Utkarsh, Operations Head
Evolution of Legal Tech
The field of legal tech has come a long way, and evolved rapidly over the past two decades, all thanks to the digital age. Be it through digitalization of case files, documents, records, judgements, etc. or using cutting-edge technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, Cloud, etc., it has become an indispensable part and completely transformed the sector. In today’s blog, we’ll go over some key areas where legal tech has played a huge role in improving productivity & made the lives of law professionals easier.
Digitalization of Data
One of the areas where legal tech has helped the industry is expediting the process of digitalization of data like past judgments, case records, court arguments. Document scanning through techniques such as Optical Character Recognition (OCR), including handwriting recognition has become very handy. This makes data management easier, and improves accessibility for clients and law professionals alike. Cloud based storage solutions can ensure data security and redundancy, in the event of original data being lost.
Workflow Management
It is often said that time is money. The same is true for the legal sector. The more time-efficient a law firm is in managing its workload, the more clients and cases it can work with. Centralized systems that improve and enhance collaboration, can help firms to optimize and streamline their entire workflows, from top to bottom, whether it’s through assigning tasks to individual employees and teams, or automating general tasks, or measuring case progress, or tracking important events and milestones. This ensures an uninterrupted flow of knowledge.
Data Analytics
It’s not uncommon to be confronted with large volumes of data in legal cases. While digitizing it might make it easier to manage it, a lot of the time there’s more to the data than what meets the eye. In such cases, firms can leverage the power of AI and analytics to gain crucial insights, which can help them in preparing their strategies for their clients’ cases. Combined with interactive dashboards, analytics tools can give firms insights for their own businesses. It can aid in tracking the flow of money, such as expense patterns, revenue growth, etc. and track progress and performance of the various departments in a firm. It is usually a part of workflow management softwares.
Contract Drafting, E-Signature & Risk Analysis
Contract drafting using existing templates is another feature that’s becoming very popular with law firms. Firms get the ability to draft, create and manage their own unique templates, complete with clauses that can be tailored for each client and e-Signed. This eliminates repetitive, time consuming steps in the process, while automating general tasks like clause and report tracking, risk mitigation & compliance.
Context Based Legal Discovery & Search
Software solutions based on Natural language processing (NLP) have become very popular for people working in legal discovery. Law professionals often use keywords and phrases to do case research for the cases. But traditional methods don’t often give the most accurate results and often make the process of legal discovery time consuming and exhausting. These kinds of softwares help by taking context into account, so that the search results that show up are as relevant as possible to the case in question. Searches can be in the form of keywords, or images, or documents. Context based search can also be used while performing due-diligence for mergers & acquisitions (M&A). This enables law firms to spend the time saved to focus on more substantive tasks at hand, like building their case strategies, and contributes in reduction of the overall turnaround time.
Concluding Thoughts
We can conclude by saying that in a fiercely competitive market like, it’s important that firms and lawyers invest in knowledge management by using the appropriate legal tech tools to help maximize efficiency, save time and optimize resource usage. This saves operational costs, and massively improves client satisfaction, while retaining a loyal client base, all while making the life of professionals much easier.
