Nobody is 100% sure what the future of lawyers will bring, but smart lawyers like Douglas Healy etc. understand which skills or areas they must focus on to get ready for the future reality. Lawyers across the world have to deal with this question – How does the Future Lawyer work look like and how to improvise our skills?
Whereas some lawyers need tech that will help them with the repetitive tasks and give them more time for the challenging and professional work, some are looking for a change to happen, and others are intimidated and worried about future work.
Whereas nobody can be completely sure about the answers, it’s good for lawyers to use their time to sharpen the skills more to get ready for any changes in this legal world, which are coming because of document automation and AI. Daily legal consultants and professionals are doing most of the given things:
- Administering skills tests to develop the specific knowledge that lawyers use for preparing their work product.
- Designing & building collaboration portals online to manage their projects & deliver work to their clients.
- Measuring, improving, analyzing, and controlling the work processes that will reduce the variation, get rid of the error-prone steps & improve efficiencies.
- Using statistics to allow clients and law companies to audit and check the quality and accuracy of the work product.
- Working on the integrated system of the quantitative analytics, and each with its detailed checklist, that will regularly measure & manage quality.
Most of the legal experts have resisted such change, but it is the time to take technology seriously and make their lives simpler for the given reasons:
Cost-effective legal consultation to the clients –The top reason for the lawyers to use technology in their work is to offer cost-effective legal consultation to the clients. Clients might not care much about the intricacy of the legal problem.
They just want to choose the top lawyers at the fees that will suit their pockets. So, this makes it very important for the lawyers to use new technology that can save their time & completes surplus tasks at a lesser cost & address the wider audience.
Efficiency: The lawyers go through several past cases just to find the right ones that can help them with the client’s case. According to the studies, lawyers have to spend a quarter of their time to do such research. The document automation will manage things when it comes to contracts or other legal documents creation, and make you more agile and efficient to any changes the future might bring.
Better client experience. –It is important for the lawyer to make their clients happy. Though you offer the best work in your legal field, if your clients aren’t satisfied with your service, you cannot get their work again. The legal technology will make things easier like software that will specialize in email marketing will help you to reach your client & keep them engaged.
Cost-savings – The legal management software allows the users to track each billable second, give tasks, provide online payment, manage your client funds as well as give the right picture of the firm’s performance. With an extra time given by such efficiencies, lawyers can bill more hours & improve the company’s bottom line. Additionally, many law companies are going paperless, and freeing up their time was once spent over managing the paper documents to focus on important aspects of their legal profession.
Handle mundane tasks: Whereas some lawyers are scared of technology, thinking that it can replace them, but, the fact is many lawyers will end up spending huge amounts of time doing a mundane task that will be done efficiently through the technology.
Conclusion
So, this type of legal work is growing — with the advent of the legal operations specialists in the large companies, an emergence of the process mapping & operations management by the legal providers, and the starting of the process consciousness in some influential law firms.
Today’s lawyer takes an opportunity to know their client’s business needs well enough and understand their risk appetite, and thus enters the commercial world. With this knowledge, a lawyer sets out to know what is essential and then works out with their client to create the legal scope with quality, time, and cost.