In today's world, technological advancement is proceeding at a whirlwind pace. Every day, there's a new AI-powered solution on the market that promises to change the way law firms do business. While some of these products are ultimately nothing more than empty hype, many of these new technologies can make a real difference when it comes to helping law firms do more with less.

One of the latest advancements to offer real benefits for law firm efficiency and spending is robotic process automation, or RPA. While the name may sound daunting to some, RPA is nothing to fear. In fact, it's something that law firms should be embracing. By automating routine processes, law firms can achieve the seemingly impossible goal of performing more billable work without hiring more people. RPA isn't just a way of cutting costs, but also a largely untapped avenue for law firm growth.

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What Is RPA?

Robotic process automation is the use of technology to enable computer software commonly called robots or bots to perform routine tasks by accessing existing applications to capture and interpret data, manipulate it, use it to process a transaction and report the results to other digital systems. RPA isn't simply about automating processes, but rather about creating virtual workers that can perform highly repetitive, time-consuming, rule-based tasks.

Many business functions, particularly on the administrative side, are routine tasks that don't require specialized skills or high-level analysis. Nonetheless, employees are paid large sums of money to spend their days doing little more than clicking a mouse to accomplish them. This is not a good use of either time or resources. By implementing RPA, law firms can allow bots to take over the performance of these operational tasks, freeing up employees to handle higher-value work and boosting firms' overall efficiency.

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Law Firm Use Cases

The purpose of RPA is to help law firms create efficiencies and do more work with fewer people. Every firm regularly performs many necessary but routine tasks that are accomplished simply by following a set of prescribed rules. These kinds of tasks are excellent candidates for RPA.

Consider invoicing, for example. It's a necessary part of business at every firm, but the process is incredibly routine. At most firms, the invoicing process involves having a person (who is likely paid a decent salary) access the system each day, find the current bills, PDF them and send them to the proper recipients. As the volume of invoices increases, firms usually hire additional staff to help process them.

Invoicing is the perfect example of a structured task that a bot can handle just as well as a human. In the case of invoicing, the bot is nothing more than a computer program that runs in the middle of the night, following the same set of steps a human would take to generate bills. The significant difference is that, when RPA is applied, the bills are ready in the morning for the responsible employee to review and send out, without requiring any employee labor in their preparation. Automating the process cuts out half the manual work and frees up hours of invaluable time that employees can instead devote to high-value work.

The same is true for other routine, structured commodity tasks that are defined by a set of rules. Think of these as the low-hanging fruit of the law firm. Similar examples include new client or matter intake, as well as employee onboarding and offboarding. Each of these tasks involves a predefined set of steps that must be accomplished in a routine matter. Bots can easily be assigned these tasks while law firm staff focus on more important tasks.

RPA's usefulness isn't limited to administrative operations. It can also be applied to more case-oriented work like basic legal research. Today, a good portion of legal research consists of a paralegal performing keyword searches in a designated database, collecting the results, converting them to PDF and delivering them to the overseeing attorney. That exact process can easily be automated and handled by a bot. The bot can simply be programmed to look for designated terms in the middle of the night, collect the relevant results, organize them as PDFs into a folder and deliver them to the assigned associate before he or she arrives in the morning. Using RPA frees paralegals up to instead focus on more high-value billable work.

The preceding examples are by no means exhaustive. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of tasks that law firms perform daily that could greatly benefit from automation.

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Common Barriers to Entry

Despite the widespread potential use of RPA, many firms are failing to take advantage of it. This is primarily due to two of the largest barriers to entry for RPA at law firms: cost and not knowing what to automate.

Implementing RPA is an expensive proposition for law firms that attempt to do it on their own. Fortunately, they don't have to. There are expert vendors in the marketplace who are now offering automation as a service. By outsourcing to a vendor with expertise in RPA, law firms can obtain the desired automation without excessive upfront spending on software and licensing. With automation as a service, law firms simply pay a monthly fee based on the number of bots used. That number can be adjusted up or down as needs change. The as-a-service model offers a much easier entry to the world of RPA, as opposed to spending thousands or even millions of dollars to build the necessary infrastructure it would take to implement RPA without help.

The second common factor that keeps many law firms from pursuing RPA is the fact that they simply don't know which processes to automate to best boost efficiency. Some firms opt to spend money to interview their staff in an attempt to map out a potential automation strategy, but these efforts ultimately don't generate useful information. Instead, firms should be relying on an automation vendor that offers automated process discovery.

Automated process discovery is a sophisticated technological approach to determining what to automate. The vendor will install software that watches firm employees while they work and then creates a map showing what processes can be automated and what the corresponding savings will be. Automated process discovery is invaluable, because RPA is only useful if the right processes are being automated in a way that leads to increased efficiencies and real-world benefits.

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Why RPA Makes Sound Business Sense for Law Firms

RPA is well suited for any organization that provides any type of routine services. In the last five years, many service-oriented industries have changed the way they do business and adopted automation. Law firms, as they have historically been with most new technologies, have been more hesitant to commit.

Continuing to pay staff to perform routine tasks that could easily be automated is no longer a good use of either time or money. Many law firm systems employed today don't have automation capabilities built in. Instead, law firms will need to augment their current systems with an RPA framework that allows them to perform commodity and structured tasks in an automated fashion.

Most law firm staff are currently spending 30 percent or more of their time doing commodity work. By automating that commodity work, firms can see that 30 percent of effort devoted instead to high-value work. RPA offers the possibility of having law firm staff achieve a 100 percent rate of performing value work. This leads to increased efficiency and lower costs without having to cut staff. RPA allows firms to get more capacity out of the employees they already have by removing the operational side of firm business from their workloads.

At a time when law firms are under increasing pressure to reduce costs while boosting efficiency, RPA is a game-changer. Performing more billable work without hiring additional staff used to seem like an impossibility. With automation as a service, that impossibility is now a reality.

Arup Das is CEO of Alphaserve Technologies. He is an expert in institutional level technology governance and operational risk management standards that are prevalent in hedge funds, private equity funds, venture capital funds and global law firms. Mr. Das holds an MBA from Cornell University and sits on its Board of Entrepreneurship; he also has a Masters degree in Computer Engineering from the State University of New York at Stony Brook and a Masters in Analytics from Villanova University where he is an advisor for their Center of Business Intelligence. Mr. Das is also a Board Member of Youth Inc.