The beginner's guide to legal automation
5-steps to get you started automating your repetitive legal tasks. Get our free guide today!
What is legal automation? Is it robots replacing paralegals? Is it Siri or Alexa giving advice to clients? Will there be holograms? Flying cars?!
All reasonable questions. But the answer is actually very simple: it’s the automation of simple and repetitive legal tasks by a computer program.
Lawyers around the world are using legal automation to save time on the boring stuff, get work to internal clients faster, and focus on higher-value strategic work that matters to the business.
It’s the means by which legal teams can work smarter, not harder.
Ken Carter, General Counsel at Bitmovin sees it as his fiduciary duty to be more efficient – scaling a business isn’t just about growing, it’s about achieving greater results with less effort. Be more like Ken.
Importantly, Ken understands that legal automation doesn’t have to be complex and technologically sophisticated. By using “easy-to-use” no-code platforms to build legal automation tools, teams like Ken’s can get to ROI faster.
Also, if the tools they build do one thing well – rather than trying to solve all of the problems at once – Ken finds that they are more valuable to the business.
In-house lawyers play a pivotal role in any business. But, even though you know that you’re keeping the company safe in uncertain times, it can feel like you’re playing ‘bad cop’ from time-to-time.
Legal automation isn’t just a powerful way of making your team more efficient and saving costs – it can also completely change the way the business sees the in-house function, transforming you from a “house of ‘no’”, to a collaborative and innovative business partner.
But there exists a raft of easily solvable problems. Solvable with legal automation.
Legal processes, like document generation, are at the heart of what lawyers do. They’re also super repetitive. But they don’t have to be. Automate repetitive tasks to regain valuable time.
Change management can be challenging. No-code legal automation tools are different. They’re designed to be easy to use. Enabling you to empower your team to innovate and transform the way you deliver legal services. Whether it’s a long complex document or a simple FAQ, automation makes it simple and painless.
Legal teams hate being the bottleneck. Enable them to get the information and guidance they need when they need it by building an ‘easily accessible front door’. Help your stakeholders and clients self-service with intake and triage style automation tools.
Repetitive tasks. Manual work. Broken processes. They’re a drain on you and your team. Regain lost time, and get more done with less, thanks to legal automation.
By automating low-complexity tasks via self-service journeys, you make time to focus on high-complexity, high impact work. The stuff you find fulfilling, you know… The reason you become a lawyer in the first place.
Streamlining intake and triage, means clients and stakeholders can self-serve to source the answers they need in a timely manner.
Automation leaves less room for human error and greater standardization for operational excellence.
One lawyer can only ever serve one client at any point in time. With bots, you can scale your delivery of legal services by serving an unlimited number of clients or customers at any time.
Removing bottlenecks gets work delivered faster by allowing anyone in the business to create their own legal document.
Automation of regulatory processes helps ensure practices and processes are followed like clockwork.
Creating tools that streamline and automate compliance tasks, that not only reduce risk for the business but free up the time of lawyers who oversee the risk assessment process.
“Data is the new oil” capture insights that would otherwise be lost using manual processes and gain a better understanding of your organization and current trends. You can even use integrations to help fool-proof this process.
In short, the opportunities are endless. You really are only limited by your imagination. Here are a few examples of the most common use cases:
Build a tool to automate the production of any legal document.
Build a tool to automate a legal process or decision tree. For example, a common automation built is a “who needs to sign this document” tool.
Build tools to automate the management and collection of data to make data gathering simple and easy.
Create a better document review process by building tools that you to build an efficient process for the assignment, review, and signing process.
Build tools that guide stakeholders or team members through the process to manage your team’s work or triage stakeholder requests.
Use automation to get documents signed and approved with your intervention.
Don’t do it manually, built a tool that enables stakeholders to complete an assessment and help you identify knowledge gaps in your organization.
Build a compliance or regulatory test and share it with your team to plug any compliance knowledge gaps.
Help your team self-serve. Build a tool that serves up the information they need rather than answer the same question time and time again.
Build a tool that offers advice and guidance to common or low-risk requests.