Benefits of using Robotic Process Automation in law firms & legal departments

This article will discuss Robotic Process Automation as an instrument to perform and streamline a legal firm’s day-to-day tasks. RPA enables law firms and legal departments to increase their productivity and serve their client better by automating repetitive operations.

The implementation of Robotic Process Automation in the legal industry is gaining wide popularity of late. Moreover, automation technology powered by artificial intelligence has piqued the interest of business managers due to obvious reasons. The combo of RPA + AI can considerably increase the efficiency of any business by reducing or even eliminating redundant and repetitive tasks. The sooner we jump on the bandwagon, the better, as RPA can take away the burden of completing mundane tasks and let one focus on more integral processes of the workspace. Robotic process automation for legal firms holds great potential as it can save time spent on filing, paperwork, and other tedious tasks and help lawyers focus more on their cases.

Let’s dig deeper;

• Need for RPA in the legal industry
• What is Robotic Process Automation or RPA?
• What are the benefits and applications of RPA for legal teams?
• Where to start?
• Case studies

Need for RPA in the legal industry

In any law firm, the employees have to deal with two types of tasks. One is the boring and monotonous tasks like processing case inquiries and forms, searching for documents, organizing files, etc. The second type is the white-glove services for the clients, studying cases, brainstorming, etc. In most legal firms, the first category of tasks consumes the majority of the man-hours. What if these tasks can be automated? What if you let machines do these tasks while humans focus more on the white-glove services?

For example, robots can lessen the burden of due diligence by looking for information in records; an employee will take hours, whereas the bot can finish searching for information within minutes, saving a huge chunk of time. The automation process also aids in other operations like registering trademarks, reviewing disputes, digitizing client records, automating accounts payable, etc. These processes do not need human intervention. Instead, humans increase the turnaround time for these tasks, costing the firm money.

What is Robotic Process Automation or RPA?

Robotic Process Automation involves software that automates a business process. It mimics the interaction between humans and machines and empowers the business to configure the task that they want automated. The software can search, interpret, communicate and process information faster and more efficiently.

It also evades the probabilities of errors as it uses defined rules and logic to perform mundane, tedious tasks. It can process data, offer responses, complete transactions, etc. AI-powered RPA can even make decisions based on the available conditions to automate tasks. It uses machine learning for data processing, easing the burden on employees who perform basic repetitive tasks based on logic-based outcomes. Some of the common actions in automation include copying and pasting data, moving files, filling forms, performing calculations, etc

Applications of RPA in legal firms

RPA technology can relieve attorneys and legal assistants from repetitive tasks and enable them to focus on white-glove services for their clients. Common applications include data classification, data extraction, processing of structured and unstructured data from legal documents, contextual searching of information across data sources, etc

• Compliance Checks: A cumbersome task RPA can simplify in legal firms is compliance checks. Here, a bot can parse through tons of compliance documents to find potential risks, violations, etc. It can help mitigate risks and protect the firm from fines and sanctions. Robots can do due diligence and create suspicious activity reports to fish out potential risks. RPA can search and fill in the information and browse through to find dubious activities by clients.
• Risk Assessment: Automation can calculate case-to-cost data, find a client’s credit rating, search accounts payable, categorize them in risk registers and work out the opportunity cost of taking on a certain client. RPA can also use anti-money laundering (AML) and Counter-Terrorist Financing (CTF) risk assessment forms and find the client’s details, including their locations, services, and relationships and integrate the information into documents. Building a complete profile will save huge chunks of tie and resources that an employee would use.
• Automating Paralegal Works: Law firms hire paralegals to perform research-intensive tasks. These include filing, recording, searching databases, etc. An automated robot will free up the paralegal’s time by fulfilling all these responsibilities by doing the sludge work like creating spreadsheets, scanned documents, websites, tools, etc. Therefore, it allows the employees to pay attention to the client’s needs and perform other strategic actions. Depending on the task, one can choose between using controlled and uncontrolled robots or a hybrid mix. The flexibility to create one’s automated task can hugely contribute to the firm’s efficiency and productivity.

• Financial Management: Finance is an area that usually requires a lot of human labor and effort. Automation can reduce the burden and errors in this grueling process. A survey by Deloitte discovered that 91 percent of the finance executives want accounts payable to be automated. The RPA software for legal teams can help with the processing of vendor invoices by drawing out data from different formats and feeding it into the financial planning system, creating smooth payments. Generating bills from an existing management system will also help save labor costs. 

Where to start?

It is ideal to recognize the areas that will impact cost and labor-saving as a first step and automate those processes. Using it as a service instead of going through a mediator will help the legal firm customize the tools it needs and cater to the current requirement. E-discovery programs can be designed to aid with data management systems. Tracking software that audits expenses can also be a good start. Based on the wide range of applications, the firm can choose the software that best aids their employees in finishing day-to-day tasks. An opportunity discovery consultation can help you realize what all processes in your organization can be automated and get an idea of the ROI for this automation.

Case studies

Husch Blackwell is a Missouri-based law firm with 19 offices across the US. The firm looked around, consulting with other legal industry experts to talk about RPA, and then decided on which processes to automate and then ran their proof-of-concept bots. One of their first bots was to deal with conflict checks. It digitized the clients and cases and then cross-checked to see if there was a conflict of interest. Another bot was utilized for scanning emails and flagging any litigation possibilities. The bot further extracts more data which is interpreted and packed in an email and sent out to the appropriate departments who can look for who needs legal action. It will aid the firm in getting more clients and produce a sizable influence.

In another example, we’ve helped a firm move 1700 property lot records from their in-house database to a cloud-based system without any manual process. Their cloud application was unable to load and validate solicitor records. With an automated process of reading an excel file and validating each cell, the RPA inserts it into an E-Conveyancing platform. The RPA saved 1500 hours of work time by processing it in 4 hours, with 100% data accuracy.

Robotic process automation for legal operations has helped firms save time and money while also aiding their growth through increased proficiency. By taking away the attention from tasks that can be automated, it focuses more on customer satisfaction. RPA for legal teams has emerged as a boon, helping both the lawyers and clients. The sooner we leverage its potential, the better.