Automation Credit: Urupong Phunkoed/Shutterstock.com
|

As law firms face pushback from clients on high rates and large legal bills, firm leaders are looking for durable ways to increase efficiency. The prospect of an economic downturn creates even more pressure to boost productivity and streamline processes.

One area where law firms stand to gain the most in terms of efficiency is document automation. In the simplest terms, document automation is the process of transforming frequently used documents or forms into dynamic templates—then creating a new document by guiding users through an intelligent interview process, the answers to which will customize the document to a firm's exact requirements. Knowing the documents to be produced will be accurate and consistent with far less effort is a key benefit of document automation.

|

The Push for Efficiency

There is nearly universal agreement among law firm leaders that efficiency is one of their top priorities. In a recent flash survey on 2019 Law Firms in Transition, Altman Weil solicited survey responses from 362 law firms with 50 or more lawyers, including nearly half of the U.S.'s largest law firms. Of those law firm leaders surveyed, 96% agreed that a focus on improved practice efficiency is a permanent trend in the industry.

At the same time, firms are bracing for a widely predicted economic downturn. The top concern of the managing partners surveyed was the prospect of a broad economic recession. While no one can know with certainty when the next recession will occur or how significant it will be, the consensus is that it will happen and not all firms will fare as well as others. An impending economic downturn only heightens the need for improvements in efficiency that will cut costs and reduce financial risk. In order to best position themselves going forward, firms are turning to technology like document automation to lay the groundwork for long-term sustainability.

|

The Benefits of Document Automation

Much of a law firm practice revolves around documents—drafting, revising, standardizing, editing and proofreading are all tasks that take up a significant number of hours every day. With the right document automation technology, however, these tasks take far less time, allowing attorneys to focus on higher-value work that benefits clients.

Document automation can significantly boost efficiency in five key ways:

1. Standard Clauses: Every law firm has standard clauses that appear in numerous different documents, such as jurisdiction or choice of law clauses. Whenever you want to change one of those standard clauses, the alteration needs to be made in every single document that contains that clause, a task that can be incredibly tedious and time-consuming.

Document automation tools maintain your standard clauses in a single location. That means that when it comes time to update your clauses, you only need to make a change once and it will appear across all documents that contain that clause. This ripple effect saves significant time and eliminates the possibility of human error associated with making numerous manual changes.

2. Consistency: Along with standard clauses, certain terms need to be consistent across all your documents, including references to parties. Maintaining consistency is difficult when you have different drafters preparing or editing multiple related documents.

With document automation, you can easily ensure that party references or other standardized terms remain consistent throughout your documents. Document automation software will auto populate all your documents with the appropriate party names or standardized terms, eliminating human error and ensuring uniformity across all documents.

3. Signatures: Proper execution is a crucial factor in document preparation. When dealing with matters that all have different requirements, ensuring that your documents have been properly executed can be highly time-consuming and prone to errors that can have devastating consequences for your clients.

Document automation programs alleviate these concerns by automatically including standardized execution pages and signature blocks in your documents. You can even customize your signature pages to meet the needs of particular clients or deals, making it easy to comply with the execution requirements of any given matter.

4. Special Circumstances: Certain documents require special actions above and beyond standard drafting, such as special approvals for deals of a certain size or signoff from local counsel if the matter involves more than one jurisdiction. With manual drafting, you're reliant on the drafter to recognize these special circumstances and take the appropriate action, which opens to the door to potentially costly human error.

When you incorporate document automation, you eliminate the potential for missteps by instituting alerts that require document preparers to take any necessary special action before documents can be finalized. The automatic prompts ensure that any special circumstances are accounted for with minimal effort on the part of the drafter and there is no need to rely on human judgment.

5. Proofreading: Proofreading is a critical final stage of preparing any legal document, and one that can take a considerable amount of time. This is particularly true when the documents have been manually prepared, because the potential for human error is high. It's not uncommon for proofreading to take so much time that it impedes your productivity on other tasks.

When you rely on document automation to prepare your documents, you eliminate many of the proofreading tasks that are necessary for manually prepared versions. Document automation allows you to ensure accuracy at the drafting stage for things like date and number formats, singular or plural party references and internal cross-references, removing the need to spend hours double-checking these issues at the proofreading stage.

These are just some of the major efficiency boosters that come with document automation. The ability to customize your document preparation and ensure consistency across all aspects of your documents significantly reduces document preparation time, constraining costs in the process.

|

Tips for Implementation Success

Successfully incorporating document automation into your firm's day-to-day practice requires more than simply purchasing the tools and trying to force them on your attorneys. Successful implementation calls for a holistic approach to document automation that focuses on people, processes and technology

The first step is identifying the document types where automation makes the most sense and where the firm stands to gain the greatest efficiencies. This determination should be made by taking into account what your users want and what they think will be most helpful in making their day-to-day work faster. You can then uncover which technologies will produce the results your users are seeking.

Most firms find it easiest to start small and then engage in process mapping to expand document automation. Successful implementation involves determining what tools you already have in-house and which tools you might want to buy or develop, with the end goal being sustained usage by your attorneys. Ease of application is key – you don't want to change the way your people work; you simply want to make their current workflows better and easier.

Involving attorneys in every stage of implementation is crucial to success. Identify those attorneys who will be successful users and champion the technology to others in order to foster adoption. By empowering users to see the return on investment and how document automation will create positive change in their workflows, you'll ensure that your firm fully embraces document automation and reaps the greatest possible benefits from it.

Document automation is one major way that firms can achieve the increased efficiency that will be crucial for surviving the next economic downturn. By constraining costs and streamlining workflows, law firms can satisfy and retain clients as they best position themselves for the future.

Tomas Suros is a technology advocate working at the intersection of IT and client consulting. With AbacusNext since 2004, he currently serves as chief solutions architect, guiding firms through the process of identifying forward-facing technology options and ensuring the successful implementation of a tailored solution. He can be reached at [email protected].