Creative ways legal document automation drives great efficiencies

With limited time in the day and more and more work piling up, law firms of all sizes, corporate legal teams, and government agencies are looking for better ways to maximize their efforts. Their answer? Automation.

While it’s true that automation can help you streamline workflows, saving time and money, it can be intimidating to take the first step in adopting this new technology when you need to maintain your current day-to-day operations and workload. And with so many different types of automation technology on the market, developing a clear understanding of what automation could actually look like for your legal practice or agency can be difficult. Where should you start?

Because so much of legal work begins and ends with documents, the best way to immediately benefit from workflow automation is through legal document automation. By automating your document processes, you’ll not only receive significant benefits with the least amount of disruption to your current operations, but also create a solid foundation for bigger workflow automation upgrades in the future.

How to optimise operations with document automation

Here are some specific examples of how document automation can help law firms of all sizes, corporate legal teams, and the public sector optimise their operations:

Small, midsize, and boutique law firms

1. New client intake.With the amount of competition between small firms, your level of efficiency and communication can mean all the difference when it comes to winning new business. Automating client intake and engagement letters that can be passed to clients for electronic signature can save administrative time and effort as well as show prospective clients that your firm is fast, attentive, accurate, and technologically modern.
2. Document generation.Especially useful for boutique firms – with specialist focus areas such as estate planning, family law, or bankruptcy practices – that offer fixed rates for legal packages rather than charging hourly, the ability to save time creating documents is critical to keeping hourly work within the scope of your pricing structure. Automation can help firms gather the necessary information and automatically generate most, if not all, of the documents included in a fixed-price package, which saves time and frees up specialised consultative time with clients.

Corporate legal teams 

1. Request intake. Corporate legal departments spend a significant amount of time managing requests for issue evaluation, document review or creation, and numerous other tasks that are coming in a steady stream via email. Automation technology helps reign in this chaos by streamlining the intake process. Things like simple employment agreements or non-disclosure agreements can be set up as self-service with department oversight only as needed. Getting out from under these types of requests allows your legal department to better manage internal requests, simultaneously creating order while freeing up valuable lawyer and paralegal time. This way, your team spends less time managing and organising documentation and more time meeting the needs of the business.
2. Case intake. Ordinarily, when corporate lawyers are served with lawsuits, they would have to manually generate responsive pleadings to ensure the case is handled properly. Automating the intake process ensures that no steps are missed, responsive pleading templates are automatically generated, and all relevant information is exactly where it should be. This frees up legal staff to spend more time responding to a lawsuit and less time on administrative work.

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