at the end, and I'll I'll make sure to bring up a lot of those questions. So keep them coming. And then I don't know about you, Elan and Tyler, but I my favorite thing, with talking with Karen was learning about all the lessons, that she had. So, the way that Karen broke it down was really talking through, some of her implementation lessons as she was setting up those systems, and then, she also has some best practices, she wanted us to share with you here, shortly as well. But when, implementing solutions or, if you're still in those early stages, we definitely want to consider how to best automate these processes and how to do it well from the beginning. So some lessons that she learned in the implementation process were determining the most logical and simple simple workflows where possible to maintain, the integrity of the firm policy. She really emphasized that this is a great time to clean up those obsolete approvals and expense codes. So if you haven't already, this is even a great activity. If you've already got something established, I highly recommend that, every year you kind of reevaluate your policies and your work flows and see where you can streamline and automate some of those. So next, thing here outlined is the, think about the system from the user perspective and balance of ease of use with policy compliance. So as you're kind of going through those workflows, and those approval processes and you're looking to streamline them, don't just think about them from an admin perspective. Think about them from a user perspective as well. How can you really reduce that, those policies and those steps to make that easier for your end user so that they actually want to submit those expenses and get those, get those in on time and make your life easier on the approval side as well. Test and retest before going live. Yes. Definitely take advantage of things like testing environments, and make sure that you have everything set up and ready to go before rolling it out. Seek user feedback and make sure to record any training sessions or or can provide continuous training to, your staff and those users as well. That was one thing I really, really, valued from Karen was her emphasis on, the user experience. So a lot of the times we speak, to the admin and to the people managing the solution, but we really wanna make sure we're considering the user as well. And, so we wanna look at this from a holistic standpoint on how can we simplify these processes, and make expense management easy for not only the admins and the approvers, but for the users submitting those expenses as well. And one way to really do that and make sure to get everybody on board is to share how much, those systems are going to improve their lives and share some of those early success stories. And then once you have your solution identified, and you started moving forward, so some things that Karen, advised on for future considerations and for those further along are creating a centralized email monitored by the team to field day to day questions. So it as your team, gets used to the solution, as they continue to work through different policy changes or updates, they might have questions. So having a centralized email for them to to rely on is really valuable. They said she said, at least ask at least two people to be well versed in the system. Make sure that you have those go to experts who really know the policy in the system that you put in place. Update your routing rules constantly. So as you're updating your firm policies, you should also be updating those route routing rules, and then update your compliance rules to address any user errors. As you're working through them, if you see consistent user errors, you can update those compliance rules to help mitigate those as well. So be sure to be constantly updating that as well. And then take advantage of training and resources. Emburse and Aderant both offer some good training, so make sure that if you're in the process of implementing or you or you see updates to the systems, definitely, take advantage of those trainings, and those resources. And then continue to seek user feedback. Again, Karen was very adamant that you, consider the user in this, so continue to talk as a team and as an organization, to figure out how you can improve their pain points, when you're looking at updating your policies. So with that, I do wanna share our last poll question here before we open it up to questions, and then we'll dive into some of your guys' questions here that you've been submitting. But, as a reminder, this is, this webinar is eligible for CPE credit, And in order to do so, you do have to engage with all poll questions. So we have just one final one for you here, in which we'd really like to know what what topics you would like us to dive into further and what you would like to learn more about in the future. So with that, that poll's open. If you want to start kind of filling out some answers there. Curious to hear what everybody would like to learn more about. And I'll share that with our team here. Looks like best practices for policy management and building a long term roadmap for automation and compliance. Yes. We, we'd love to have that identified for you all. That seems to be a very popular one. A long term roadmap. Awesome. And we do take, this feedback very seriously, so we would love to kind of build on this content for you guys and deliver that. So keep an eye out for future webinars, with Emburse. We definitely, love getting to talk to our legal clients, and getting to play in that world that we were originally built on. So I can definitely see us diving into more of a long term road map in the future. But I'll give you guys couple more seconds to fill that out, and then we'll close that and open it up to questions. Okay. Perfect. Elaine, Tyler, are you ready for some questions? Let's see. We have quite a few from our audience here, so I'd love to dive into more. A lot of people were asking, if we can share some more information around the hold for client payment functionality in Emburse. Tyler, can you expand upon that, please? Yeah. Absolutely. Are you saying this first question here from Carrie at the top? We have quite a few. If you just wanna talk to how that function, works in Emburse specifically, and and give them maybe some high level information. For for anybody who wants to see how that function works, we aren't showing, showcasing the product today. However, if you want to see exactly how that functionality is set up, or how you can enable it yourselves, definitely, use that request a demo button or book a demo link, and we'll be happy to showcase that for you. But Tyler can at least speak to it a little bit, and how that functionality was created and set up for you. Yeah. Definitely. Hold payment. Correct? Correct. Mhmm. Okay. Great. And I yeah. I saw a lot of questions regarding that. Overall, it's really you think of it as a workflow. Right? Whether some firms have it set up where it's like a check mark. Right? And while you're submitting that invoice, you could basically check hold payment. Some clients define it as something different, which means the same thing. But, basically, as you check hold payment, it will impact the workflow and, of course, impact what that means from a cash perspective. Right? And so we pretty much just take the approach of enabling the end user to determine if it's a scenario where you would hold payment. We can also create business rules around, you know, if this set of scenarios happen or it's this type of matter number, then we always hold payment. We can also explore things like that. It's a very flexible system. But overall, we can really tailor the solution to exactly what you're looking to accomplish. I would say most commonly, it's a checkbox that says hold payment. And then when you when you're looking at your invoice management dashboard, you can also just straight up sort all of your invoices by just the hold payments or just the check request or things of that nature as well. So the short answer is we can customize it however you would like. I would say the checkbox is the most common one that I see. But everything will impact the workflow and the functionality, and we can really tailor and design the software to what that means for you and what you would like that to mean for you. Perfect. And I I've asked Karen. I know she's, able to join the chat here, it looks like. So I've asked Karen to share in the chat, how Nixon Peabody has that element set up, if she's able to. So hopefully, we'll hear from her, but we do have quite a few questions. So, one other question that came up here, that I wanna address is what is that ease of integration? What is the timeline for kinda training the software? Can you expand? Can you talk a little bit about implementation timelines and and how we integrate and work with Aderant. And is that a manual cost, a a very heavy lift for people, or is that, an easy solution for them to adapt? Yeah. It's it's another great question. And I the vast majority of the law firms we work with have both expense and invoice, which are two separate modules. When you think about, the advantages of doing both, of course, having a unified system where you're processing expenses and invoices has is it has advantages as well as the data because you're able to report across your expense reports and your invoices and combine the spend across channels. But as it pertains to implementation, I'll you know, for example, firms that start with expense and then they do invoice after, you're really looking at a finance professional driven implementation. So a lot lot of the heavy lifting is on our our end, whereas your teams are really meeting with us to configure the technology based on what your unique law firm will look like. We have best practice recommendations, we have best practice setups, we have all types of things to streamline that process for you and make it really a finance professional driven implementation versus a very IT heavy implementation. As far as timeline goes, it really just depends on the back and forth communication and how complex you want to go. We've had clients go live in three to four weeks. We have other clients that are much larger and, you know, maybe it takes six months or a little bit longer than that. It really depends on the scope and scale of what you're looking to accomplish. Most commonly for medium to smaller law firms, I'm seeing a lot of projects go live in one to two months. Can take a little bit longer depending on, you know, back and forth and and testing and all kinds of stuff. It's really a communication game. But overall, from an IT perspective, it's a it's a relatively light lift. It doesn't mean there's no IT involvement, especially when it comes to testing and things like that. But generally speaking, we've had really great feedback and our professional services team, they are rock stars. They are amazing at what they do. Consultants that work with us throughout the years, they always recommend us because of how great the implementation resources are. And really during and after the implementation process, we also have professional services. A lot of our law firms, for example, work with our consultants on an ongoing basis after they go live and really rely on those expert consultants called ESAs to configure the system and make modifications on the go forward as well. And then lastly, firms that will, implement expense first and then invoice after, you have the unique advantage of the fact that most, if not all, of your GLs are already on the expense side. So we'll bring in any additional GLs. We'll, of course, need to integrate your vendor master file. And then we have to basically just look at configuring the invoice side for what that means for your firm in terms of routing and all of that stuff. But overall, it's, again, it's it's not a big scary ERP implementation or anything like that. Yes, it is an implementation. I'm not naive to that, but it's, generally speaking, a very streamlined and efficient implementation, and most of our clients have been very happy. Yeah. I think that the key is to really, determine what are your priorities and what are your needs for your firm, and then talk through that with a rep to identify, how much that how much customization or how much, you need to accomplish those goals, and what that lift would be because that is gonna vary. But, definitely, I we are coming up on time, so I want to see if we can address maybe one more question here. For anybody whose questions we don't get to today, we will reach out, to you individually and, try our best to address those questions. But, if we also didn't get to you, I I highly encourage using that request a demo and chatting to a rep, who can definitely address, those questions as well. But we do have one, from Brian Driscoll who, wants to learn more about, the Imverse AI functionality since that is a pretty hot topic these days. Brian asked, is the AI functionality within Inverse pretrained, or does it adapt and learn based on usage patterns and input from firms, for firm users over time? Excellent question, Brian. And the answer is it's adaptive and iterative and uses machine learning to continually improve. I can't speak to the specific infosec related, aspects such as customer data and things of that nature, but we can definitely get you those answers. Overall, the AI functionality does learn and is using some levels of machine learning. From a high level perspective, I can answer it to that point, but definitely feel free to reach out. I personally network some of our customers with, you know, some of our VPs of products and some of the folks all the way up to our chief product officer who is, very much spearheading those efforts. So we're happy to have a more detailed discussion around that at any point for anyone here attending. I know enough to be dangerous, but that's pretty much my high level answer for you. Yeah. And I would say definitely keep an eye out, for some some updated content from us. We are releasing some more information about, AI, and, I think we're gonna be doing some some more webinars around the topic as well. So, keep an eye out for those, but definitely, want to take the time to thank everybody for joining us today. Like I mentioned, we will get to your questions, outside of this webinar if we didn't address them today already. And please, definitely, keep an eye out for future webinars. We hope to see you at some some future events. And thank you, Elan and Tyler, for joining us. We appreciate the content that you guys are able to deliver today. Thank you, everyone. Thank you. Thank you.