Legal Process Outsourcing
The benefits of automating legal processes: An overview
Law firms, independent lawyers, or professionals in corporate legal departments are constantly dealing with large paperwork that is not only tedious but also time-consuming. The legal teams are burdened with lengthy communication and approval processes.
Paperwork, correspondence emails and letters, photographs, documents, call records, screenshots, chaotic data storage, and outdated resources add to the workflow headaches. This diverts attention from efficiency, growth, and innovation.
This article will explain the benefits technology can bring to your legal process through digitalisation and automated workflows.
How can technology transform your legal process?
From streamlining internal and external communication to faster approvals to better document management, here are the benefits of automating legal processes –
Better communication between the lawyer and the client
According to an American Bar Association (ABA) report, 87% of lawyers in a firm work remotely, and 23% must work from the office one to three days a week. This calls for better and more secure communication between the lawyer and the client.
A unified communication system within a firm helps lawyers easily communicate with the client and keep its record. This helps lawyers be more productive and communicate with peers when necessary. Tools such as instant messaging, email, voicemail, and web conferencing over a single platform make communication easy.
Simplified case management
Digital business management platforms allow lawyers to automate processes such as scheduling important dates, managing documents, organising contact lists, and pushing data into billing. All the information for a case resides in a centralised database.
Case management using digital tools makes it easy to share information with other lawyers within the firm. Web-based case management platforms are accessible from any location using a laptop or a mobile phone.
Automated eDiscovery
Lawyers spend hours sifting through piles of documents to find relevant evidence. Digital documents facilitate eDiscovery, which makes the lawyer’s job easy. eDiscovery can do a platform-agnostic search across emails, mobile devices, databases, archives, and IoT devices. It uses analytics to speed up the process using keyword and keyphrase searches. eDiscovery removes the time wastage in searching through irrelevant documents, thus streamlining the process.
Leveraging analytics
Time-consuming routine legal processes can become easy with cognitive analytics. Natural Language Processing (NLP) examines textual threads and helps understand the context of statements in complex legal documents.
By automating the contract analysis and editing process through Artificial Intelligence (AI), businesses can reduce the cost of contract reviews by up to 90%. This saves 80% of the time a law firm spends on contract reviews.
Online community support
Disadvantaged and unprivileged communities can take pro-bono services, counselling, and resources using online communities. Online communities also share information with lawyers and students so that the legal community can learn from and debate it. For example, the ABA has an online community called ‘LegallyMinded’.
Lawyers also collaborate through social media, especially LinkedIn. They participate in online discussions through forums and post informational videos and articles.
Risk management
The massive paperwork and juggling through them for evidence can make crucial processes slip through the cracks. You do not want to waste time searching for a signed affidavit from a client before the court date. You can focus on the case by having a system that automatically records responses and completes a checklist.
Legal process automation also protects the client and internal files through encryption, and thus cybercriminal attacks.
With a cloud-based and automated legal process, you can easily comply with HIPAA, FERPA, SOC 2, CCPA, and GDPR compliances that apply to your business.
Higher client intake and onboarding
The client intake and onboarding process can be tedious, and any mismatch in the expectation can lead to disputes in the future. You can improve this process through automation which helps in clear communication with a trail, efficient checklist-based onboarding, and scheduling of events.
Your clients get a better service experience thanks to clear and consistent information from the start. They understand the action plan, expectations, and expenses clearly. This does not create any confusion or bitterness in the relationship between the client and the attorney. Some of the ways this makes a client’s life easy are –
- Automatic quote sharing and meeting schedule
- Pre-screening checklists and questionnaires
- eSignatures in intake forms and attorney-client contracts
- Securely store and update the client’s records
For organisations on the digital transformation journey, agility is key in responding to a rapidly changing technology and business landscape. Now more than ever, it is crucial to deliver and exceed organisational expectations with a robust digital mindset backed by innovation. Enabling businesses to sense, learn, respond, and evolve like living organisms will be imperative for business excellence. A comprehensive yet modular suite of services is doing precisely that. Equipping organisations with intuitive decision-making automatically at scale, actionable insights based on real-time solutions, anytime/anywhere experience, and in-depth data visibility across functions leading to hyper-productivity, Live Enterprise is building connected organisations that are innovating collaboratively for the future.
How can Infosys BPM help?
Transform, standardise, and automate legal tasks to leverage your teams’ skills for further growth. The legal process outsourcing model differentiators include higher flexibility, AI-based technology solutions, tri-shore capabilities, increased flexibility, and custom consulting services.
Read more about legal services outsourcing at Infosys BPM.
