Technology has been utilised widely through many business sectors, however seven out of ten business leaders are concerned about their firm’s ability to adopt new technology, as over half don’t increase their IT budget, according to the 2018 Insight Intelligent Technology Index. This article is designed to help senior management in legal practices envisage how AI might be utilised within their companies.
Automation can be an extremely useful asset in the legal industry, potentially assisting firms in many ways, freeing their staff to focus more on the critical components of a case and the human side of client servicing. As in any professional service the use of RPA can increase efficiency, operationalising necessary and time consuming processes - of course there are many of these within the legal sector meaning automation really should be a ‘must’ rather than a ‘maybe’ option.
This blog discusses the areas within the legal sector where Intelligent Automation might be used, with particular reference to an emerging technology platform - SmartFlow.
Intelligent Automation for Legal
There is no doubt that traditional Robotic Process Automation is great for repetitive, uniform processes. In any business sector you are most likely to find these in the finance or HR departments, where they perform a linear, rule-based function.
Intelligent automation takes this further, bringing automation to the non-linear tasks that professional services workers such as lawyers typically deal with. With Intelligent Automation, robots can be used to analyse and structure huge amounts of data making it more accessible for the human to easily view and extract relevant information. In the legal sector this would be an extremely useful aid to Paralegals who are searching databases for precedents and producing relevant analogues. This is a tedious and time-consuming task where Intelligent Automation would guard against error and improve the accuracy of the resulting document.
SmartFlow operates on the desktop as a digital assistant, supporting the knowledge worker or Paralegal, processing large volumes of data, finding trends and highlighting discrepancies. From its implementation within the banking sector we know that SmartFlow can complete in 35 seconds the same data analysis tasks that would take a human approximately 18 minutes to complete. It’s 100% secure, compliant and provides greater job satisfaction for the bright minded clerk, improving their productivity and related cost/value.
In turn, the implementation of SmartFlow within law practices could help reduce the cost of legal services to clients, thereby making the sector more affordable and increasing usage. In a world where every industry is competing with web-based services this has to be an advantage, the human is still there to provide counsel and advice whilst utilising technology to improve the process. Want to find out more about our award-winning Intelligent Operations Platform? - More on SmartFlow - SmartFlow's Solutions - Get in Touch #intelligentautomation #smartflow #legal #machinelearning #ai #artificialintelligence