In the latest pace of digital transformation, law firms are facing increased pressure to keep up with the change and trends. This has led the sector to provide quicker services and at a lower cost for customers. It means law firms and professionals in this space are needed to adapt the way they work and become more efficient. Previously, the legal sector has resisted technological changes, mainly due to cultural reasons. But with the growing customers’ expectations, the industry is now taking crucial steps to catch up with that.
Looking at industry reports, investment in legal technology in 2014 accounted for £1.5 million, and in 2019, the figure has burst out to £61 million. Just two years ago, only 10 percent of the top 100 law firms were using artificial intelligence in order to advance the accuracy and speed of processing massive amounts of information. But now this has increased to 40 percent which is showing that the sector has made vast strides with new technologies. However, there are still something out of the industry that are yet to be unbarred.
Advances in legal tech provide law firms with various solutions such as e-billing, e-signature, dashboards, workflow automation tools, and general compliance. These solutions have become the major adoption for the legal industry as the use of technology stacks and application integration picks up momentum.
The hype around AI, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and other technologies are also gaining a lot of attention from legal practitioners to manage partners, practice group leaders and general counsel. It is found that RPA in law practice can lessen costs by 20-40 percent, while minimizing human error and increasing compliance.
Scaling the Capabilities of RPA
The use of RPA can be beneficial in reduction in time and costs, particularly when the most common method of charging used by law firms is by the hour. Leveraging this solution strategically can more effectively help analyze the risk of taking on a new client and cut the cost of managing civil cases within FRC guidelines.
There are a wide range of daily time-consuming, monotonous processes that are compulsory, but do not necessarily need to be acted by a lawyer. This is where the robotic process automaton comes in and can handle that task. By automating repetitive tasks to software robots, lawyers’ time is freed up to significantly concentrate on what really matters.
RPA can also assist with legal functions in the public sector which faces issues that require easy-to-deploy, cost-effective solutions, from a high volume of work that carries out productivity to employee shortages, cost optimization, recurrent changes in regulations and policies and department siloing.
RPA in Ensuring Legal Compliance
A firm can protect itself against sanctions and fines by keeping up with compliance checks before or after a trial. And software robots here can automatically perform periodic due-diligence checks and flag dubious activity with 24-hour vigilance and 100 percent accuracy. RPA’s software robots can fill out the Suspicious Activity Report and notify it when finished. By crawling the law firm’s records, RPA can also automatically place information required in the subject details and transaction details.
Thus, adapting to an automation first approach will undeniably revolutionize the way the legal sector performs. RPA can essentially automate business and people requests to ensure consistency and reliability across multiple systems and formats.
