Lawyers have enough legal work on their hands without needing to juggle the business side of their practices too. Yet, for too many of us, 23% of our work involves mundane tasks like creating contracts, producing monthly newsletters and drafting, adjusting and approving notes for billing.
New lawyers tend to ask themselves questions that include the following: How can we handle 200 or more clients calling us per week? How can we reduce the length and cost of judicial proceedings? How do we simplify billing? How could we get to the next level?
Automation’s the answer. Here are three ways automation can transform your law firm.
1. Onboarding and Legal Communications
New staff have to be led through an extensive onboarding program where you produce, check and process intake forms, welcome emails, consultation notes, contracts/ NDAs, case sheets, case templates, draft documents and signed packages, among other forms. Lawyers told us that onboarding new employees typically takes at least three months.
Automation can slice that time to 99% by automating tedious manual workflows and scaling their operations.
Tasks you can automate include:
- Template intake, where you simplify your intake process with a legal client intake form template to save time and standardise your onboarding process
- Partnership agreements
- Shareholder agreements
- Contract signing system that’s where you upload a generic contract, have the client’s name automatically inserted, and the client can sign with encrypted electronic signatures
- Non-disclosure agreements
2. Legal Operations
Legal automation helps you boost your productivity and get the most ROI from resources like law firm partners and in-house general counsel, by relegating them to high-value work. (Automation does everything else). No-code automation builders like AUTTO, help legal teams and law firms stitch together manual processes to make common workflows scalable. Examples include processing legal intake, prioritising legal cases, and assigning the right cases to the right people at the right time.
Most law firms are represented by legal innovation teams at industry events and have early adopters that buy their products. But actually achieving adoption at scale within a hierarchical environment like a law firm is a different story.
It’s also been notoriously difficult for in-house GCs to persuade decision-makers to invest in automation, although more recently that’s changed, where high-growth tech companies have come to appreciate that these legal teams use automation to patch up inefficiencies and maximise company productivity – and that investing in legal automation is just as profitable as investing in product marketing and sales.
No-code solutions like AUTTO’s automation platform makes it even easier for GCs to persuade their decision-makers to adopt automation since it cuts the cost of digital transformation by 99%. There’s no need to hire IT experts or invest in ongoing IT maintenance, among other costs. The headache at the thought of investing significant money, time and effort disappears. The timeline is hacked from four to six weeks to mere hours. You don’t need to learn to code. All you have to do is connect to a modern browser and your legal team could automate their work processes and forms on the same day.
Check out how AUTTO helped UK law firm Burges Salmon develop their own automated NDA within a few hours and at a minimal cost. No code was involved.
3. Legal Billing
Lawyers can lose as much as 50% of their revenue because of billing mistakes. With automated billing, you can reduce write-downs and write-offs through task-based automation. For example, you can insert parameters into certain petitions or cases, specifying conditions like cost or time.
Automated billing eliminates errors. Using systems such as AUTTO for billing not only standardises your invoices but also prompts clients to pay you faster.
Automated billing also provides the transparency that’s critical for auditing and conflict prevention. You can automate this billing to integrate with Quickbooks and your lead tracking system to improve collections.
Also, Law firms can set up prescheduled payment reminders to notify clients with overdue accounts. Automated UTBMS/LEDES coding that organises and standardises legal work. These make it easy to capture and communicate meaningful billing data, leading to a higher rate of claims acceptance and less time spent on correcting and resending invoices. Unfortunately, legal staff have to manually search for and insert the correct code for each entry, resulting in a process that’s tedious, drawn-out and prone to human error. Automation automatically assigns the correct codes.
Check out this case study about how AUTTO is used for automating invoices.
Save Time, Money, and Aggravation By Automating Legal Processes
AUTTO is an automation platform for law firms, legal departments and GCs, helping you automate everything from file sharing to signing documents. Its no-code tool helps you build automated workflows for routine tasks and build conditions in data and documents. No coding skills are needed. The tool plugs into your system and doesn’t need IT maintenance. All you need is a browser and you’re good to go.
Fancy trying it out for free? Sign up to our 14-day FREE trial here
