Top 5 Solutions For Legal Operations Optimization. Why Does It Matter?

A few years ago, automation of legal processes was considered to be a trend of the future. Now it’s a necessity.

Automation could save time and money for small and big law firms, allow lawyers to focus more on quality, creative, and high-level analytical tasks. For example, 67 percent of Chief Legal Officers are pretty sure that the use of technology is the biggest driver of efficiency within the legal department. Also, 73 percent of CLOs think that an administrator or operations manager is the most significant factor in the efficient delivery of legal services. In 2017, CLOs were focused on containing costs, including achieving greater overall cost reductions, improving budget forecasting and alternative fee structures. All this can be solved by automation.

Automation transforms businesses and will contribute to economic growth via increasing productivity. Many examples of this impact we can see now. For example, American multinational investment bank JP Morgan has created software that does in seconds what their lawyers were achieving within 360,000 hours. Also, according to IBM, using AI has cut the total time their lawyers spent analyzing trademark search results by at least 50%.

So, What Solutions For Legal Operations Optimization Matter The Most?

1. Chatbots

Chatbots are one of the easiest ways to automate services. Chatbots could help trim global business costs by more than $8 billion per year by 2022. For comparison, in 2017 this number was $20 million, which indicates a significant development of this technology. Chatbots could ease information access and its management by analyzing documents, due diligence, compliance, helping to carry out various administrative and HR related tasks in any legal organization, making internal communication and communication with users more effective, and so on. It is therefore not surprising that 80% of businesses want to implement chatbots into their work process by 2020.

Chatbots are particularly useful for B2C firms. A chatbot can help steer website browsers to the firm, presents a friendly approachable interface and, via machine learning, answers basic types of FAQs. The chatbot can also triage areas of inquiry and send them to the appropriate person in the firm, saving staff and client time.

As an assistant for legal operations, a chatbot frequently handles such tasks as:

1. Documents drafting based on answers in the dialogue between a lawyer and the bot;

2. Contracts review according to predefined parameters;

3. Automated search of the digitized legal information on the internet;

4. Advising company employees on simple legal issues, in order to protect lawyers from such distractions;

5. Collect and transfer data to different corporate services through existing integration.

2. E-Discovery

E-discovery allows users to find and process necessary information in a few seconds, which saves lawyers time and money. eDiscovery also helps ensure the preservation of content properties and file metadata, time and date stamps, and author and recipient information. According to Jatheon Technologies, up to 30% of the relevant information that the eDiscovery process would need to access in coming years will be stored in the cloud. In 2015, just 5% of information sought through eDiscovery was stored in the cloud. This is actually one of the most promising fields in the legal tech industry. The global eDiscovery market is expected to reach $17.32 Billion by 2023.

One of the examples of the successful implementation of e-discovery is File.one. It’s a solution, which allows working with data from the cloud, local, network storage and mail clients in one complex system. The use of predictive coding technology helps to accelerate the speed of analyzing large amounts of unstructured data. This allows one to create complex, specific search parameters, try different combinations, add logical operators, contextual searches, tags, file attributes, and metadata. Also, an implementation of the optical character recognition (OCR) enables actions that are not capable with physical copies. For example, OCR makes it possible to compress into ZIP files, highlight keywords, incorporate into a website and attach to an email. This saves time, decreases errors, and minimizes efforts.

3. E-Billing

The issue of the financial relationships between law firms and their clients will always be a relevant concern. Although the disputes regarding hourly pay have been going on for many years, nothing better has yet been created. Lawyers can only improve the process of billing using e-billing systems, and discuss options for individual discounts with customers. In a 2017 survey conducted by Gartner and Wolters Kluwer’s ELM Solutions, 31% of respondents weren’t completely satisfied with billing guidelines. Thanks to e-Billing, businesses can get paid for their services quickly and securely without dealing with the hassles of paper bills and checks, all error-free. This improves efficiency while cutting costs.

4. Document Automation

According to the “Report on the State of the Legal Market” issued by Georgetown Law and Peer Monitor, productivity growth continues to be a major issue for law businesses. Document automation can help lawyers register documents once and uniquely identify the document, giving the possibility for parallel execution of operations, which will reduce the time of movement of documents and increase the efficiency with which they are executed. Also, a single database allows for the elimination of the possibility of document duplication. A well-developed reporting system allows businesses to control the movement of documents through workflow processes and make management decisions based on data from reports.

In document automation, document assembly play a significant role. Often, lawyers spend a lot of time on drawing up typical and almost identical legal contracts. Such work often comes down to copying information and leads to a large number of errors due to the monotony of the process. The use of Document Assembly tools allows experienced lawyers to create flexible document templates. Universal templates allow any employee to create a legal document without the need for legal education and verification. For example, using the Document Assembly tool; Doc.one helps to save 40% of lawyer’s time spent on routine work by developing automated templates for regularly-used documents.

5. E-Invoicing

Suppliers and buyers, with the help of lawyers, enter into thousands of transactions every day: draw up contracts, make deliveries, send each other documents. This process, which could take a couple of minutes, lasts for weeks. E-Invoicing solutions serve as cloud services for sending and coordinating electronic documents, and allow multiple partners to simultaneously connect to the electronic document management service. All documents can be signed by electronic signature, which gives them legal value. This provides an opportunity for sending invoices in a machine-readable format, directly from the company’s ERP systems to the client’s back-end systems.

What else makes E-Invoicing a useful automation tool?

1. Reduce invoice-handling costs by up to 60% by cutting out paper, printing, envelope-stuffing, and postage;

2. Automatic application of the correct tax and legal requirements to each invoice, which eliminates concerns about delays due to inconsistent billing;

3. Reduce the number of incoming requests for communication due to misunderstandings from customers and suppliers;

4. Avoid fines for late payment of vendor invoices. Invoices deliver to their destination faster, often weeks earlier than when sending paper invoices;

5. Send invoices anywhere in the world at anytime.

Conclusions

There are many ways you can use technology to automate legal operations in your business. By using the right automation tools, law firms can create a better collaboration experience and more accountability. This will help to reduce internal costs, but at the same time increase profits. Automate legal operations if you don’t want to leave your company unarmed in front of more innovative competitors.