SPECIALS; 4 Ways Legal Processes Are Impacted By Technological Innovation

Technology offers huge opportunities for law firms to innovate in ways that benefit both them and their clients.

It is no surprise that many lawyers believe that innovation is critical to exploit opportunities and to differentiate their practice in a very competitive legal environment.

In an environment where the speed at which lawyers work has a direct effect on business outcomes, a growing number of legal functions are turning to automated contract management tools and sophisticated document review technologies. What are the main categories of technological innovation that impact law firms by their function on the process in the legal industry?

From document assembly and automation to Natural Language Processing, Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Assistance, new legal technologies offer exciting possibilities for how legal processes might evolve or be reinvented for the future. Here are the main categories of technological innovation that impact and shape law firms and transform the traditional status of the legal industry:

Advance Search and Extraction
These functions are based on machine learning capabilities that can identify specific legal information, clauses, definitions and blocks of texts. This function of Advance Search and Extraction can be used to speed up document retrieval and review in order to create a more efficient and cost-effective process of advance research and extraction from thousands of documents. At the same time this function allows law firms to quickly extract and summarize any provision from virtually any legal type of document.

For law firms machine learning automation is about managing risk – what is the risk profile of only reviewing one in ten documents? Using automation, logic and decision trees to create document templates that pull out all of the relevant search terms, non-lawyers and businesses are able to produce initial draft documents and contracts that used to fall to legal teams. Machine learning works best when there is a large amount of data available to be analyzed; where it is possible to find proxies and patterns in the law; and where past data is generalized to obtain new data.

Data Analytics
This function is fueled by increased computing power and more digital data. It enables law firms to gain insight from the increased amount of digital data they hold about workflow, cases and clients. Data analytics allows for mass document search, e-discovery, data mining, predictive analytics and the use of virtual assistants. The importance of data analytics lies in its use of data to determine where the value is in the services that law firms provide to clients. It aims to identify the clients’ needs, the legal risk assessment as well as the workflow and case allocation.

Predictive analytics is also the practice of extracting information from existing data sets in order to determine patterns and predict future outcomes and trends. Technological systems try to predict the outcome of court cases based on multiple criteria, including the courthouse, the judge and the type of case. Such tools will definitely assist lawyers and help them decide if a case is worth taking to court at all. Such decisions will help law firms avoid unnecessary and substantial costs for their clients. Predictive analytics can also help identify language patterns of judges and leverage those insights to help lawyers anticipate what language and arguments might be most persuasive before particular judges.

Predictive analytic programs are already being applied to massive datasets to spot trends and generate insight around case behaviors. Such tools add to the increase of technological innovation aimed at helping law firms manage risk in their decision-making process. In the future predictive analytics might be even built into business analytics software as a standard feature and may reduce the need for human experts in the field.

Automation and Assembly of Documents
Document Automation is fueled by advances in process automation technologies and it creates new ways to transform frequently used documents and forms into intelligent templates that enable fast production. Technological systems allow even non-lawyers to complete forms and produce reliable draft legal document without expert legal knowledge. This automation of the assembly and production of documents saves time and money. It also reduces risk, enhances compliance and increases accuracy of the legal documents.

Automated document assembly today is improving at a high speed and can be applied to create very complex documents with multiple levels of “if-then” clauses to accommodate different fact situations. Such technologies reduce greatly the amount of time a lawyer has to spend on an individual document project, enabling alternative billing systems that yield a higher margin for the law firm and potentially lower pricing to the client.

Assembly and Automation of Conversation
This function is fueled by advances in Natural Language Processing, machine learning, document assembly tools and voice recognition. It includes Chatbots, Robo-lawyers and Virtual Assistants. The conversational instant messaging interface is able to provide users with information and to generate real-time documents specific to a client’s needs. The automation of conversation combines the processing principles of machine learning and natural language to process user information, to answer questions and to provide a constant point of access.

Chatbots envisioned by the technology industry combine artificial intelligence with voice recognition that relies on the way humans naturally speak. The goal is to create a situation where clients feel they are communicating with another human which reduces costs in customer service. It allows legal departments to re-engineer their legal support responsibilities, where lawyers can stop doing some of the more routine or low-risk aspects of their work in order to focus on higher value legal support for their clients. The chatbot function may also reinvent how social organizations provide legal resources to the public. Virtual Assistants can also be engaged in spontaneous conversations, in administrative tasks and whenever there is a need to help organize workflows that can bring value to the law firm business model.

Technology by itself will not bring innovation to a law firm. A better understanding of business issues is needed in order to identify the points where technology and business come together. Legal businesses which use technology to deliver legal services that focus on smarter, more flexible resourcing, will look and work very different from the traditional law firm of the past. Technological innovation and collaboration will be an important factor for the success of law firms in future markets driven by borderless platforms and digital ecosystems.