Digital transformation in the legal industry is starting to take off, but there are still some major obstacles law firms need to overcome. Even the most ingenious inventions in the legal industry are useless if lawyers lack the skills to use them. Lawyers must first consider investing in talent and people who can make that technology effective if they want to fully realize the potential of digital transformation in the legal industry.
Diverse businesses and sectors are experiencing the emergence of new business models that are changing old value chains and dissolving sectoral silos. Additionally, we have seen how unanticipated rivals—startups and even businesses from unrelated industries—have been disrupted by fundamentally altering how they were doing things.
What is stopping the legal industry from digitally transforming?
The legal industry has experienced the same thing. Legal professionals can now lead the way in enabling more secure, practical, accessible, and client-centric legal services based on digital transformation solutions thanks to disruptive technology. Additionally, firms are reinventing themselves by turning data into valuable assets.
Lawyers must understand how technology affects various industries and consider how law, business, and technology are intertwined to compete in this new environment.
Lawyers can devote more time and effort to client service and higher-value work thanks to the effectiveness and support of new technology and operating systems.
However, individuals with a history of success following “what has always been done” find it particularly challenging to understand the concept of actual disruption. That is true for most large firms and organizations in the legal industry, where there is a conflict between lawyers who want to protect the “profession” and consumers’ requirements and an industry that wants to provide those needs.
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Digital transformation in legal firms
Law firms pride themselves on putting clients first. Most firms’ employees, including the managing partners, client-facing attorneys, and numerous support workers, have functioned outside the technological realm. Besides email, customer databases, and online document signing, the legal profession must be more active in embracing digital transformation.
What does digital transformation look like in legal industry firms?
The process of implementing technology across the entire organization to increase efficiency, decrease errors, expand capabilities, deepen insights, and strengthen customer relationships is known as digital transformation.
In furthering corporate digital transformation, which has as its end goal value creation and improved consumer experiences, legal has a vital but underappreciated role. Like technology, the legal function now influences every aspect of business and is no longer vertical.
Automation is a must-have!
Several types of legal automation can be implemented by any firm looking to improve its efficiency:
- Electronic signature of contracts. A digital agreement has become commonplace thanks to the development of secure, globally recognized electronic signatures, much of which may be automated.
- Contract automation. Lean legal teams usually implement contract automation workflows over scaling expensive workforce for low-complexity legal agreements.
- Contract review. When faced with thousands of unstructured Word or PDF contracts, legal teams frequently use AI contract review companies to determine what is in their contracts. In the near term, this does fix a problem, but in the long run, it would be better to stop producing unstructured PDFs.
- Automated billing management. One of the main goals for many in-house legal teams is to keep spending on outside counsel under control. Numerous recent companies have provided automated solutions to assist in cost monitoring and reduction.
- Automated workflows. To make standard procedures scalable, no-code automation builders assist legal teams and law firms in fusing numerous manual processes. That could resemble the receipt and triage of new inquiries, which aids in giving legal problems the appropriate priority.
- Automated risk and compliance management. There are several ways to assess and manage a company’s risk and compliance exposure, especially in highly regulated sectors like fintech.
- Knowledge management. Although knowledge management (KM), used by in-house legal teams and law firms, is a reasonably mature product area, workflow automation’s influence has grown, making it faster and more effective for information to reach the right people at the right time.
- Obligation management. For both large and growing organizations, post-signature contract administration, mainly dealing with contract renewal, can be a severe problem. This procedure can be automated to save time and lower danger.
Technology, in particular, can significantly improve productivity and efficacy for lawyers. Workflow automation and digital procedures have significant advantages in the legal industry. These tools, for instance, can speed up the process of filing paperwork, monitoring case status, and automating lawyer-client contact. Automated systems can also assist lawyers in understanding case data and making better conclusions.
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Automation benefits in the legal industry
This technology increases a legal team’s capacity and the caliber of their service by allowing them to concentrate on challenging issues and face-to-face interactions with clients. Automation can also refer to software robots or bots that perform essential tasks much more quickly than employees would. Bots may execute numerous tasks, like sending and receiving emails, filling out forms or scanning documents, logging into programs, creating reports, and much more. They are the ideal remedy for businesses where staff members waste time on monotonous tasks.
Data management and processing are complicated subjects, especially when laws like the GDPR are involved. Professional secrecy is another obligation for legal professionals.
Customer experience management
Since the Covid-19 epidemic began in early 2020, a lot has changed, and a lot will never be the same after it is over. Customer experience management for law firms is one of the things that have altered for good. One of the benefits is the capacity to provide clients with real, ongoing, and palpable empathy through outstanding digital experiences. When they have experienced it, there is no turning back.
We are seeing the fourth industrial revolution, which experts have long recognized. If your company is keeping up, it will eventually stay caught up. Keeping up with the times may be the subject of a book, not just a quick post, but a few critical components that need immediate attention and vastly enhance the client experience.
- Using a digital-first strategy,
- Putting in place a website that is responsive to mobile devices,
- Obtaining thorough client information to provide customized service,
- Using AI technology wisely and strategically.
The ability to provide virtual feedback has evolved over the past 18 months and has become a vital component of this process. Recent studies show that timely, user-friendly virtual feedback methods are more valued than in-person alternatives by both present and potential customers. Therefore, businesses that offer these services attract this clientele. Those businesses that are most effective at converting leads are familiar with the notion of customer journey mapping.
A modernized grasp of customer experience mapping is just the tip of the iceberg. Reflecting modern ways in the client research tools decreases the time and money typically spent on stale techniques. Customer experience management must now be a lean, focused division of your business, just like your legal services, and it cannot be bloated or wandering.
Customer experience management is something other than what law firms are educated in. Your lack of experience becomes a bigger liability since the success of law firms depends more and more on customer-centered business strategies.
An expert legal consultant can assist businesses in changing their strategy and make sure that they focus their time and resources on offering the highest quality legal services.
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Artificial Intelligence
Technology can provide lawyers access to information beyond what they can learn from endless documents. Solutions are available that “read” papers using natural language processing, finding errors, contradictions, and even emotions or forgeries.
The software can sift through data to look for patterns that could provide significant knowledge and insights. Advanced, AI-driven software can also assist lawyers in developing a case or restructuring a contract in ways otherwise wouldn’t be able to do or in much less time.
Artificial intelligence advancements are opening up fresh opportunities that will increase technology’s usefulness in the legal industry and possibly lower the cost of getting legal assistance. Now that artificial intelligence has been developed expressly for the legal sector, it can accomplish activities that previously required human intelligence.
It offers the possibility of a sector transformation, which could alter the lawyer’s function.
The application of artificial intelligence by lawyers and within the legal sector is only now starting to take off. Artificial intelligence adoption, especially by in-house lawyers, will drive a transformation in law practice during the next few years.
What effects will this artificial intelligence have on the legal industry?
Comparatively to how email revolutionized conducting business daily, AI will spread like wildfire and become every lawyer’s necessary assistant. Those who resist the change and do not adopt it will fall behind. Those who succeed will eventually discover that they have more time for the two activities of thinking and giving advice, for which there never seems to be enough time.
The simple explanation for the steep rise in AI spending is as follows: Humans may focus on tasks that bring value, those that computers really cannot do or do effectively, by dismissing them from regular tasks that computers can perform, resulting in significant productivity gains and cost savings.
AI enables the search for concepts, such as contract review and analysis for due diligence, to detect changes in email communication tone. These include searching for code words used to conceal the true nature of the conversation and even mapping out where the computer comprehends what needs to be drawn and prepares the adequate document.
Benefits of digital transformation in the legal industry
Law firms today confront many business issues, such as increasing competition, client demands for higher value, pressure to increase profitability, slowing revenue growth, and cybersecurity risks that could damage their and their client’s reputation.
Many legal firms and in-house counsel believe that digital technologies like cloud computing and artificial intelligence (AI) hold the key to innovation, better utilizing new market opportunities, boosting business productivity, and lowering risk.
There is no requirement for user-owned hardware with cloud computing. It is replaced by a cloud service that requires a monthly subscription but offers cost savings and better protection for the company and its customers. Additionally, it facilitates seamless file exchange and collaboration between attorneys working on the same issue, eliminating the need to send endless reams of paper back and forth between offices.
If you need help implementing advanced tech into your legal firm, let us know! Reach out to us via email or schedule a call with us!
