NaCTeM

Bott and Co.

Background

Bott and Co (B&C) is a leading consumer law firm specialising in personal injury, flight delay and holiday illness compensation claims working on a no-win no-fee basis. The firm is the UK's most experienced and trusted authority on flight delay compensation regulation EU261. The firm handles over 50,000 flight delay compensation claims each year.

The project will embed process innovation to automate, improve decision making, reduce wasted costs and improve service delivery. Some basic level automation has been introduced but claims that pass the initial rule-based check are then manually triaged. Given the low profit margin of the work, maximising automation is fundamental to ensure a profitable return. Introducing predictive analysis will empower staff to take more complex decisions without referral to senior staff.

Problem

The new capability will be applied to the company's workflow addressing specific identified areas of lost revenue and wasted costs in processing areas such as:

  • The success prediction problem: time spent processing claims that would subsequently be unsuccessful.
  • The inefficiency problem: time spent on administrative tasks that have been viewed as difficult to automate with historic technology
  • The conversion problem: a failure to utilise data intelligently to improve conversion of enquiries and reduce client withdrawals.

Related Work

The project will build on NaCTeM's experience in the following relevant areas:

  • topic analysis
  • coembeddings
  • term extraction (TerMine)
  • named entity recognition and normalisation
  • event attribute recognition (negation, confidence, etc.)
  • active learning
  • document classification

Project Team

Company Name: Bott and Co Solicitors Ltd

Company Supervisor: Mr. Paul Baylis

Knowledge Base: The University of Manchester

Academic Supervisor: Prof. Sophia Ananiadou

Lead Academics: Prof. Sophia Ananiadou, Dr. Andre Freitas

KTP Associate: Dr. Minh-Quoc Nghiem