Nathan Wenzel and Patrik Outericky had a successful services business called Edge Solutions that helped enterprises — especially insurance companies with large portfolios of cases — sort out their legal bills. Although the business wasn’t sexy, it was profitable. But Wenzel and Outericky decided to wind that company down and go into Y Combinator to turn that review process into a scalable product instead. They are now emerging from the accelerator with a new company,SimpleLegal.
SimpleLegal takes as much friction out of the bill review process as possible. All a customer has to do is ask their law firm to copy SimpleLegal on each invoice, and then the magic starts to happen. SimpleLegal’s system ingests the invoice and parses each line item into its database. Natural language processing systems figure out who billed what and for how long — and then that data is run through a machine learning system that flags outliers. One example: the system flagged a line item where a professional billed a half hour for mailing. That might not be too unusual but for the fact that the system knew the thing being mailed was a one-page form. That’s pretty smart.
