Chatbots Can Help Your Law Firm Stay On Top

You want to bring in more new clients and keep current clients happy, but you have only so many lawyers on your team — and they each only have so many hours in the day. Hiring more attorneys or paralegals isn’t always an option, but you can still increase your efficiency exponentially by bringing on a new teammate that never sleeps, never needs a break, and works for free.

Chatbots, an AI-powered tool that can automatically answer routine client questions online through text, can help save both you and your clients time and money.

Of course, attorneys are by nature a skeptical bunch, and any new technology is often suspect. Jodie Baker, an entrepreneur in Melbourne specialising in information and technology services, believes that it will take several years for chatbots and other advanced technologies become mainstream in the legal sector. “[W]e are talking here about discerning and intelligent people…They just want to understand the risk,” she told the Financial Times.

But the massive increase in efficiency gained from using chatbots are likely to be enticing, and give those who do take the leap an advantage over firms that don’t: A 2017 study by the Law Society found that chatbots can increase the efficiency of your lawyers by 40–50% with no training time — and that includes the time spent reviewing chatbot-collected data for any errors. IBM Watson reported that chatbots can also reduce customer service costs by 30%.

Clients are also better served by integrating a chatbot into your practice: 70% of millenial chatbot users report positive experiences, and that same percentage of all consumers prefer asking a chatbot questions, rather than asking a human lawyer, because they value receiving an instantaneous answer. Another study found that clients’ top priorities in any conversation with a firm are “reaching the desired outcome,” “ease of experience,” and “speed” — things all easily accomplished with technology.

You might think that your baby boomer clients would be chatbot-averse, but you would be wrong. In a 2018 study, Baby Boomers actually reported that they liked that chatbots have the ability to give them an instant response, answering simple questions, communicate easily, resolve complaints quickly, and answer complex questions at higher rates than millennials reported. Unfortunately, despite all of these benefits, the study found that only 15% of consumers have engaged with a chatbot in the past year.

Rather than replacing existing lawyers, chatbots help the best lawyers do even more great work. A McKinsey Global Institute study projects that less than a quarter of any lawyer’s job could ever be automated — which means that integrating a chatbot could free up nearly a quarter of your day for tasks that require your intelligent and insight, rather than answering the same questions over and over again.

Despite all of these perks, some attorneys feel that integrating AI technology is too complicated for them to handle. Thankfully, there’s a way to utilize chatbots without teaching yourself how to code: Form.One, a new smart and adaptive chatbot tool from the creators of Case.one, is a chatbot builder that is accessible to legal teams with zero tech experience. Using Form.One, you can build custom answers to commonly asked questions with a drag and drop builder, and then you can integrate the resulting chatbot into your website or in into messaging apps like Facebook Messenger. You can also use the chatbot to collect client data and create routine paperwork more easily.

In addition to making the lives of attorneys easier, legal chatbots also help increase access to legal consultations for those who wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford it. The first legal chatbot, DoNotPay, was created by a Stanford student to help individuals get out of paying parking tickets but was soon expanded into a tool to help homeless people challenge evictions and apply for housing aid, as well as a tool to help refugees apply for asylum for free. The applications for chatbot technology are endless.

Most legal work falls into three categories: creating, processing and analyzing legal documents, providing legal advice, and advocating for clients in court. Chatbots may not be ready for a primetime court appearance, but they can certainly help enterprising attorneys with documents and providing legal advice. Onboarding new clients and identifying potential new ones takes time, but it’s typically a straightforward process that a chatbot can handle with relative ease. The same is true for the creation of routine documents.

Of course, there are potential pitfalls to allowing robots to give legal advice, so it’s still important to make sure a competent attorney directs the chatbot on how to answer. That’s why Form.One is so great: the only things the chatbot will tell a client are the answers that you tell it to give. When you build the chatbot yourself, you can breathe a little easier.

By using a chatbot, you’ll also cut down on the amount of irrelevant information you need to sort through to identify what the key issues that your client needs help solving are. It’d be rude for a person to conduct a conversation by spitting rapid-fire conversations at the client without any break for smalltalk, but it’s not rude when a robot does so. As Martin Bartenberger, Sven Galla, and Alexander Kosak write in a 2018 paper for the Compliance Elliance Journal, “The first dialogues between lawyers and their clients are often structured in similar ways. To gain a quick understanding of a situation lawyers routinely go through a predetermined set of questions. This is a task that could be easily fulfilled by chatbots…While communicating with a chatbot clients have much more time to understand complex legal concepts and might even take a short break in the chatbot dialogue to inquire about certain aspects before they continue. Clients might also feel less intimidated to ask specific questions and query about aspects they don‘t understand.” As a result, the notes generated from a “meeting” with a chatbot are incredibly useful.

Allowing a chatbot to process legal information allows attorneys to focus on advising clients and increasing access to justice for all by lowering the cost of accessing basic legal services.