By: Tayler Sherman
A 2019 study revealed that the average lawyer works 2.5 billable hours a day due to mundane non-billable tasks consuming a majority of their day. Law firms are service-based, generating revenue from billable hours for client work. Non-billable hours can negatively impact a firm’s revenue because they are costly and time-consuming, ultimately taking away from billable hours. Legal automation can assist law firms with non-billable tasks such as administrative work, client intake, billing and collections, and management tasks, allowing attorneys to devote more time on billable matters that require legal skills and knowledge. Legal automation uses software to streamline the legal process by automating the creation, approval, and management of non-billable, administrative tasks.
Automation can help firms provide reliable and efficient services to their clients. One way automation can improve services is through document generation programs. Document generation creates templates for common documents and stores them in a central location. Automated checklists and workflows generate comprehensive lists including tasks, deadlines, required documents, and other important information required for cases. Automation can streamline billing and invoicing through an invoice sharing and online payment process or batch billing and custom rates. Programs can assist with client intake by generating a legal document in response to a client’s questions and answers. These programs allow lawyers to quickly review the document instead of spending hours questioning the client and then drafting a document based on the responses. Additionally, clients are more likely to be honest when interacting with a machine because computer-generated responses are not judgmental like people are.
Firms can also use legal automation to efficiently perform billable tasks such as document review, research, and due diligence. Advances in technology allow modern software “to save time by automatically gathering and dynamically populating lien and other public records information into forms and other customizable summaries.” Legal automation can streamline time-consuming research tasks by scanning a legal document and finding relevant case law.
Some products on the market include CARA, ROSS, and Docket Alarm. Developed by Casetext, CARA, known as Case Analysis Research Assistant, is a platform that reviews and analyzes citations in a legal document and generates a list of suggested cases that are relevant to, but not cited in the document from its own database. CARA’s database consists of legal documents, opinions, statutes, and legal articles. CARA can review briefs, memorandums, and other legal documents.
Geared towards bankruptcy, intellectual property, and labor and employment law, ROSS is a research program that narrows down research methods and provides substantive answers to various legal issues. In response to legal inquiries, ROSS provides briefs, citations, and case excerpts.
Docket Alarm offers strategic case data and monitoring of federal and state court cases. Docket Alarm can provide case data such as how a judge has ruled on similar matters and the likelihood of settlement.
The legal industry is known for dragging its feet when it comes to incorporating technology. As a result, technology provides companies with alternatives to legal services. Businesses began to handle some legal tasks internally like due diligence, business management, and fulfilling global transactional requirements. Legal automation provides law firms with a competitive edge to meet client’s low-cost expectations and increased efficiencies.
Legal automation will revolutionize the legal industry. Some advantages of automation include creating a better experience for clients, improving communication and transparency between firm staff and clients, decreasing costs of staffing, helping to efficiently serve clients, and removing human error. Although legal automation greatly benefits the legal profession, it also invites the risk of malpractice. Malpractice can occur if attorneys rely too much on the technology and fail to check the work like the attorneys in J-m Manufacturing Co. v. McDermott Will & Emery. In J-M Manufacturing Co., the plaintiff sued a law firm for not adequately supervising a discovery vendor resulting in the production of privileged documents. While some critics claim that automation takes away from human interaction, this is not the case because legal automation allows lawyers to spend more time on matters that require their expertise and legal skills instead of non-billable tasks.
The use of technology to optimize various areas of the legal profession provides attorneys with more time to work billable assignments, increase revenues, and in turn client satisfaction. Legal automation is vital for success in the legal profession. Soon it may be malpractice for firms to not use legal automation because “it would be analogous to a lawyer in the late twentieth century still doing everything by hand when this person could use a computer.”
Student Bio: Tayler Sherman is a third-year law student at Suffolk University Law School and serves as a Staff Member on the Journal of High Technology Law. Tayler holds a Bachelor of Science in Criminal Justice from Endicott College.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this blog are the views of the author alone and do not represent the views of JHTL or Suffolk University Law School.
