For the second year in row, summer associates at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati will have the option of engaging in a Build a Bot initiative that allows them to take a crack at automating the legal function of their choice.

In some ways, the program is already the perfect fit for the firm's first completely virtual summer program. But whether it's also symptomatic of a new urgency surrounding law firms and their use of bots that automate tasks remains to be seen.

To be sure, many firms have had to endure furloughs and layoffs over the last several months to cope with the economic fallout of nationwide business shutdowns. Automating responses to basic client inquiries or other low-value work could help lighten the load on remaining staff.

However, David Wang, chief innovation officer at Wilson Sonsini, believes bot adoption will ultimately be driven not by personnel shortages, but continuing pressure to drive efficiency. "I do think that there probably will be long-term trends in the industry that, for lack of a better word, push firms to better understand this area, because ultimately they need to become more efficient in order to compete in the market," Wang said.

The motivation behind the firm's own Build a Bot initiative revolves around the desire to put a tool in the hands of associates, partners and paralegals that would allow them to automate processes in a more distributed way, spanning both varying levels of expertise and multiple practice groups. Summer associates are given the choice between completing a standard-issue writing sample such as a brief or selecting a document-based legal process to serve as the basis for a bot constructed on Documate's platform.

Wang compared the initiative to a research and development lab. For example, last year a group in the summer program attempted to automate an M&A terms sheet, which proved too ambitious of an undertaking. Instead, this summer's projects will include automated processes around nondisclosure agreements and service provider terminations.

"We're using the summer labor to do the testing instead of the more productive associate time," Wang said.

But while Wilson Sonsini may be exploring automation and bots, are other firms? To be sure, there were already a few. Last November, Clifford Chance launched an Automation Academy in Singapore geared toward instructing lawyers how to automate tasks such as contract drafting. Meanwhile, Baker & Hostetler has developed a bankruptcy bot to help field general bankruptcy questions pertaining to rules and client pricing.

Fallout from the pandemic may have opened up even more dimensions for firms curious about deploying bots or automated documents. Dorna Moini, CEO and founder of Documate, the document automation platform that Wilson Sonsini's summer associates will use to build their bots, indicated that the platform has seen an uptick in interest from large firms over the last few months.

"Several of them have come to us specifically to build COVID-19 response tools and then as a result have realized that [automation] can be applied more broadly within their practices," she said.

As for whether furloughs or layoffs could bolster the adoption of bots inside law offices, the answer may be entirely dependent on the size of the firm in question. Moini believes reduced staff levels could definitely be a factor at small or medium-sized firms. But larger law practices may be more focused on the next stage of their evolution, which includes a heavier emphasis on client-facing bots that cut down on the low-value work juggled by employees still on the payroll.

Moini called the internal-facing bots and automated documents that firms are deploying the "baby step" toward applications that can interact directly with clients. "I think it's going to be a bit of a transition," she said.

Such a transition will likely require the right blend of legal and technological insight. Wang at Wilson Sonsini pointed out that summer associates will need more than just technical knowledge to excel at building bots. It's difficult to successfully automate a nondisclosure agreement if you don't know much about how those deals are structured.

"You really need to have a deep understanding of the process from end-to-end because you need to account for all of those things," Wang said.