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BigHand
BigHand supplies law firms with applications for workforce allocation, document production, pricing, billing review and financial reporting. Impact Analytics uses AI to turn timecard narratives into structured activity and cost information, supporting matter budgets, staffing analysis and client reporting. Workflow Management converts Outlook email into support tasks and routes work according to capacity, skills and availability.
Matter Pricing combines historic matter information with fee scenarios, budget versions and live tracking. PrebillManager provides digital invoice review, approval rules and an edit history before changes reach accounting. These products cover different parts of running a firm rather than replacing its legal research tools. BigHand acquired Ayora in August 2026, with the first integrated Matter Pricing capabilities expected later that year.
Installed and hosted versions have different data responsibilities, and retention varies by product. Its service notice requires human verification of AI output affecting deliverables and restricts training of external foundation models. Customers include Dickinson Wright, Charles Russell Speechlys and Withers. The group operates through regional entities, with BigHand Limited based in London. Workflow pricing depends on licenses, features and configuration, with amounts supplied by proposal.
BigHand, head to head
Side by side on the same 15 capability axes and 12 legal signals: where the two part company, and what neither one publishes.
Alternatives to BigHand
Vendors in the same categories as BigHand whose graded profiles look most alike, with a line on what each product does.
Similar is not the same, so check that each one does the job you need. No vendor pays for placement.
- DDiliTrustDiliTrust combines contract lifecycle management, board meetings, legal entities, matters and secure file sharing in one governance suite.
- HHighQHighQ is Thomson Reuters' collaboration and legal work management platform for law firms, corporate legal departments and government legal teams.
- LLuplLupl is a legal work management platform for law firms and legal departments, owned by Elevate since August 2026.
- DDazychainDazychain is matter management software for small to medium in house legal departments, made by Yarris Technologies of Melbourne, with an office in Boston.
- OOddrOddr connects a law firm's billing, collections, payments and revenue reporting on top of existing financial systems such as Aderant and Elite 3E.
- OOntraOntra is an AI platform for private markets firms, covering the routine legal and compliance work around funds.
Ordered by how closely the graded profiles match across the 15 capability axes, inside the same categories. See how each axis is graded in the methodology.
Capability grades
All 15 axes, graded from public sources on the date shown. Hover a grade to see what the letter means on that axis.
AI Centrality
How much of the product is actually AI. Whether the machine learning is the mechanism the buyer is paying for or a feature layered onto conventional software, and whether the vendor is specific about which is which.
BigHand combines financial, document and workforce applications, with AI concentrated in particular products. Impact Analytics converts timecard narratives into structured activity data for pricing, staffing and billing analysis. Workflow Management turns Outlook messages into support tasks and routes them by skills, availability and workload. Speech recognition handles voice instructions, while Matter Pricing includes AI enabled timecard analysis alongside budgets and financial scenarios.
BigHand acquired Ayora in August 2026, with the first integrated pricing capabilities expected later that year. Much of the catalog still functions through conventional dashboards, forms, accounting connections and document tools. AI extends that broader operational suite rather than constituting every product's core.
Citation Accuracy and Hallucination Disclosure
Whether the vendor publishes measured accuracy on citations and assertions, grounds output to primary sources, and says plainly what its system does when it does not know. Legal has a documented public record of fabricated citations reaching filed briefs, so an untested claim of accuracy is not evidence.
Impact Analytics classifies time entries within a consistent code set, with additional task detail through UTBMS+. Its results support matter cost analysis and staffing decisions rather than legal authority. The DPA describes testing sample customer timecards, reviewing coding accuracy, adjusting the system and repeating the exercise before automatic processing begins. That is a defined quality procedure, though BigHand gives no acceptance thresholds, test results or error distribution for it.
Financial dashboards make transformed data available for review and export without demonstrating a source link for every classification. A separate Ayora masking accuracy claim concerns anonymization, not the correctness of BigHand's billing analysis.
Autonomy and Oversight Model
What the system decides on its own, what a lawyer must approve, and whether the vendor documents where the review point sits. A tool that drafts under review and a tool that files without one are different products and different risks.
The service notice requires human review and verification of AI output affecting customer deliverables, reporting or core services. Matter Pricing keeps final pricing decisions with people and provides scenario modeling, budget versions and live financial views for that work. Workflow Management automatically routes support tasks, while teams can redistribute work and follow its progress. PrebillManager separately lets firms require attorney or biller approval and undo edits through its history.
These are practical review surfaces, although the notice does not map each AI feature to a required approval step. BigHand does not describe stops for uncertain classifications or recovery after an incorrect automated routing decision.
Operational and Outcome Evidence
Named, dated evidence that the product works in production at real firms or legal departments. Case studies with figures and identified customers count. Unattributed testimonials and launch announcements do not.
Dickinson Wright's Impact Analytics account names COO Michael Kolb and analytics director Renee Morris, who describe gaining greater insight into staffing, time recording and pricing. Their account combines early benefits with plans for using the data, without a measured change in outcomes. Other named users include Tasktop's Amyli McDaniel, who attributes task level cost transparency to the analytics, and Kaiser Permanente's Tamara Morgan, who describes work with BigHand's team.
Workflow Management separately attributes a turnaround reduction from 99 hours to 18 to Charles Russell Speechlys. Those workflow results do not isolate the contribution of the newer email routing models or Ayora integration.
Privilege and Confidentiality Posture
How client confidences are handled: attorney client privilege and work product treatment, segregation of one client matter from another, whether client data trains any model, and what the vendor commits to in writing rather than in marketing.
Customer Data Access terms restrict support and implementation access to its agreed purpose, require confidentiality and keep copied information separate from other records. Customers can revoke that permission, triggering cessation of access and destruction of copies within 72 hours. The service notice prohibits using customer and personal data to train external, public or third party foundation models. The DPA still permits timecard quality testing and service improvement, with ChatGPT testing requiring express customer instruction.
Internal model adjustment therefore remains allowed in those forms. Matter level ethical walls and specific privilege or work product protections remain unexplained across the suite.
UPL and Professional Responsibility Posture
Whether the vendor is clear that it supplies a tool rather than legal advice, who its audience is, and how it addresses unauthorized practice of law, competence and supervision duties, and jurisdiction limits. ABA Formal Opinion 512 is the reference point. Where the advice line is not the duty a product raises, the axis is read through the nearest professional duty it does raise: judicial conduct rules and the reviewing duty for products sold only to courts, and the duty to bill for time actually spent for products that draft time entries.
BigHand's financial tools help firms classify work, construct budgets and edit bills. Its service notice requires verification of AI output that affects deliverables, reporting or core services, and Matter Pricing leaves final decisions to people. Neither statement assigns a lawyer a specific duty to validate machine coded work, fee narratives or charges before billing a client. Cost transparency and fair budgeting appear as product benefits rather than a framework for professional competence, fee reasonableness and AI disclosure.
The website's general information disclaimer concerns website content. It does not define the professional responsibilities that accompany the operational AI used in a firm's fee process.
AI Governance and Bias Disclosure
Published governance over model behavior: who owns it inside the vendor, what is tested before release, and what is disclosed about disparate output across matter types, parties, or populations.
BigHand's Artificial Intelligence Management System governs AI processing under its service notice, which requires human verification, identifies automated interactions and prohibits training external foundation models on customer data. The timecard quality procedure adds a concrete testing sequence before automatic deployment, including sample review and system adjustment. An AIMS Manual and Statement of Applicability are listed in the trust center behind an access request.
Their contents and the acceptance criteria for individual models are not available in the open notice. Impact Analytics supports equitable work allocation, but no test results assess classification differences across lawyer groups or identify who approves model releases.
AI Safety and Data Stewardship
Retention, deletion, access control, and what happens to prompts and documents after they are processed. Whether the vendor states its subprocessors and its incident practice, or leaves the buyer to assume.
The DPA sets separate retention rules for Workflow, Matter Pricing, Resource Management, analytics and Ayora, and lists processors with their activities, data access and locations. Staff access is denied by default, follows a formal request process and ends within a day of departure. Security event logs have a minimum 30 day retention period. Customer Data Access terms add a 72 hour deadline to end access and destroy copied material after revocation.
A breach notification procedure is identified in both the annex and trust center, but the procedure requires access approval. Its customer notice deadline and incident handling commitments therefore remain unknown.
AI Liability and Recourse
What the vendor stands behind contractually when its output is wrong. Indemnities, caps, carve outs, insurance, and whether any of it is published or only reachable through a negotiated agreement.
Customer Data Access terms apply the liability limitations from the separate BigHand Agreement to implementation and support access. They also require destruction of copied confidential data after permission is revoked. The referenced agreement's financial cap, indemnity and warranty are not included in the open access terms or DPA annexes. Trust center insurance entries identify available certificates without exposing the cover amounts or claims conditions.
These materials provide no remedy for incorrectly coded time, a mistaken price recommendation or misrouted work. Website disclaimers address the website itself, so they do not supply the missing allocation of liability for the operational products.
Practice Systems Integration Depth
How deeply the product reaches into the systems legal work already lives in: document management such as iManage and NetDocuments, Word and Outlook, contract lifecycle management, matter management, e-billing, and court filing systems.
Workflow Management accepts Outlook email requests as structured support tasks, then distributes work according to skills, capacity and workload. Firms configure their forms and routing processes with BigHand during implementation and can change them afterward. PrebillManager carries attorney edits through billing review, with changes processed into the accounting system and a reversible edit history. Matter Pricing imports historic matter data and tracks actual costs against budgets through financial and time recording connections.
Word and document management connections are included in Document Creation packages. BigHand does not document field mappings, authentication requirements or supported source systems for each financial connection.
Deployment Model and Data Residency
Where the software runs and where the data sits. Multi tenant cloud, single tenant, private deployment, on premises, and whether region of residence is a published option or an enterprise conversation.
Installed BigHand software runs on the customer's infrastructure, where the customer controls retention and local security. Hosted services use region specific Azure or Innovate Cloud9 infrastructure, with AWS supporting Digitory analytics and backups kept in the chosen hosting region. The processor annex distinguishes hosting from support and development access, including international personnel and specified invitation only access.
Azure OpenAI anonymization for AutoCoder has named regional options. Ayora separately uses AWS and a processor list that identifies Google for generative features, but lists corporate headquarters rather than all processing locations. The suite has substantial regional detail without a complete location map for every current AI feature.
Security Certifications and Trust Center
Independent attestation a buyer can pull without a sales call: SOC 2, ISO 27001, penetration test summaries, a trust center with current reports and named scope rather than a badge image.
A downloadable A-LIGN certificate identifies BigHand Limited's ISO 27001:2022 management system, certificate ISMS-BI-040925. Issued November 6, 2025, it expires November 20, 2027 and covers development, provision, support and SaaS maintenance across BigHand entities serving professional and healthcare customers. The certificate names London and Chicago locations and includes internal legal, HR, finance and IT operations.
It is available directly through the trust center. The center also lists ISO 27701, SOC 2 Type 2 and penetration testing material, with some resources requiring access approval. The certificate verifies the scoped management system; it does not certify the accuracy of individual AI outputs.
Model Supply Chain Disclosure
Which models sit underneath, whose they are, where they run, and whether the vendor commits to telling customers when that changes. A legal buyer inherits every dependency it cannot see.
The processor annex names Azure OpenAI for removing identifiers from AutoCoder and Digitory datasets, plus OpenAI ChatGPT for testing sample timecards only on express customer instruction. Azure supplies hosted speech recognition, while AWS hosts Digitory analytics. Ayora's separate security page identifies Google for generative AI features and a self hosted small language model for masking, without naming its family.
These disclosures identify several different roles, so hosting and anonymization should not be confused with the model that classifies work. BigHand does not name the engines behind timecard coding and email routing. Processor update notices carry no commitment covering every underlying model change.
Commercial Transparency
Whether a buyer can learn what this costs without entering a sales process: published rates, the unit being charged, what sits behind an enterprise tier, and what implementation adds.
Workflow Management proposals depend on the number of licenses, access to features and the firm's configuration. Its Standard, Plus and Advanced tiers distinguish basic workflow from forms, reporting, timesheets and utilization features. Speech recognition, outsourcing, the service provider gateway and SDK are optional additions. Other packages cover resourcing, document creation, metadata, matter pricing and business intelligence, with feature differences visible across tiers.
No license rate, minimum purchase or renewal uplift is stated. Implementation and training are scoped through a separate consultancy proposal. The license basis makes the structure clearer than a price request alone, while actual recurring and setup costs remain quote dependent.
Firm and Practice Coverage
Who the product is actually built for. AmLaw, midlaw, small firm and solo, in house departments, government and courts, and which practice areas are supported rather than merely claimed.
Law firm operations teams use BigHand for support work, resourcing, document production, financial reporting, pricing and prebill review. Impact Analytics also serves corporate legal departments analyzing outside counsel spend, with task based cost information and staffing insights. Workflow Management has users in healthcare, property and financial services as well as law, while the index profile concerns its legal workflows.
Named legal users range across regional and international firms, including Dickinson Wright, Charles Russell Speechlys and Withers. The products work on the customer's operational records rather than a jurisdiction specific legal research collection. Country availability by product and minimum firm size are not fully defined.
5 public documents
The public pages on file for BigHand, with the recorded signals each one supports and the date it was last read. Open any of them and check the reading against the record.
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Client Data in Training, Ethical Walls and Matter Segregation, Third Party Request and Subpoena Notice and 1 more
Read Oct 16, 2026
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Prompt and Output Retention, Refusal and Uncertainty Behavior, Outside Counsel Guideline Readiness
Read Oct 16, 2026
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Primary Law Corpus Provenance, Good Law Verification
Read Oct 16, 2026
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Billing and Fee Posture, Court Disclosure Support
Read Oct 16, 2026
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Fabricated Citation Record
Read Oct 16, 2026
Custom quote
- Workflow Management is quoted by license count, features and configuration.
- Standard, Plus and Advanced packages add different reporting and workflow functions.
- Installation and training come through a tailored consultancy package.
- License rates, setup amounts and renewal increases are not listed.
Workflow Management pricing depends on license count, feature access and configuration. Standard, Plus and Advanced tiers add forms and email submission, process reporting, timesheets and utilization reporting in stages. Firms can add speech recognition, an outsourcing module, a service provider gateway and SDK to their Workflow package. Other tiered packages cover Resource Management, Document Creation, Metadata Management, Matter Pricing and Business Intelligence; Pitching and Proposals has a single Standard package. No license rate or minimum purchase is stated.
Implementation: Installation, training and adoption support are offered through a tailored consultancy package, without a stated fee. Workflow projects typically take 6 to 12 weeks depending on scope and environment.
Confidentiality and data terms: Data terms vary by installed or hosted product, with a DPA annex listing retention and processors. Healthcare compliance references do not establish an available business associate agreement for each legal product.
Note: The Workflow product FAQ names licenses as the charging unit, correcting the impression created by the quote-only package table. Rates, recurring term, renewal increases and minimum commitments remain unspecified. Ayora's acquisition announcement does not price the planned Matter Pricing integration.
Legal Signals
What each signal meansA signal records what public sources say on the date shown. It is not a grade and it is not a recommendation. Where a signal reads Not addressed, it means the index did not locate the material in public sources on that date, which is a statement about disclosure rather than about the product.
Client Data in Training
Can material a lawyer puts into this product be used to train a model?
A public policy or trust page states no training on customer content, with no matching term located in the published agreement.
The service notice prohibits training external, public or third party foundation models on customer and personal data. That promise does not expressly cover every internal model. DPA annexes allow timecard service improvement and quality testing, including system adjustments; ChatGPT testing requires the customer's express instruction. Neither permission alone states a right to train models. Ayora also has a foundation model training prohibition in its own policy.
The open service notice supplies the explicit restriction, while the full BigHand Agreement is not available to establish its contractual incorporation.
Prompt and Output Retention
How long does the product keep what a lawyer typed, and can that be set to zero?
The customer controls the retention window, by product configuration or by contractual instruction, but zero retention is not stated as available.
Workflow audio and attachments normally remain for up to 52 days after task completion; customers can extend that period by up to a year where the feature is available. Unfinished tasks can persist until completion, deletion or termination. Other product windows differ, including three months after termination for Matter Pricing and four for AutoCoder personal data. Ayora uses 30 days with backups up to 90. These are product specific controls and deadlines. No universal zero retention setting covers every AI input, generated result and service record.
Ethical Walls and Matter Segregation
Does retrieval respect the firm’s ethical walls, or can the model read across them?
Segregation is asserted in public materials with no published detail on how it is enforced.
The service notice states that customer and personal data processed by AI is isolated. Administrators govern Workflow Hub visibility through user permissions, and Matter Pricing includes role based access. Support access is separately controlled through confidentiality terms, formal requests and limits on copied information. Those measures do not explain how an AI request is restricted to one client's matters or how a financial system's ethical walls carry into analytics.
No detailed wall inheritance or matter exclusion procedure accompanies timecard coding, email routing or the proposed Ayora pricing integration.
Third Party Request and Subpoena Notice
If someone subpoenas the vendor for a firm’s data, does the firm hear about it first?
Published terms or policy address disclosure to authorities or in response to legal process, and no commitment or reservation regarding customer notice is located anywhere. The vendor has told the customer that data can leave and has said nothing about whether the customer hears of it.
The North American privacy policy permits disclosure for legal requests, investigations, court orders and other specified business purposes. The service notice adds that requests from law enforcement and regulators are validated before personal information is disclosed. It does not commit to telling the customer beforehand or giving time to challenge a demand. No transparency report provides the history of requests received.
The support terms' confidentiality and access revocation provisions constrain ordinary service access, without adding a notice commitment when information is sought by a third party.
Primary Law Corpus Provenance
Where does the law in this product come from, and does the vendor have the right to use it?
No located public material identifies the corpus behind the product’s answers.
Impact Analytics classifies the firm's timecard narratives and transforms billing information into task and cost data. Matter Pricing uses historic matters and current financial records to construct budgets and monitor delivery. These inputs come from customer operations, rather than an identified collection of cases or statutes. UTBMS+ is a coding approach, not a primary law corpus or license. No legal publisher, corpus update schedule or rights basis is attached to the AI classifications. The models' training datasets are also distinct from the customer records they analyze.
Good Law Verification
Does the product tell you when the authority it just cited has been overruled?
No located public material addresses whether authority is checked for subsequent history.
BigHand's financial analytics interpret work descriptions, costs and staffing information. PrebillManager supports editing bills, while Matter Pricing compares planned and actual financial performance. None of these functions supplies later history treatment for a legal authority. Document Creation's clause bank and template tools likewise do not identify a citator or an automatic legal currency assessment. Correcting a billing code or refreshing matter cost data serves a different purpose from determining whether an opinion has been overruled. No good law verification feature accompanies the described AI workflow.
Refusal and Uncertainty Behavior
What does the product do when the answer is not in the corpus?
No located public material addresses what the product does when it cannot ground an answer.
Timecard quality testing reviews sample classifications and adjusts the system before automatic processing begins. The service notice also requires human verification of AI output affecting deliverables and reporting. Neither description states how the live classifier handles an entry it cannot confidently code, or what email routing does when a request is ambiguous. No confidence value, abstention message or automatic referral rule is described for those situations.
Ayora's separate masking accuracy percentage is a security claim, without establishing uncertainty behavior for pricing recommendations or billing classifications.
Fabricated Citation Record
Does a public court record exist addressing fabricated or hallucinated legal citations in output from this product?
No court order, opinion or disciplinary record addressing fabricated or hallucinated legal citations produced by this product has been located as of the date shown. This is a statement about the public record on that one subject, not a finding about the product, and this signal is not a litigation history.
No entry in the AI Hallucination Cases database names BigHand, Digitory Legal or Ayora as of October 16, 2026. Their described capabilities concern operational work such as timecard coding, price analysis and task routing. The absence of a court record about fabricated citations says nothing about whether those outputs are correct, and it is not a statement about every kind of dispute involving the companies. Legal authorities are not the stated output of the financial products considered here; erroneous financial classifications raise a separate accuracy question.
Bar Guidance Alignment
Has the vendor engaged in public with the ethics opinions its buyers are bound by?
No located public material engages with bar or ethics guidance.
The service notice addresses data isolation, mandatory human verification and AI governance, while financial product descriptions emphasize cost transparency and budget control. Neither connects those practices to a named legal ethics opinion or conduct rule. There is no explanation of how a lawyer's duties change when AI reclassifies time or supports a fee estimate. BigHand's commitment to ethical and nondiscriminatory AI processing concerns its general management framework.
It does not provide a firm with guidance on professional competence, client consent or disclosure of AI assistance in billing.
Billing and Fee Posture
Does the vendor address what happens to the bill when the work takes an hour instead of six?
Public materials claim time savings without addressing billing or disclosure, and the product sits inside a fee relationship between a lawyer and a client where those savings would change the bill.
PrebillManager shortens billing review and keeps an edit history, while Impact Analytics transforms timecard data to support pricing and client cost transparency. Workflow Management can record effort on completed support tasks. These records are not described as distinguishing AI performed work from human work within each client's fee record. No fee guidance explains how saved time or automated classification should affect charges to clients.
Although Impact Analytics has a corporate legal use case, the broader BigHand financial suite also serves the law firm preparing and collecting the bill.
Outside Counsel Guideline Readiness
Can a firm get this vendor through a client’s AI clause without a bespoke negotiation?
A current subprocessor or model provider list is published.
The DPA annex lists processors by activity, accessed data and processing location, including Azure OpenAI anonymization and expressly authorized ChatGPT testing. Ayora's linked list separately identifies Google generative features, AWS hosting and support services. The service notice adds the foundation model training restriction and required human review. A firm can use those materials to explain several parts of its information flow.
No client facing AI disclosure or consent package combines the relevant product, providers, processing geography and conditions into a complete outside counsel approval pack.
Court Disclosure Support
If a judge’s standing order requires an AI disclosure, can the product produce one?
No located public material addresses court disclosure or verification certification.
PrebillManager preserves edits and messages, and Workflow Management provides task ownership and activity trails. The service notice requires review of AI output affecting deliverables, but does not describe retaining the particular verification decision with the generated result. No export joins the model used, input sources and human approval for each passage or classification. These operational records can help reconstruct work, without constituting an AI certification for a court or regulator. The product descriptions do not supply a filing disclosure template or an equivalent client certification workflow.