5 ways to enhance your productivity with Legal Tech
When you work for a legal firm, you are usually faced with a huge workload. You are often overwhelmed with files and time passes so quickly that you cannot do everything you have planned. Unless you work overtime, of course…
Legal professionals have long found ways to improve productivity individually thanks to rigour and methodology. But developing positive change for an entire law firm or department is a much more difficult challenge.
To achieve this, studies have shown the importance for a company to set and record objectives (Pritchard et al., 1988). This helps to focus on the essential elements and to implement corrective measures to achieve these objectives.
In addition, you will avoid any distractions that might take you away from your goal. This will not only improve your productivity, but also help optimise your expenses and budget.
If you think your company’s organisation is already effective, do not rest on your laurels. Given today’s competitive environment, you should always be looking for opportunities to improve it.
Because the legal market really is tough. Looking for opportunities to further optimise the organisation and productivity of your business will help you stay ahead and position you as a market visionary. Innovation can make the difference between long-term success and failure.
Today, advances in LegalTech can help you revolutionize your practice. Improving productivity means more business for you and your firm, happier clients and greater profits.
So let’s look at 5 ways to enhance your productivity with Legal Tech.
1. Automation and machine learning
Many tasks done by humans are relatively easy to do but very time-consuming. While robots may replace automation and artificial intelligence (AI) in the future, both technologies still have major advantages in improving your productivity. Most firms find AI to be a valuable aid to them. For example, 56% of the law firms surveyed at the New York Market School concluded that they were looking for employees skilled in new technologies and specifically in Legal Tech.
For example, IBM’s Watson is an excellent example of a virtuous application of artificial intelligence in the legal field. ROSS Intelligence uses Watson to allow users to ask simple questions in the legal field; ROSS then reads these questions and answers them in a simplified way, relying on legislation, case law and other legal sources to provide a relevant answer.
Using a chatbot like Watson and combining it with an automation process like Alf can save time on:
– Time and expense tracking
– Client onboarding
– Budgeting
– Invoice sending and processing
– Document review
2. Use your own database
Having the right figures is an important part of any good analysis. Without accurate measurements, little (if any) analysis can be done.
Data is an important source for improving a company’s baseline. Learning from past mistakes can save you from failure and lead toward success. The data can be of any type; it can be client data, billing structures, etc. The main thing is that this data doesn’t remain unused. One report indicates that approximately 66% of law firms have implemented a data analytics system to increase their productivity.
This is a change, as intuition and understanding have been the main way of proceeding in the legal field for many years.
But to see how change can happen (in a different field), go watch “Moneyball”, which shows how a new statistical and empirical vision has revolutionized basebaIl.
The legal field must learn from this. Taking an empirical approach will make it more effective.
3. Cloud-based management systems
The days of lawyers working exclusively on paper files are long gone. The internet has fundamentally changed the structure of companies and the way we work, regardless of the field of activity.
The cloud is one of those applications that could never have existed before. The legal management system has become very important thanks to software solutions such as Alf or Clio, which bring considerable advantages to all firms that use them, no matter their size.
However, it would be impossible to provide the relevant data for their use without the cloud.
Working with documents stored in the cloud makes them easier to share and greatly simplifies working together on the same document, especially by making changes in real time. It also eliminates any uncertainty about working on the correct version of a document.
4. Personal investment
There are times when we want to try to grow our law firm or legal department. And usually the opportunities to do so are right in front of us.
In principle, law firms start with their own technological setup and a basic working environment.
Developing skills in innovation and technology learning can help you to better understand and identify these opportunities.
To do this, try to create a working environment where your employees can easily talk, share ideas, cooperate and simply work together.
Establishing a friendly and caring working environment could also help you recruit future talent. No doubt they will prefer a firm like yours rather than one with “old-fashioned” practices.
5. Tracking productivity metrics = Tracking expenditure metrics
“If you want your success to continue and if you want to increase your productivity rate, it is vital to adopt a perfect approach to tracking your metrics” (Hauser, 1998). Tracking your data rigorously will help you continuously optimise your structure and measure the progress you are making, which can be very motivating. Get into the habit of making notes at the end of your day, including both positive and negative aspects. This can guide you to improve your productivity and avoid losing time.
Your expenses can become uncertain if they are not tracked. Many law firms and legal departments only analyse the various successes and failures they have had once they are no longer in business. But by then it is too late to take corrective action.
If you have an in-house accountant or financial expert, contact them for advice on your financial situation. If you don’t have anyone like that, head to the internet to find any of the multiple technologies that can track and report your data on an ongoing basis.
Conclusion
The 5 points mentioned above will help you to succeed, even if they can’t guarantee it.
To make your law firm or legal department successful and prosperous, consider new technologies in Legal Tech.
The automation of legal tasks, for example, saves time and helps people perform tasks that were difficult and time-consuming to do manually. A cloud-based platform certainly has considerable advantages. Learning from your past data can help you achieve the success you hope for in the future. Employees will also be happy to see the increase in your productivity rate that comes from reducing the most tedious tasks for them, which will also help you improve the overall quality of your business experience.
Time moves on, and that’s why it’s best to embrace technology before it’s too late to keep up. The tools and applications provided by these technologies will certainly help you work more productively while requiring less effort on tedious tasks.
A lawyer for 20 years with international law firms and worldwide companies (Canal+, PwC Legal, Nomos, Amazon), I’ve had the experience on the inside: too much time wasted on regularly monitoring recurring tasks linked to files, with low added value. Alf, the first workflow automation platform for the legal files, was designed and developed to respond to this critical problem. Customizable, collaborative and accessible in all languages, Alf is also part of a GreenTech approach that encourages responsible innovation by reducing your carbon emissions. — Sabine Zylberbogen, Registered lawyer and Founder
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LegalTech at the heart of the digitization of legal professions