Imagine this: a new claim comes through to an insurer on a Tuesday morning. Maybe it’s one of the 600,000 bodily injury claims made in the UK each year.
It’s, from an insurer’s perspective, a fairly run of the mill claim. A motor vehicle accident where the claimant is suffering one of the most common injuries - whiplash. The claimant has filled in their forms, attached the required police and doctor’s reports, and is claiming £500 for medical expenses.
Now the insurer has to have someone painstakingly read through the reports, check all the boxes, file the forms, assess the claimant, and pay out the claim, all for a very small sum (in the insurance world) of £500.
But now there’s new technology that is claiming that, soon, it could change that. An artificial intelligence lawyer called Lauri that would be able to assess simple claims and determine if they should be approved.
Keoghs law firm has already implemented Lauri to help reduce its workload when handling avoidable litigation in low-value personal injury claims – and it has been extremely successful.
Dene Rowe, innovation director for Keoghs, said Lauri could be taught how to assess medical claims, and that would take several months.
“Lauri could extract the data from the medical reports, for example, and compare that data to which other claims of the same type were approved. From that it would determine if it should approve the claim or not,” he explained. “There is the potential for that.”
There’s also the potential for Lauri to be used in theft or other types of claim cases, but for now Keoghs is focused on selling what the artificial intelligence lawyer does for personal injury claim paperwork.
What Lauri is currently doing for the firm is helping to automate processes and reduce workload. It’s essentially an AI lawyer, dealing only with personal injury insurance claims - and the way it works is sure to impress most.
Basically, if an insurance claim proceeds to litigation, instead of emailing a human lawyer the insurer emails the court documents, and any other documents, to Lauri. The insurer includes any relevant information in the body of their email, and sends it off.
The email text doesn’t have to be formal or use specific words either—Lauri has been trained to read the email and use natural language processing, so it understands slang and how humans naturally email each other.
Lauri receives the email, processes the email and attachments, and extracts the required information. If everything required was sent in the email, Lauri will open a case using the tracking system, and do all the legal paperwork.
Once the paperwork is complete, the AI lawyer sends an email to the insurer to confirm everything and settle the case. If the insurer doesn’t confirm in a set amount of time, the case is allocated to a Keoghs handler.
“End to end, the journey that would have taken two days now takes one minute,” Rowe said. “So going from a process that would have taken hours and hours to a minute, that saves a lot of time and money.”
Despite the possibilities for Lauri to be able to read medical reports, it’s unlikely that will be the next step for Keoghs, however.
“Counter-fraud is next for us,” Rowe said. “The higher value areas are what we’re most excited about because there are a high volume of documents."
