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 11 common use-cases for automated legal operations:

1. Intake and triage: Create a legal services request gateway that enables self-service and standardized, automated triage

2. Document execution workflow: Digitize and facilitate approvals for document execution, contract review, and delegation of authority (DoA)

3. Legal contract automation: Generate standard documents like NDAs, letters, T&Cs, and justification notes with signature workflow

4. Bulk contract automation: Create hundreds of renewal contracts in minutes, error-free, using legal document automation

5. Legal advice automation & FAQ: Generate standard documents like NDAs, letters, T&Cs and justification notes with signature workflow

6. Contract Negotiation: Automate your contract generation and streamline the negotiation process to get your business deals across the line faster

7. Delegation of Authority: Free up time for the legal team by digitizing and operationalizing complex approvals through automation

8. Request For Information: Save time on receiving and processing RFIs to allow your legal team to focus on higher value work

9. Claims Workflow and Approval: Facilitate and streamline the claims process whilst improving customer experience

10. Contract Lifecycle Management: Standardize and streamline your end-to-end contract lifecycle process

11. Compensation Calculator and Workflow: Streamline the claims process and improve customer experience

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.