A Systematic Approach to Automation in a Law Firm

Workflow automation is a tricky matter. Much more so in a law firm where a lawyer’s manual involvement is seemingly irreplaceable at any step be it communications, research, or drafting. And yet, the times call for a change in mentality and we are forced to adapt to a new market. A market that’s much more digitized than even three years ago. 

Well, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. 

The same can be said about business automation in a law firm. 

Start small: build your foundation

A survey by Adobe found people in the workplace spend on average 3.1 hours per day sending and checking their emails. That’s a lot of time that could be put to better use, wouldn’t you say? 

Well, that’s easier said than done. An email, by nature, requires a response. In it you will have to write, attach files, add people into ‘CC, etc.’ – and neither of these tasks can be performed by a machine. 

That said, you can definitely speed up the process using automation. Supplement these kinds of tasks with automated data entry, a CRM that holds your contact base, and a solution that’s capable of assigning and tracking tasks based on your inbox and you’ll have a much easier time. 

The same can be said about the contents of your letters. A drafting solution will take care of the most frequent attachment files you’ll be sending without forcing you to go through everything manually. 

The trick here is to start with things you do all the time. These tasks should be easily repeatable and they should have predictable outcomes. As I’ve mentioned above, standard employee agreements, NDAs, or centralized and curated FAQ forms, or your system for tracking legal requests are prime candidates for automation. 

Taking baby steps to automate these simple processes will give you a nice head start and a solid pool of data to work with in the future. How so? Well, you’ll see your processes a little bit better. You’ll know how many steps it takes to deliver the desired outcome in a certain business process and you’ll also learn where to cut a few corners. 

The simplest example of this would be a system that tracks basic terms in a contract. This system can lead to automated renewals or important notifications sent away in a timely manner.  

Grow from data

A clear vision and understanding of routine processes can serve as a basis for more complex automation that involves linking multiple workflows via an array of tools and integrations. 

Congrats, your legal department can drop the status of the first guinea pig in your company. Operations, sales, IT, and HR can all join in on the fun. 

All you need to do is to walk the same road as before. Find repetitive tasks, replace them with software, and carefully analyze the results. 

Working on integrating these individual workflows from various departments into a streamlined and unified business process – that’s where the real challenge begins. I suggest you start with a single ticketing system and/or task manager application paired with email integrations. 

Also, this is the stage where Business Intelligence solutions come into play. 

What I mean by this is that all of your operations with a predictable outcome become measurable. The effort put into them, success rate or lack thereof become quantifiable. As such, they are much more feasible. Taking action becomes simpler once you know about the areas that need it most. 

Your endgame is a business process where people don’t need to bother themselves with easily achievable yet time-consuming distractions like, say, checking if a document is signed or not or browsing through a vast catalog of cases. Think about how much time a well-structured, and categorized knowledge base can save in the long run (in our experience, it speeds up the search from hours to milliseconds). 

Think gains, not functions

The more advanced levels of business automation come hand in hand with the buzzwords most of you probably came here to see: AI, Machine Learning, Big Data, and predictive analysis. 

This is also the stage when automation outgrows your business and expands onto your relationships with partners, suppliers, and clients. The tasks you’ll be automating are much less linear or predictive. Most will even require a human in the middle of the process to make a decision. 

We can look at an app called Notarize for a simple example of how this approach works in real life. Users of this app upload their files into the system, follow a series of simple instructions to validate their identity, and are connected to a person that can notarize their documents. The brilliance of this process is that the person who is responsible for notarizing does not need to waste their time on the first two steps. As such, they are free to be much more productive – all while the clients are much more satisfied as they’ve achieved their goal from their phone on the fly. 

Sure, the process of reaching the last step in your automation journey is not a quick one. Your company will take anything between five to ten years to truly embrace the benefits of stressless business processes. Still, I’d think about it this way:

1. Even the first few steps will bring rewards in the form of saved time and higher ROI
2. Other companies have already started their processes of digital transformation. Do you have the time to lag behind?