Practice areas outside of the technology and business-facing sectors have historically had a harder time attracting legal software developers, meaning that law practitioners in these areas often have to adapt technology from other areas to their specific work. Increasingly, however, technology is moving in to serve some of these needs in more proactive ways.

Epiq subsidiary AACER this week launched AACER Cashiering, an automation tool for cashiering processes for default credits. “Historically, providers have worked to address symptoms in this space reactively, and without consumer product orientation,” Noah Ornstein, managing director of the AACER business arm, told LTN.

Here's a look at the new tool:

Who it serves: AACER Cashiering is intended to help any organization dealing with payment receipts from bankruptcy trustees, notably organizations that handle a ton of them. “This typically means a bank, non-bank servicer, loan servicing law firm, corporation or investor,” Ornstein said.

What it does: AACER's new tool essentially tracks trustee payments to specific bankruptcy files and loans monitored within the broader AACER platform and automatically logs and sends payments accordingly. For organizations already using software to track payments, AACER Cashiering can also be integrated into broader technology platforms through its API.

Why it's ripe for automation: Bankruptcy cashiering currently requires a ton of manual management. Especially because trustees tend to send payments in a whole variety of forms, creditors typically rely on people to take payments and log them manually, which does introduce some risk of human error. “The process requires headcount cost and time delay between actual trustee payment and posting of payments,” Ornstein said.

Ornstein plugged the product as a means to have technology manage and reduce some of these concerns. “Epiq identified an opportunity to introduce automation technology to both increase accuracy and reduce cost, processing time, and lost income resulting from current processes,” he said.

Why isn't there more technology for bankruptcy? As Ornstein pointed out, products created to serve the bankruptcy vertical tend to be fairly reactionary, and often fail to look at broader questions about how business processes are handled. Ornstein is hoping that this product, in conjunction with AACER's other bankruptcy-facing offerings, can help change that. “We're working to change the way companies do business to increase their valuation. The future of legal-based processes will be automation based, and eventually integrate various types of artificial intelligence,” Ornstein said.