3 ways automated legal advice bots can transform your legal practice

The legal process is full of questions. From start to finish, clients and lawyers alike run into countless inquiries, slowing down progress and creating frustrating bottlenecks. As you know, legal questions are impossible to avoid. But here at Josef, we believe there’s a better way.

Automated legal advice bots are able to collect and manage dozens of questions and requests without involving a single lawyer. Once you have set up your bot, clients can simply ask away and receive immediate answers to most simple inquiries. For more complicated requests, the bot seamlessly triages the request to the appropriate individual. 

With automation, your clients and your staff can spend less time waiting for important information and more time moving forward through the legal process. Here are three ways legal advice bots can help transform your legal practice.

While it may not seem significant to spend a few minutes day after day answering the same question, that time spent adds up quickly to significant time wasted. If you find yourself thinking back to answers you gave yesterday, last week, or last month, again and again, it’s time for a more efficient way of doing things. 

Legal advice bots streamline your workflows by removing sticking points and cutting out response time. Rather than leaving your clients waiting for an answer, building a bot allows them to self-serve and access information in an instant, without interrupting your workday.

At Josef, we know you might be worried about the time it takes to learn how to build a bot. That’s why we use no-code software designed for subject-matter experts like you to easily implement, without any prior coding knowledge required. Aren’t sure? Lawyers at Randstad, a global HR and recruitment firm, built a Josef bot in just a few hours. That same bot saved them 100+ hours a year in turn.

An unavoidable reality of working with clients is ambiguity. With many voices and the stop-start nature of projects, inconsistent guidance from various lawyers can occur. This often leaves clients frustrated or confused and can result in even more questions. 

With automated legal advice bots, you can reduce the risk of clients receiving different answers to the same question. Legal advice bots are consistent, scalable, accurate, and efficient. They provide peace of mind that inconsistencies can be minimised and sound advice provided in a timely manner.

As your legal practice grows, it can be difficult to keep up with the increasing demands of new and existing clients. Legal advice bots are scalable, allowing your team to build new bots to manage new requests. More than just time savings, you benefit from having more more options when it comes to finding solutions to meet your client’s needs. Do you add more people to meet short-term demand or do you automate?

Beyond building new bots, your existing bots can be easily updated with the latest information and become more sophisticated as you learn more about building a solution that fits your client’s needs. No need to start from scratch as soon as you learn something new update the bot. Automation makes delivering accurate and up-to-date legal advice simple and repeatable. 

A great example is MKI Legal. They used Josef to build a dismissal bot. Through a quick and easy online assessment, the bot gathered information to help analyse whether a client had a valid unfair dismissal claim. At the end of the process, if they have a case, the client may choose to notify an MKI lawyer, enabling them to access legal help and seek resolution of their claim.

Automating this process saved MKI roughly 50 hours, what could automation do for your firm?

An added bonus of automation is the data and insights you collect. Need to validate your assumptions? Want to better understand the value you provide clients?

With reports on your bots at your fingertips, you will have tangible data to give insights into your clients’ wants, needs, and knowledge gaps so you can serve them better.