3 duties and responsibilities of legal assistants to hand over to automation

The workloads of legal departments continue to increase! Countless studies show legal teams are under stress, in one survey 54% of lawyers said they were exhausted. In-house legal professionals continue to be asked to do more with less. But juggling everything from minor administrative duties to major legal decision-making is a lot to manage, often leading teams to look to delegate these tasks to a legal assistant. 

As you know, legal assistants provide much-needed support with tasks like research, document drafting and other responsibilities. However, before making the decision to add another salary ‘to the budget’ it’s worth asking the question: can I avoid hiring another FTE?

The answer might be staring you in the face because there’s another way to help manage your ever-growing to-do list. Legal automation tools take on those tedious low-value tasks that pull you away from clients, giving you back the time to attend to your important responsibilities. And, with less on your plate, you and your team can get more accomplished while heading home at a reasonable hour. 

Here are three tasks your team can automate in a matter of hours — no extensive hiring process required. 

The process of producing repetitive documents can take hours out of the workweek. Many legal assistants help manage this responsibility, taking on the task of collecting necessary information from clients and drafting the required documentation. 

But passing on the job to an assistant still creates bottlenecks as information is gathered and documents are assembled. Automation takes on the front-end of the legal process, giving clients the power of self-service. Simply create a bot using your existing template and allow your clients to do the rest. In moments, you’ll have a complete and accurate document, all without the added time or frustration of manual drafting. 

In-house counsel at Fnatic, a global esports performance brand, built 15 bots to handle their most commonly used documents. In turn, they got back one day a week to dedicate to their high-level responsibilities. From terms and conditions to intake forms, the possibilities are truly endless with document automation.

Although among the most common administrative tasks, scheduling meetings and managing the calendar are critical responsibilities for many legal assistants. Your clients rely on you to keep track of your available time in order to schedule check-ins, and inaccurately reporting your availability could lead to double-booking and missing important events.

Legal automation tools allow your team to easily automate meeting scheduling, giving clients access to available times and automatically tracking when windows have been taken. This mitigates the risk of frustrating double-booking and allows clients to quickly and easily find a time to meet, without the need to play email-tag.

Many legal professionals report spending a great deal of time responding to repetitive questions from various clients. While employing a legal assistant may be one way to clear your inbox of identical inquiries, automation provides a much more efficient solution. 

With chat bots, your clients can ask their pressing questions and receive automated responses based on your feedback. As you receive inquiries, you simply add the question and its corresponding answer to your bot, boosting its knowledge and accuracy over time. 

Answering FAQs is an important part of managing clients. But with automation, it no longer has to take hours out of your day. Giving clients the ability to ask and answer their critical questions with no wait-time removes frustration and streamlines processes.