LawTechnos | Legal Technology Magazine

The year is 2022, and advanced legal software is no longer a luxury  for corporate legal departments; it’s now a necessity. Even with  legal departments prioritizing cost control, multiple surveys still  predict that legal ops technology budgets will triple by 2025.  Additionally, artificial intelligence (AI) software use in the legal  industry is expected to grow by over 28% by 2026. The emergence of COVID-19 pandemic emphasized this need for  comprehensive legal technology even more. The crisis pushed  corporate legal teams to the brink, particularly ones that only had  manual spreadsheets and legacy tools to rely on. This resulted in a  rapid and complete paradigm shift, where the benefits of bringing  on AI and legal technology outweighed the initial cost. With so many varying, complex responsibilities, there’s no one-size fits-all tech solution for different in-house legal teams. To figure out  what kind of digital tool will give your unique team the best ROI, let’s  look at the different ways AI and legal technology can save you time  and money across these five key areas: 

Legal Spends 

It can be difficult and cumbersome to effectively analyze legal  spend and demonstrate the value of legal ops when using  spreadsheets or legacy software. These tools quite often have  incorrect or incomplete information because you need to enter data  manually. This invariably impacts the quality of your spend analysis.  It also takes much longer to compile data and design reports out of  them. Again, just trying to find patterns across hundreds or  thousands of legal spend data points is mentally draining. When you use a legal spend management platform like Beveron’s  Smart Legal Counsel, for instance, it automatically ensures that you  have all the financial information you need in one central location. It  pulls spend data from multiple sources into the software and  updates in real time. You can be confident that the information  you’re bringing to your senior management is accurate right down  to the last dime. 

Contracts 

Generally speaking, contract reviews take hours to complete  manually, which takes in-house counsel away from more strategic  work. Additionally, poor contract management processes make it  more difficult for attorneys to identify and proactively respond to  risks. Usually any Contract lifecycle management software comes with  templates so you don’t have to draft fresh contracts from scratch.  This consistent format reduces the risk of errors and speeds up the  drafting process. Additionally, you can also set automatic alerts to  remind you of approaching deadlines so you can stay on top of  fulfilling your organization’s contract obligations on time. 

Document Management 

Without a centralized legal document management system (DMS),  corporate legal departments often have to spend more time tracking  down files. And once they finally manage to locate them, they still  have to confirm if they’re the most current versions. These are  extremely frustrating issues, especially when you’re on a tight  deadline or working remotely. A good DMS functions as a searchable, cloud-based storage  center. Besides searching text documents to find what you need,  some new technologies even use optical character recognition to pull out text from images and PDFs. Legal departments usually  receive thousands of scanned files, so ensuring they don’t get left  out of the search function is a huge time-saving asset. Using a legal DMS also gives you peace of mind because you know  your documents are secure. Thanks to encryption and stringent  control over user access permissions, you can rest assured that  sensitive client information is well protected and won’t get  accidentally shared. You don’t get that type of security with a wall mounted filing cabinet! 

Dispute Resolution 

Automating the management of invoice disputes and deductions  can help immensely with faster resolution of each dispute, right  from the time it is logged into the system, by ensuring that all the  information pertaining to a dispute is stored in a central location and  that everyone involved in the dispute resolution process has instant  access to that information and is on the same page at all times. Using smart and intuitive features like automated data collection,  real-time tracking of information, online discussions and access to a  dispute management dashboard, the automated system eliminates  any possible friction in the process, making the entire dispute  resolution process smooth, seamless, transparent and easy on both  the customer and the business. Here it’s important to understand that broad solutions like ERPs and  CRMs might NOT hold the answers to automation. For automating  dispute management, what one needs is a specific scalpel, not a  generic Swiss knife. Automating the management of disputes and deductions helps  accelerate cash flow and ensures a good customer experience.  This would also mean augmenting your existing legacy solutions  (even if they are scores of excel sheets) with something more  specific to identifying and resolving disputes.

Risk Management 

In 2020 when Covid struck us, most corporates spanning every  industry and geography quickly realized that the processes they  were relying on to manage disruptive risks were outdated. A major  hurdle they faced was the over-reliance on point-in-time  assessments for monitoring risk. In the rapidly evolving risk  landscape, the data collected quickly became stale, and as a  consequence, the static nature of this process created significant  blind spots. Instead, it dawned upon organizations that effective risk  mitigation required continuous monitoring and ongoing risk  intelligence. Now, organizations everywhere are looking for a better way and  want automation solutions and not humans to monitor and manage  risk continuously. Where risk is concerned, Big Data and  automation can be tremendous catalysts to accelerate significant  advancements in risk management by enabling companies to  continuously monitor risk at scale both cost-effectively and  efficiently.  

Today, companies can leverage robotic process automation (RPA)  tools for data collection. In addition, Machine Learning and Artificial  Intelligence (AI) can perform sentiment analysis to determine  whether the profiled data is good or bad news as well as Impact  Analysis to determine the potential impact to the organization —  low, medium or requires immediate attention. Along with legacy statistical models, these latest technologies can  constantly improve the accuracy of risk detection, confirmation and  prediction, enabling an almost 360º visibility into an organization’s  true risk exposure than ever before. By incorporating automation at  this stage, human resources are freed from spending countless  hours gathering and validating just a tiny fraction of the data that AI  can handle.

To summarize… 

Whatever goal you’re trying to achieve in your legal department,  using AI-based or automated legal technology will increase your in house team’s overall productivity. By extension, you can gradually  start to decrease your reliance on outside counsel, even if you can’t  hire extra employees. This is an extremely important cost-saving  benefit, as many external counsel / law firms usually raise their  rates by at least 5 to 10% every year.