trends

The benefits of automating your legal tasks

Legal automation refers to software that allows companies to streamline, automate and manage legal tasks. For example, it includes:

• document automation
• legal project management
• document review and validation
• And more!

Generally, legal automation allows legal teams to streamline legal tasks and develop smarter, better processes.

What’s more, legal automation is no longer a futuristic concept. Already in 2016, a survey of lawyers and paralegals in the US showed that around 22% of lawyers’ workloads and 35% of paralegals’ workloads could be automated. On the one hand, this shows us that automation has a key role to play in the legal industry. But it also shows that almost no job can be fully automated. 

Because despite all the benefits that automation can deliver, we are still far from developing machines to replace lawyers. It is a common misconception that if a segment of a job can be automated, the rest will follow immediately. In fact, in almost all cases, some elements of a task are easy to automate and others are impossible. As a result, legal tasks will likely always require human capital.

That said, however, predicting how new technology will impact the law is challenging. Although we can be confident that automation will continue to transform legal services, exactly how these changes will play out remains to be seen. 

The Importance of Legal Automation

Legal departments, law firms, real estate agents, financial officers, etc. are constantly faced with the challenge of doing more with less. Given that people are an expensive, limited resource, doing more with less translates into leveraging processes and technology. However, there is little to no support provided to legal teams from a priority or budgetary point of view when it comes to technology, and as a result, these teams continue to work in very manual ways.

This results in legal counsel having to do tedious, repetitive, low-value work, with the side effects of the legal department becoming a bottleneck for the business and there being a lack of visibility on legal data and activity.

While this is nothing new, contemporary changes in the industry are finally driving people into action.

These driving factors include:

• Year-on-year budget cuts or headcount reductions
• Corporate strategy for cost reduction and simplification
• Increasing volume of legal work as businesses and regulatory environments become more complex
• Legal departments wanting to move from simply being a support function to becoming more of a strategic adviser to the business

So why are we talking about legal automation? Because it can easily reduce the time legal departments spend on menial tasks. These professionals can then concentrate on other, higher-value tasks, and work on improving client satisfaction.

Disciplines like legal operations (or ‘Legal Ops’) have emerged and are seeing legal departments run like a business, focused on optimising the delivery of legal services to their business clients – with legal automation being a key pillar for achieving this.

Legal automation is best deployed to automate all the low-value, low-risk legal work so that lawyers can focus on the high-value, high-risk work. The result is the creation of no-touch and low-touch legal activities which give time back to legal teams and only involve them when necessary.

At Alf, we’ve come across a number common use-cases for legal automation:

• Intake and triage
• Create a legal services request gateway that enables self-service and standardized, automated triage
• Document execution workflow
• Digitize and facilitate approvals for document execution, contract review, and delegation of authority (DoA)
• Contract generation
• Generate standard documents like NDAs, letters, T&Cs, and justification notes with signature workflow
• Bulk contract generation
• Create hundreds of renewal contracts in minutes, error-free, using automation
• Legal advice automation & FAQs

Advantages of Legal Automation

There is a reason why legal automation is a key pillar of any legal operations or legal transformation strategy. While other legal technology may help lawyers organise and manage their work, legal automation is unique in shifting the type of work performed by legal departments, enabling them to truly do more with less while also creating visible and direct improvements in the legal services delivered to their business clients.

Some benefits of legal automation include:

• Giving time back to legal teams – refocus the legal team on high impact tasks by creating automation and self-service journeys for the low complexity tasks.
• Faster turnaround for business clients – remove bottlenecks to progress deals faster by improving accessibility to services through self-service whilst shortening the queue for high importance legal requests.
• Higher compliance – improve accuracy and adoption of proper practices and processes.
• Standardisation – create operational excellence and consistency of service delivery.
• Data capture – gain access and report on data that isn’t captured in existing manual methods of working, such as email and phone calls.

The law is one of the longest established professions, and as such is often resistant to change; this is why the looming threat of automation making certain practices within the sector obsolete is a key concern. Some of the more forward-looking – and large – law firms have attempted to get ahead of this by investing in legal startups so that they have a stake in the disruption to come. Others seem to be ignoring the issue – a study last year by PwC found that 21 of the top 100 UK law firms are not interested in using process automation technology.

For those unwilling to stick their heads in the sand, there are ways to overcome any potential internal objections and get ahead of the curve – and the competition. Here are a few myths that can be dispelled about modern legal automation processes:

MYTH 1: Improving your staff is a tough battle

Many law firms consider the challenge of getting staff up to speed with new technology a daunting one. After all, people join the legal profession for reasons other than becoming proficient in technology platforms. A study by Capgemini last year actually found that upskilling staff in AI and automation platforms is on the radar of just one in ten businesses. For some tech solutions on the market, this is a key issue – they are not necessarily intuitive or easy for non-specialised employees to grasp. However, there is a new breed of systems available which take a more accessible, ‘Apple-esque’ approach to automating company processes.

For example, Alf’s legal automation platform allows you to choose, create, and sell your own services online easily. The process feels intuitive, which increases the speed of uptake. When it comes down to it, many established approaches to automation are actually relatively basic, addressing only single issues within the larger scheme of business operations. This simplicity is often clouded by a certain inaccessibility in the interface. But as automation develops and evolves, this has been changing. Just as Apple didn’t nail the iPhone’s user experience straight off the bat, legal automation is learning as it develops.

MYTH 2: A human touch is required for our task

What could be more human than the law? It is often rooted in understanding the unique nuances of each individual client’s case, and therefore exceptionally complicated since no two sets of circumstances are precisely the same. That’s not, however, always the case. When it comes to lease agreements or the kind of repeated processes often given to paralegals, there are many process-led actions which automation can absolutely help with. For example, AI is making great inroads in checking contracts for GDPR compliance and even Brexit preparation.

Historically most automation applications have been deployed for processes just like this – task-based, repetitive and relatively straightforward. In these cases, solutions automate a single process (often very well) but in isolation. Now operations are attempting to connect these processes together, and are finding that these tasks may seem straightforward but are often nonlinear in practice. Humans are quite good at adapting to and managing complex tasks – so when it comes to automating the complex, that often stands as a stumbling block.

The more these technologies develop, the deeper we will go into this problem. But cooperative behavior will be maintained between humans and the database in any scenario. This basically means that human data is saved securely and can be reported whenever needed.

MYTH 3: Make the right investment at the right time

It’s true, legal tech is seeing a lot of growth. It’s natural for people to want to wait before picking a solution, as they look to avoid backing the wrong horse, which could prove costly. Some may also think they have already invested in management systems and that should be enough. The new breed of solutions don’t necessarily close doors to companies when it comes to future tech integration, though. Alf has a no-code approach and our drag-and-drop user interface can integrate with any database or third-party technology. Future-proofing is baked into the DNA of the service and any new alternative can be easily swapped in or out. This means that no user is tied to one single type of tech as the sector continues to develop, instead letting them start finding solutions and delivering cost and productivity savings from the get-go.

Legal automation may seem a daunting prospect for those in a sector where technology isn’t often applied. However, the benefits of lifting the process burden from partners, associates and paralegals alike are beginning to be recognised by legal businesses across the board. Cost efficiencies can be one of the clearest benefits, but they are not the only ones. One Alf client was able to save thousands of hours of valuable legal hours while improving SLAs and allowing staff to focus on other areas of their roles. It’s high time that those who only see the hurdles to automation begin to recognise the benefits that they may be missing – for their staff, their clients and ultimately their own businesses.

Automation is reshaping many industries. Legal automation, which helps streamline legal tasks and provide for better processes, is already here. In-house lawyers and business stakeholders are increasingly aware of the benefits of automation for productivity. But how do you actually make the leap into automation? Let’s help you find the right automation solution for your platform.

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

Read more

• How to pick the right legal automation platform