We explore how lawyers and legal counsel can speed up workflows by embracing automation, streamlining communication and collaboration, and perfecting the art of legal research.
The legal sector has become fiercely competitive in recent years, with growing price pressures, the Big Four and alternative legal service providers disrupting the market, the ongoing commoditisation of much legal work, and various other factors. The successful lawyers are the efficient ones, the ones that streamline processes, improve productivity, and free up time to focus on high value tasks.
It has thus become increasingly essential for lawyers to speed up workflows. And there are plenty of ways to achieve that. In this article, we explore how lawyers can speed up workflows by embracing automation, streamlining collaboration and communication, and perfecting the art of legal research.
Automation can drastically speed up workflows by automating repetitive tasks that take up too much time, transferring such tasks to legal technology in various forms. And there are plenty of tasks for lawyers to choose from. A for example, says that roughly two-thirds of legal work is considered repetitive. That finding is corroborated by the ½Û×ÓÊÓƵ report, Escaping the in-house legal labyrinth, which suggests nearly half of legal counsel spend too much time on repetitive tasks.
Identifying repetitive tasks is usually quite a simple process. Lawyers and legal counsel should perform an evaluation or audit of their tasks, looking for any high-volume and low-value work that might prove ripe for automation. It can be a fun – and rewarding – task: think about the jobs you hate, the ones that take up too much time, the ones that cause frustration. These are usually perfect for automation.
Popular targets for small-scale automation include , payment collection, document automation, and legal research optimisation (which we will cover below). Using legal tech to streamline tasks will help lawyers and legal counsel speed up workflows, while also saving money.
Perhaps the best way to demonstrate the benefits of effective collaboration is by highlighting problems caused by ineffective collaboration. Ineffective collaboration leads to team siloes, duplicated work, bottlenecks that prevent progress, inconsistencies in vision, missed opportunities, less visibility and transparency, and increased risk. All of the above prevent efficiency. All of the above slow workflows down. In short, effective collaboration is essential for the success of any lawyer.
And it is particularly essential for speeding up workflows. That’s because lawyers need to work with others to help them find solutions, to note inefficiencies, and to extract vital information from wide-ranging expertise. Others can add value to your research, give advice and second opinions, perhaps even notice something you’ve missed because you are too close to a case. A siloed lawyer is an unsuccessful lawyer, as they’re failing to take advantage of one of their greatest assets: colleagues.
Legal technology can boost collaboration, as we’ve seen in recent years. Legal tech gives teams the ability to host meetings anywhere, at any time, including people once excluded by geographical limitations. Tech promotes collaborative integration, allowing colleagues to share analytics and insights across teams, boosting the ability to make decisions and solve problems. Tech also and prevents bottlenecking, often by using centralised and open forum to track interactions and record progress, which ensures a common vision and drastically improves accountability.
All of the above allows lawyers to get on with their work, speed up their workflows without the risk of others slowing them down. Effective collaboration also ensures lawyers can take full advantage of the knowledge and expertise of their colleagues, and problem-solve in open and transparent forums.
Optimising legal research drastically speeds up workflows by quickly identifying and retrieving relevant information with the click of a button. Did you know, for example, that an investigation carried out by the University of Manchester found that lawyers using Lexis+® UK for research were saving over eight minutes per task, on average, potentially adding up to over eight hours every week.
Effective and trusted legal research tools save time and save headaches. Consider, for example, that according to the ½Û×ÓÊÓƵ 2022 Bellwether report, 74% of lawyers use Google for research. The problem, as we’ve outlined in previous articles, is that the information Google provides can be out of date and not trustworthy. Scrupulous lawyers will have to cross-check and fact-check the information, which can be time-consuming, and unscrupulous lawyers risk undermining their case or counsel.
The best solution is to opt for a trusted tool, such as Lexis+® UK. Trusted tools allow lawyers to quickly explore secondary and primary sources at a click of a button. They offer functions purposefully designed to speed up workflow, such as research maps that break down search histories, answer cards that recognise questions and return specific answers, colour coded search maps, and so on.
Quick and effective and money, drastically speeding up their workflows and allowing them to maximise efficiency. In the current market, with growing price pressures and fierce competition, such increased efficiencies are fast becoming a necessity.
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