Beyond that larger clients are negotiating (imposing really) explicit conditions into thier agreements to prevent abusive billing. Things like minimum detail requirements (no more "5hr - lgl resrh"), no first year associates, no clerical work, etc. Then there's capped and flat fee billing.
Definitely a time of big changes.
The more interesting point would be like in the example provided in the article (billing half an hour for mailing) where the system considers the charge for the stated work to be excessive but the client may not be in as strong a position to question it as with the clear cut example you gave.
Definitely interesting times though!
We (SimpleLegal) will work with those guidelines and train our models accordingly.
Example: Walmart's Outside Counsel billing guidelines http://www.acc.com/advocacy/valuechallenge/toolkit/loader.cf...
As bradleyjg points out, some charges make their way onto a bill when they shouldn't. It's usually not malicious.
The problem is that legal bills don't get enough attention from the law firm. They rely on the client to tell them when something is a problem. We make that process easier. And hopefully everybody, even the law firm, is happier.
The "shared" component is for training purposes. At no point do we share invoice content. The key to convert a numeric vector back into a partial view of the original text changes every day. Security and confidentiality of customer data is a big area of concern for us. We also provide our customers with a named list of people with access to the content.
Unless of course you agreed with your lawyers that any invoice would be subject to review by SimpleLegal although I would suspect there would be some opposition to this. Although of course doesn't take away from the value of the service in allowing a company to monitor legal expenditure and to gain greater insight into this (possibly with a view to obtaining leverage for future fee discussions).
On a final point, your privacy policy already assumes that you will use data to improve your service and to provide external reporting. This would seem to imply a degree of aggregation. Although as stated this would be on an anonymous basis, the very fact it happens may be off-putting to certain companies.