What is Legal Automation?

Legal automation software is the use of tools & technology to enable legal teams to streamline, automate and measure legal work. Through legal automation, teams are empowered to create self-serve and self-help tools for their clients. This frees the lawyers to focus on the high value tasks where they can uniquely add value as experts, such as engaging in negotiation and providing strategic advice.

Why is Legal Automation Important?

Corporate legal departments are constantly faced with the challenge to do more with less. Given that people are an expensive limited resource, doing more translates to leveraging process and technology. However, there is little to no support provided to legal from a priority or budgetary point of view when it comes to technology, and as a result, legal teams continue to work in very manual ways.

This results in legal counsels having to do tiresome work that is repetitive and low value, with the side effects of the legal department becoming a bottleneck for the business and a lack of visibility and inability to report on legal data and activity.

Whilst this reality is nothing new, contemporary changes in the industry have driven the attention to finally translate into action.

These driving factors include:

1. Year on year budget cuts or reduction of headcount
2. Corporate strategy for cost reduction and simplification
3. Increasing volume of legal work as businesses and regulatory environments become more complex
4. Legal departments wanting to move up from simply being a support function to becoming more of a strategic adviser to the business

Disciplines like legal operations (or ‘Legal Ops’) have emerged and are seeing legal departments run like a business and focus on optimizing the delivery of legal services to their business clients – with legal automation being a key pillar to achieving this.

Use Cases for Legal Automation

Legal automation is best deployed to automate all the low-value, low-risk legal work so that lawyers can focus on the high-value, high-risk work. The result is the creation of no-touch and low-touch legal activities which gives time back to legal teams and only involves them when necessary.

What Are The Benefits of Legal Automation?

There is a reason why legal automation is a key pillar of any legal operations or legal transformation strategy. Whilst other legal technology may help lawyers organize and manage their work, legal automation uniquely shifts the type of work of legal departments to enable them to truly do more with less, whilst also creating visible and direct improvements to the delivery of legal services to their business clients.

Some benefits of legal automation include:

• Giving time back to legal teams – refocus the legal team on high impact tasks by creating automation and self-service journeys for the low complexity tasks.
• Faster turnaround for business clients – remove bottlenecks to progress deals faster by improving accessibility to services through self-service whilst shortening the queue for high importance legal requests.
• Higher compliance – improve accuracy and adoption of proper practices and processes.
• Standardization – create operational excellence and consistency of service delivery.
• Data capture – gain access and report on data that isn’t captured in existing manual methods of working, such as email and phone calls.

At Checkbox, we’ve come across common use-cases for automated legal operations:

‍Emerging Legal Automation & AI Technology

The most recent trend in the legal automation space has been in the introduction of Artificial Intelligence (AI). One significant advancement of AI technology has been the development of chatbots, such as ChatGPT models. These language models have the capacity to understand and generate human-like text responses, which can be helpful for lawyers as they work on various legal tasks.  

AI models such as ChatGPT and others have been employed to automate and enhance legal processes, transforming the legal landscape by streamlining repetitive and time-consuming tasks, improving efficiency, and reducing costs.

Low/No Code Legal Automation Platforms

Legal teams often face challenges when it comes to receiving attention and support from their organization's IT departments. Due to competing priorities and limited resources, IT departments may not prioritize the specific needs of legal teams, leading to delays or inefficiencies in implementing technology solutions tailored to their requirements. As a result, it has become increasingly common for legal teams to take the initiative into their own hands and explore alternative approaches to automation, such as low-code and no-code legal workflow automation.

Low/no code legal automation can foster collaboration and innovation within legal departments. Legal professionals can experiment, iterate and continuously improve their automation solutions, adapting them to changing needs and emerging challenges. This iterative process allows legal teams to optimize their workflows, streamline processes and drive overall efficiency within the organization.

By leveraging these technologies, legal teams can become more self-sufficient and responsive to their specific automation needs, ultimately driving improved productivity and effectiveness within their organizations.

Checkbox as a Legal Automation platform

The Checkbox legal automation platform empowers teams to build legal document automation software & workflow automation software tools using drag-and-drop. Trusted by the best brands globally across legal teams of all sizes, Checkbox has been a critical piece in their legal transformation journey, providing not only the best in breed automation technology but the expertise to ensure success.

Checkbox is known for being the easiest to use, yet powerful legal automation platform available. Combined with our deep expertise in legal automation and transformation, we are excited to demonstrate to you why the best continuously choose Checkbox and why they always succeed with us.