10 tips for choosing the right document and legal automation tool for your organization
Internal use at your law firm
Ease of use when automating documents
The profitability rate for your product should be reached faster than expected, meaning it should be fast and simple to use. Choose a platform that does not require special coding capabilities, so that legal analysts or paralegals can use it to generate a report using themselves without any help from the IT team. Also, we would highly recommend purchasing a legal automation platform that does not require the software provider to do all the automation for you. We are not saying that you shouldn’t consider an outsourced model, but simply that you should be able to make changes quickly and easily yourselves, without having to pay the platform company every time you do so. Choose a solution that allows you to automate documents all in one place, ideally from Word, as that is how the documents will have first been prepared. This saves significant time compared to software that requires you to add variables, make changes, upload, and so on from various places.
In the choice of document automation platforms, we favour simplifying the work process in order to quickly modify forms using templates predefined by the user.
Appearance and user interface
A lawyer’s first impressions count when it comes to any change in their work habits. If you are going to be telling those lawyers that this is going to be a slick legal solution that will make their lives easier, convincing those lawyers that this is the future of legal drafting and automation, it needs to look good. This point is not a ‘soft’ option that can be compromised for price. Having helped many firms who have previously had failed automation projects, the lawyer’s opinion of the tool has often been the crushing blow – regardless of the platform’s potential. These are highly intelligent people, many of whom are now Gen X or Gen Z; for them, trusting a new product goes through user interface design.
It will therefore be necessary to focus on the ergonomics of the software, its ease of handling and its reliability regarding user feedback.
Ability to save the information entered by the lawyers
Several innovative law firms are now looking for ways to provide their clients with better legal management information to help them reduce their clients’ legal risks and ultimately legal expenses. By saving the data the lawyers input into document automation questionnaires, law firms can help their clients spot trends. For example, if a law firm acts for a client in defending all of their Employment Tribunal Claims, saving the information included when preparing defenses lets the law firm then report information to the client such as what percentage of those claims are for unfair dismissal or discrimination, what parts of their businesses those claims are originating from, and possibly suggest where to focus any training or improvements. Similarly, they can spot where lawyers are always taking the same position, enabling the firm to update the precedent lists and make them as useful as possible. This enables law firms to become, as Richard Susskind puts it, “the guard rail at the top of the cliff rather than the ambulance at the bottom”.
In short, good legal management allows good time management and thus more qualitative work performed for the client.
Ability to group documents together
Consider this scenario: A real estate lawyer is instructed by a landlord client to complete a new lease for a tenant. The tenant is going to be paying a rent deposit and also carrying out some changes. In this situation, without document automation, the lawyer is going to have to draft three documents – the lease, the rent deposit deed and the authorization for changes, each time inserting the same information about party details, premises and so on. With a legal document automation platform like Alf, you can easily prepare entire groups of documents; the lawyer can prepare all three documents at once without having to repeat the same information over and over, thus saving time.
Integration with other systems
It is likely that your law firm has many systems with valuable information that could be useful when your lawyers are using document automation. For example, if you plan to automate your client engagement letters, it will be useful if the legal automation platform you choose can pull up information from your accounts system. It is also helpful if the system can incorporate your existing knowledge bank, including external resources. Even better, look for a platform where the information inserted into the early steps of the workflow can readily be mapped to the automation questionnaires so that they are pre-populated when the lawyer opens them to draft a document. These pre-filled templates save valuable time with your external resources. This system based on pre-filled forms or contract templates using the existing data is exactly what you will find in Alf’s legal automation software.
Ability to build in approvals and workflow
The best document automation software out there at the moment allows you to build some governance and workflow into your questionnaires. Senior lawyers can embed their knowledge into the questionnaires and workflow, adding guidance and alerts to each stage and question. This allows junior lawyers to train via “just in-time” learning while using document automation questionnaires and workflows. By allowing firms to pass the preparation of first drafts to a more junior level, they can also have the added benefit of further improving margin. A team can also set up an approval workflow so that the initial work prepared by a junior can be checked by a supervisor, or to give them some workflow ideas on how to move information forward from one stage to the next. It is this synergy and the process of automating legal documents that will give the law firm better overall management of contracts and forms, as well as client follow-up. The legal companies that have adopted these legal document automation software programs consistently report being pleased with the fact that half of their data no longer needs to be entered repeatedly.
External use by your clients
Client-facing functionality and appropriate fee models
Law firms often want to allow their clients and third parties access to questionnaires. Some do this as a new revenue stream, or for business development or as an added value tool. It is important to think about if your firm might use this functionality and to consider any additional user charges the legal automation company may charge, factoring these into your business plan.
Customization of client sub-sites
It is essential that when your clients log in to your legal automation platform that they have a ring-fenced area for their documents only, a private area that cannot be accessed by other clients. For this reason, ensure the legal automation platform you procure allows you to create sub-sites. You will want to customize these sites, perhaps with your client’s branding, to allow their in-house teams to feel like it is a part of their everyday IT system. Ideally, you will want to co-brand it, creating a powerful business development tool as your clients also see your firm’s name and branding every day. With Alf’s white label feature, you can use easily showcase your brand to your clients.
Ability to build in approvals and workflow
This is probably even more important to your clients than for your own firm’s use. Clients will want to use document automation to help with internal governance between their business and their legal team. For example, the clients may want the business to produce their own supply contracts unless certain triggers are met that would require the drafting and checking of the contract to be passed to legal – perhaps based on total value, the payment terms or the jurisdiction of the supplier. Choosing a software that allows workflow and approvals to be easily implemented will enable you to help your clients solve the problems and capacity issues of their in-house teams much more effectively than by simply enabling them to do legal document automation without any other features.
Ability to report to clients on their data trends
In the same way that you can save the information your lawyers input, as in the Employment Tribunal example above, when you set up document automation for your clients you can ask them about information that would be useful for them to capture and look at how best to report it back to them. Could the information be easily incorporated and displayed in an online dashboard, for example?
Final Recommendations from Sabine:
- Talk to your peers at other law firms
Which software did they choose and why? What lessons did they learn? What would they do differently if they were to start again?
- Ask the legal automation provider of your choice whether you can run a pilot
Choose one area of your business to pilot the software in and get feedback from the lawyers. Look for areas which have either a high volume of similar transactions, for example Real Estate Asset Management, or, long, complex documents where asking just a few questions can let you dramatically reduce the amount of drafting (Corporate SPAs or Banking Facility Agreements, for example). Have a soft launch and then later a firm-wide launch.
- Brand your solution with Alf
This will help to distinguish your product and service, rather than simply referring to ‘document automation’. I often hear lawyers referring to different descriptions, like ‘document assembly’, ‘document automation’ and ‘automated drafting’: by referring to one name only, your lawyers will engage more strongly with your branded solution.
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