Scenario
Fighting for fair and social justice for everyday Australian’s has been Maurice Blackburn Lawyers (MBL) commitment to their clients for the last century of establishment. With a no win, no fee service promise, it’s vital that lawyers are able to process claims efficiently, accurately and in a cost-effective manner.
With a dispersed workforce of over 30 offices throughout Australia and more than 1000 of the country’s best and most respected legal professionals, MBL receives approximately 1400 claims requiring processing each month.
Maurice Blackburn Lawyers required a scalable solution that would accelerate their pre-claim assessment process, a process that initiates new claims against employee’s superannuation and their insurance company in the event of an accident in the workplace. The existing pre-claims process was a manually intensive and consequently extremely costly process for MBL where each claim would require between 6 to 8 weeks of effort to process, which was all undertaken as pre-sales, non-billable activity.
It was however an entirely essential process for MBL to go through to win new work of this nature. From a customer experience perspective, a potential new customer could only wait this duration to hear the fate of their pre-claim assessment at a time which can often be a very traumatic period in their life. The solution that Arinco delivered vastly improved the clients’ experience.
“Knowing what you’re entitled to is the first step in getting access to justice so by coupling AI with trained staff we can provide clients with greater certainty more quickly”. Said by Maurice Blackburn’s National Manager of Operations for the Superannuation and Insurance team, Jason Brown.
The question was asked; “what if we could reduce the process from 6-8 weeks down to a few days, or furthermore even within the same day?” The outcome would have dramatic benefits to MBL in throughput of pre-claims and overall client experience. A faster pre-claims process would result in reducing risk of the client going to one of their competitors. Legal Assistants would be able to do more with a lot less time and effort.
The existing manual process was both laboursome to complete and:
- Relied on human eye, experience and specific knowledge about insurance covers
- Involved policy documents that included complex and inconsistent language
- Involved single policy documents that included inconsistent member data and classes
- Had multiple definitions within policies, requiring further user inputs
- Required reconciliation between subsequent endorsement documents and full policies
Solution
Enter Arinco’s Azure Knowledge Mining solution which was used to tackle the problem by bringing intelligence and context to unstructured data.
With Arinco’s expertise in Azure Search and Azure Cognitive Services, the Azure Knowledge Mining solution applies AI skills on the data to extract knowledge as well as organise it for easy retrieval from a search index and integrate it into line of business applications.
The solution was built based on Arinco’s Knowledge Mining Accelerator and leveraged the following Azure Services:
- App Service
- Azure Functions
- Azure Cognitive Search
- Azure Cognitive Services Azure SQL Database
The final solution (known as the AI Policy Database) included the following capabilities:
- Azure Knowledge Mining pipeline that extracted content in all superannuation documents, identified key phrases, and loaded content in an index store
- An SME-facing experience that enabled enrichment of business context
- An agent-facing assistant that was guided by the business context and guided agents through the claim’s assessment process
- Outputs from the claim’s assessment process with inputs to the claims processing process
Outcome
Arinco leveraged the Microsoft AI and Cognitive platform to deliver a Knowledge Mining solution to MBL called AI Policy Database that dramatically reduced the time it took to complete their claims processing. A claims process used to take between 6 to 8 weeks and in some cases longer. The AI Policy Database solution now enables MBL Legal Assistants to complete the process within the span of the initial screening call, which amounts to minutes.
“Automating the process also means we can free up our team to spend more time with clients and make quicker decisions about how to proceed with claims.”
Arinco used Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services to develop the AI-infused solution which in turn uses Azure Forms Recogniser to accelerate business processes through automating information extraction.
“Utilising Arinco’s AI skills and creative problem-solving approach we have been able to truncate a 6-8 week process down to less than 10 minutes. The Arinco team worked closely with our sponsoring business unit through every part of the process and delivered a working solution within a matter of weeks.” – Maurice Blackburn’s General Manager Digital & Technology, Greg Emsley
To read more about this solution:
Lawyers turn to AI to make judgments on workplace claims (Australian Financial Review, 3 Aug 2020)
Hyperspeed: Law firm uses AI to slice months off insurance claims (Microsoft News Centre, 3 Aug 2020)
Arinco accesses AI to slash law firm’s processing time (ARN, 3 Aug 2020)
AI partnership fast-tracks superannuation claims (Lawyers Weekly, 4 Aug 2020)
