LegalTech automates manual work
Data gathering and data-entry are part of most jobs in the legal sector today, but do you know that they don’t have to be handled manually? With the right AI based legal management software, you can quickly automate time-consuming data gathering and reduce (or even eliminate!) redundant data entry. Your in-house legal team can avoid creating complex spreadsheets and repetitive activities by automating routine departmental procedures like invoice approvals, legal billing guidelines enforcement, accruals collection, and contract lifecycle management. With the extra time, employees can focus on highvalue, expert-level and billable work.

Streamlines Document Management
A single corporate legal case / matter can involve hundreds or even thousands of documents. When you’re working across departments and collaborating with outside firms, document organization gets complicated in the blink of an eye, without you even realizing it. It may not seem like a big deal to spend five minutes looking for a file, but eventually it all adds up. A McKinsey survey has revealed that employees spend nearly 20% of their workweek — i.e around eight hours — searching for and gathering
information. When you use in-house legal counsel software, you automaticallycprevent these disruptions by organizing documents in a logical way. LegalTech takes it a step further by categorizing documents
by matter and linking related documents together. For instance, an IP management matter may have hundreds of patent prosecution documents, filings, and notes associated with it. With a good legal
automation platform designed for legal teams, you can associate each file with the main matter

Deeper integrations allow for multitasking
In a normal work-day, you most likely use several different tools like e-mails, invoices, case files, and legal research. Task switching — even if it takes a fraction of a second — can add up to a 40% loss in productivity over the course of a day. With integrations between all these different tools, you can reclaim that time by eliminating the need to switch between applications. Integrations also reduce / eliminate repeat data entry substantially by sending data to multiple applications all at once. This automatically prevents data inaccuracies that you’ll have to manually fix later. Additionally, you can connect your existing tools with other departments, such as finance and accounting, to minimize back-and-forth.

Simplifies Reporting with Data Collection and Monitoring
You can’t run an efficient legal department without reports, but the process of collecting data and putting it into a useful format can be labor-intensive. Legal technology allows you to define the metrics you want to monitor and then tracks them for you. So, if you want to keep an eye on outside counsel spend, you can set up reports that automatically track and filter spend by vendor, practice area, and average hourly rate

To summarize…
Would you accept an invoice from an outside firm if a first-year associate billed at a partner rate? No, right? Then, why are you allowing your high-paid legal ops employees to waste time on menial, repetitive administrative tasks? Legal technology is designed from the ground up to save you from boring, low-value, repetitive tasks while also saving you money.

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This is also true for the legal industry which, for decades, appeared to be immune to all the  substantial changes caused by technology. While the core of legal services, i.e., the  assessment of facts in relation to the law, in most practice areas and cases is still too complex  to be executed by machines, this assessment of facts remains supported and surrounded by  many operational activities such as document analysis, contracting, and project management  for which clients today are no longer willing to pay high hourly lawyer rates. 

The deconstruction of legal work due to automation / software, has led to the standardization of high-volume and low-value tasks and led to the emergence of legal process outsourcers  (LPO). In essence, corporate legal services today are in a situation that looks quite similar to the one corporate information technology, financial and human resource services were in,  around 30 years ago – Chief Financial Officers (CFO) now also expect in-house legal  departments and law firms to use technology to deliver legal services better, faster, and at  lower costs.  But corporate legal departments often don’t know where to start with legal digital  transformation. Often, they are left asking themselves questions such as:  

What differentiates legal technology projects from classic IT projects? Are legal departments per se, a special / different audience? 

Do legal departments have the necessary funding? 

Can legal departments work / carry out their activities in isolation? This article offers an overview of the basic steps to take in your legal technology journey.

STEPS FOR LEGAL TECHNOLOGY SUCCESS 

Research thoroughly and identify pain points 

Don’t get dazzled by all the exciting legal technology on the market. It’s very important to  detail the pain points first so you can work out what the solution is. As an example, the usual  legal department pain points are high volume of trivial (legal) work, insufficient reporting  capabilities, cumbersome admin tasks, and high external legal spend.

Plan the budget for implementing automation 

Work out the potential of the legal digital transformation project and then create a business  case for implementing automation in your legal department. All costs identified at this stage  will mostly be just basic estimates, but you can make estimates as well as assumptions about  benefits to calculate the potential ROI. 

Initiate the project for digitalizing your legal department 

Develop a detailed project and resource plan, assign team members, and set well-defined  roles for them. 

Consider the available automation solutions 

Define your requirements and evaluate build vs. buy (vs. do nothing) options. It’s at this stage  (when you have clear and specific requirements) that you should contact legal technology  vendors. Ensure that you include potential future users at some point during solution review.  This ensures the actual users have demoed the product and their opinions have been  considered. This will help with adoption of the legal technology after implementation. 

Go Live!  

Procure, install, and test the solution. Consider on-boarding users in stages. Embrace failures  and adjust accordingly for a successful full implementation. The above steps are generally considered the five essential stages of how to approach a legal  digital transformation project.

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