To use AI Forecasting feature, it must be enabled by an Account Administrator on the AI Processing tab of the Settings page.

AppColl can use your existing fee and expense billing information to build an AI model that can predict future fees and expenses. Law firms can predict future income and corporations can predict costs by month, quarter or year over a specified time period. You can filter the forecast to only include specified clients, countries, matter types and/or law firms.

AppColl automatically creates the AI models used for these forecasts and updates them once per week using the latest information in your account. Only information from your account is used in the models. Also, your information will never be used to train any other AppColl account forecast models.

Note that in order to be usefully accurate, several years of prior billing information must exist. When training the model, AppColl will use at most the most recent 1,000,000 billing items and only those items with dates within the last 10 years. AppColl displays a color coded estimate of the model accuracy in the lower left of the page. Green for an accuracy better than +/- 20%, orange for better than +/-50% and red for > 50% error estimate.

AI forecasts are run from the AI Forecast page in the AI module.

To create a forecast, select the desired parameters (start, length, filters etc.) and click on the Create Forecast button. 

For example, to create a forecast for a single client, select the client in the “Filter By” section.

Generating the forecast can take several minutes. While the forecast is being generated, the Create Forecast button will be disabled and will show the text “Forecast Running”. You will also see a progress bar in the lower right of the page. Clicking on this bar will provide an estimate of when the forecast will be completed.

You can download the results of a forecast by clicking on the text “PNG” or “CSV” in the upper right of the chart, which will download an image of the chart or a spreadsheet of the values respectively.

The AI Forecast page can generate two different types of forecasts, depending if the Forecast Single Matter checkbox is checked.

• A forward looking time-based forecast of future fees and expenses.
• A forecast of spending on a single matter, based around the matter filing date.

For the single matter mode, AppColl provides an estimate of the billing over the life of a single matter matching the attributes specified in the filters.