Technology is galvanizing the entire legal marketplace ecosystem. As firms integrate tech solutions into their practice, it creates pressure for others to compete and produce more efficiently. The tech ship has not left the dock just yet however. In fact, Gartner’s 2021 State of the Legal Function Report found that the primary weakness exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic was the use of “technology solutions and level of adoption.” So there is still some time to catch up, but it has to be soon because the pandemic was a real wakeup call for most firms.
Where should you start your technology adoption process? Here’s five major categories of legal technology that can help your legal department work smarter.
1. Matter management
When managing a firm with many concurrent matters, it's easy for details, files, or documents to fall through the cracks and become lost. It’s also important to know which matters are most pending and urgent, and what tasks within a matter need to be addressed next and who is responsible for this task.
Matter management tools keep all of your matter-related information in one place, so you can monitor the priority of your matters, the priority of your tasks within those matters and who and when those need to be finished.
For example, contract solution Summize allows users to sort and filter all of their contracts by matter, and see key analytics about their status, important dates and any red flags. This makes it significantly quicker and easier for legal teams to evaluate and keep on top of their matters and reduces both financial and legal risk for the business.
Check out: Our Case Management Comparison Video
2. eDiscovery
In any litigation, the volume of documents quickly builds up. Each matter could involve mountains of potentially relevant data from documents, emails, text messages, database entries, photos and videos, and much more. Efficient law firms need to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff quickly in discovery. That data then needs to be reviewed, tagged for privilege, produced to your opponents, and presented as evidence at trial. This is an insurmountable task to do manually.
With modern, cloud-based, eDiscovery technology, you can rapidly search and filter data to consolidate your voluminous datasets. EDiscovery platforms offer complex capabilities—including metadata filters, artificial intelligence-based concept searches, and advanced analytics.
3. Legal Hold or Litigation Hold
Building on eDiscovery, that process cannot even begin unless you’ve preserved potentially relevant information to use in your litigation matters. Failure to preserve data is very costly to your case. Though the concept is simple, it’s easier said than done. How do you notify custodians that their data is on hold? And how can you lock their data in place so that they can’t—either intentionally or inadvertently—modify or delete that data?
Your organization needs to have an efficient process for rapidly identifying potential data custodians, notifying them of the legal hold, and monitoring the status of all existing holds over the life of each litigation matter. Automated tools are very useful in issuing and managing legal holds to save you from spoliation.
4. Contract review
Contract drafting can be very tedious. You may ask yourself where that one clause is that you wrote in another contract. Questions arise as to whether your contract reflects the new corporate policy.
Contract review software keeps all your contracts in one central place. You can add data tags to quickly search them. Natural language processing tools even allow lawyers to create new contracts faster and more easily while enhancing consistency across all similar contracts.
Summize is one of the newest examples of contract review software. The tool creates an instant summary of any uploaded contract, no matter how unique. This saves legal teams up to 85% of time when compared to a manual contract review. In each summary, Summize will identify and highlight important clauses, which can be edited and flagged. All of this work can then be shared with clients and business users with a read-only link, even if they aren’t a Summize user.
5. Document drafting and management
No matter the practice area, lawyers generate a significant amount of documents such as memos and letters to stakeholders, transactional documents for mergers and acquisitions, pleadings for court cases, or anything else related to your organization’s business. Regardless of the document type, they need to be created and managed quickly, efficiently, and consistently. In a Gartner survey, 40% of respondents stated that they intended to adopt document management technology in the near term.
As was the case for contract review software, document drafting and management tools also provide a central repository for your full library of legal work. By creating templates and using smart technology to search previous examples and identify your best existing documents and arguments, you can save time on drafting while generating more consistent, correct, compelling documents. By creating templates and using smart technology to search previous examples and identify your best existing documents and arguments, you can save time on drafting while generating more consistent, correct, compelling documents.
Another growing solution set in Document Management is the need to create a more efficient document redlining and negotiation process, be that between internal stakeholders (law firm and client), or with external parties of a document. Features such as creating a negotiation room, where a complex document can organize redlines by severity, create internal or external messaging, or sort issues by priority in a negotiated document are all helpful solutions to speed up the negotiation process vs attachment MS word based flows.
Companies such as Agreemint have a very intuitive way to introduce those features, and work alongside other common tools. Other deal room concepts are introduced in ParleyPro, Ironclad, and a few others.
Another company, dealcloser, also has powerful document management solutions that allow corporate lawyers to track the progress of their deal while ensuring that everyone is working on the correct version of a document—all taken place on the Cloud. With features like these, dealcloser automates or eliminates countless tasks on a deal that are non-value-add for your clients and also are a common source of error.
Check out: Our Review of AI Generated Litigation documents
Legal technology, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic has taken a massive leap forward and is now a foundational aspect of a successful legal firm. At Lumose Marketplace, we consolidate and review all sorts of legal tech to help you figure out which software is right for you and your practice.
