What is Legal Automation?

Legal teams are overwhelmed with manual, low-value work and shrinking resources. Legal automation tools streamline tasks, enable self-service, and free lawyers to focus on strategic work. It boosts compliance, speeds up turnaround, and captures valuable data. Platforms like Checkbox empower legal teams to automate without code, scale efficiently, and deliver measurable value.

June 17, 2025
June 18, 2025

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What is Legal Automation?

Legal automation is the use of technology to streamline, automate, and measure legal tasks and workflows. It enables legal teams to reduce manual work, create self-service tools, and focus on high-value, strategic activities.

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.

What is Legal Automation Software?

Legal automation software is the use of tools and technology to enable legal teams to streamline, automate and measure legal work. Through legal operations 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.

💡Pro Tip: Start your legal automation journey with high-volume, low-risk use cases like NDAs or intake triage. These quick wins build internal momentum and demonstrate ROI early.

Use Cases for Legal Automation

Visual map of what legal can’t automate

Legal automation tools help 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.

Graph showing risk and strategic value of legal automation

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 systems uniquely shift 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.

Key Benefits of Legal Automation

  • Giving time back to legal teams – Refocus the legal team on high-impact tasks by creating automation and self-service journeys for low-complexity requests.
  • Faster turnaround for business clients – Remove bottlenecks and progress deals faster by improving service accessibility and shortening queues for high-priority legal work.
  • Higher compliance – Improve accuracy and ensure adoption of proper practices and standardized processes.
  • Standardization – Drive operational excellence and ensure consistency in legal service delivery across the business.
  • Data capture – Gain visibility and report on legal activity that would otherwise remain hidden in emails, calls, and fragmented systems.

Common Use-Cases for Automated Legal Operations

Emerging Legal Automation & AI Technology

The most recent trend in the law automation and legal process 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.

Related Article: Read more on the rise of AI in legal operations and learn about the benefits of chatbots and intelligent routing.

Low-Code and 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 work automation.

Low-code and 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.

Want to learn more? Book a demo with us to see why the best continuously choose Checkbox and why they always succeed with us.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is legal automation important?

Legal automation helps overburdened legal teams handle growing workloads with limited resources by eliminating manual, repetitive tasks. It enables legal to shift from being a bottleneck to a strategic business partner.

What are the benefits of legal automation for an organization?

Legal automation gives time back to legal teams, improves turnaround speed, enhances compliance, standardizes service delivery, and enables better visibility through data capture.

How does legal automation improve efficiency in law firms and legal departments?

By automating routine, low-risk tasks and enabling self-service workflows, legal automation frees lawyers to focus on high-impact work and reduces delays across legal processes.

What types of tasks are typically automated in the legal industry?

Common task automation in the legal industry include intake and triage, contract and document generation, approvals, claims workflows, FAQs, and contract lifecycle or matter management.

Checkbox Team
  

Checkbox's team comprises of passionate and creative individuals who prioritize quality work. With a strong focus on learning, we drive impactful innovations in the field of no-code.

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