Intelligent drafting technology allows law firms to operate with greater efficiency and increased profitability. It also aids them in serving their clients better and getting ahead of the competition.
The legal industry post the 2020 pandemic is getting digitized at an unprecedented rate. The impact of artificial intelligence in law firms is quite distinctly visible in today’s legal field. The primary reasons behind this rampant digitization is the ever-increasing globalization and the significant rise of ALSPs (Alternative Legal Service Providers). This has led to an unforeseen increase in competition in the legal field.
A study by McKinsey estimated that almost 23% of a lawyer’s work can be fully automated. While this might be seen as lawyers losing their jobs to digitization, there is an alternative perspective. By automating the possible 23% of the work, a lawyer can use that unspent time and resource to serve more clients. At the age of increased competition, more clients is something that no lawyer worth their bread would say no to.
What Is Intelligent Drafting Technology?
With paperwork and documentation being one of the main works of a legal firm, automated legal drafting advantages are a great gift from technology. But the traditional automated documentation toolkits require law firms to build the automation themselves. If not, they would have to hire document automation consultants to aid them with the same.
Deep automations are complex and time consuming. This leads law firms to use basic automation tools to handle petty tasks while the advanced aspects of the task are delegated to freehand drafting. This not only achieves least efficiency savings but also introduces the risk of possible errors.
Intelligent drafting technology is curated specifically to seamlessly provide deep automations. Advanced elements of legal drafting like cross-referencing, advanced logic, data entities, and structure can be handled easily with the help of intelligent drafting technology. This technology is able to capture the entire subject matter of a document with the help of a highly-structured data model.
The use of this technology can curtail the time taken for drafting of suites of complex matters by upto 90%. Plus, upon entering the key pieces of information on the platform, it produces the ancillary document almost instantly, thus saving up 100% of the time.
In spite of artificial intelligence and the legal profession not seeing eye to eye for most of the time, it is difficult to deny the advantages of intelligent drafting technology, even more so as it frees up the fee earner’s time so that it can be directed to matters of higher value.
Related Reading: What is Legal Drafting? How to Improve Your Legal Drafting Skills?
Primary Functionalities of Intelligent Drafting Technology
The intelligent drafting technology has a number of usages that aid law firms to stay ahead of their competition and to serve their clients better. Let us take a quick glance at some of the prime functions performed by intelligent drafting technology in a typical law firm.
- Client experience transformation
- Operate with speed and precision
- Helps share knowledge and best practices
- Boost in productivity
- Enhanced reputation followed by flawless service
Now that we have a basic idea of what intelligent drafting technology is, let us take a look at the advantages of this technology in the legal field. This will help us understand how technology will change lawyers in the future.
Advantages of Using Intelligent Drafting Technology in Law Firms
There are several advantages of using intelligent drafting technology in the legal field. We are going to look at 5 of the most popular advantages enjoyed by law firms who use this technology to get done with their business.
1. Improvement in client experience and value
Intelligent drafting technology helps a law firm to meet the needs of a client on time, within budget, and often at a fixed rate. In spite of this faster and cheaper process, there is no compromise in quality of the work.
The automated process of work ensures that there is no scope for human error in it. This helps achieve faster turnabout time and the work submitted is more often that not of a significantly higher quality than it would have been if it had been done in the traditional way.
Drafting is one of the menial and mechanical aspects of the legal field that takes up the lion’s share of a lawyer’s time. It requires extensive research and meticulous precision. Intelligent drafting technology foregoes this entire lengthy and time-consuming process and gets the entire thing done in a fraction of the time.
This allows the fee-earners to focus on more pressing and strategically important aspects of the work. This helps with client experience as more time can be spent by the lawyers on the outlining strategy, making arguments, and actually working on the clients’ case.
This increases the chances of succeeding trials, leads to better out-of-court settlements, and in general improves the efficiency of a firm. All these together lead to the increment of the value of the firm as they can now take on more clients with a higher efficiency.
2. Allows lawyers and firms to work with unprecedented speed and accuracy
A lawyer’s primary concern while taking on a client is to be accurate in his research and strategies. While strategies are the creative part of the job, research takes up a huge chunk of the time which does not allow the fee earner to focus on the creative part as much as they would have liked.
Intelligent drafting technology cues its entry here and instantly curtails all drafting time by as much as 90%. This time freed up can now be used by lawyers and law firms to focus on strategizing, client interaction, and brainstorming.
This not only increases the chances of succeeding at trials, but also improves client satisfaction as they get reassured seeing a constant stream of communication. This communication would not have been possible if the fee earner was still slogging at their desk, research and drafting.
3. Increased productivity across the firm
As you have understood by now, the productivity of a firm will increase manifold with the introduction of intelligent drafting technology. As we all know, innovation is the cornerstone of increasing productivity. But a lot of law firms do not focus on innovation and instead choose to grind with the traditional drafting tools.
Intelligent drafting technology is a matter focused platform. This will not only help research and draft faster, but will produce entire suites of documentations within industry-leading timeframes. This will allow lawyers to be way more productive than they would have been while using traditional drafting toolkits.
The primary reason behind this is that traditional automation tools are designed to automate one document at a time as opposed to entire suites that are automated at once by intelligent drafting technology. This leads to a far greater revenue generation and superior client satisfaction. These positive reinforcements also go a long way in driving up the productivity of a law firm.
4. Better development of junior partners to safeguard the future of the firm
Law firms usually depend on junior partners for their drafting activities. This new technology will bolster accuracy and consistency. And this would not require the fee earners to babysit junior partners after they are initially taught the operations and mechanisms of the technology.
This will prevent the overworking of junior partners which will allow them to focus on the legal aspect of the work and learn better. This will help them become better lawyers and in turn will secure the future of the law firm when the current bread earners decide to hang up their robes.
5. Better sharing of best practices and knowledge
While using intelligent drafting technology it is way easier to preserve knowledge and expertise as the technology is constantly updated and put through routine maintenance. As the technology keeps getting updated it becomes easier to roll with the latest precedents as they would be available at the fingertips of the lawyers.
In contrast, while using traditional automation toolkits, any update in precedents needs to be communicated to the internal automation team. Even then, there is no guarantee of the automation being done on time. So, in the meantime, fee earners are left using out of date precedents which not only puts the ongoing case at stake but also sullies the reputation of the firm.
Wrapping up
Legal drafting has historically been a tedious and time-consuming process to say the least. The latest incursions in the automation technology has not only made it an easier process but more importantly, has curtailed the lion’s share of the time consumed in the drafting of legal documents.
So, if you do not have access to this technology and require legal drafting services, contact us today via our website and avail of the latest technologies and expert and experienced counsels that we have at our disposal. And the best part, we offer services for drafting plaint and written statements both.
