Legal offices are adapting to robotization
Talking about robotization in law may even seem like something out of a science fiction work, isn’t it? We can guarantee, however, that the future has already arrived and that all the major law firms in the country already enjoy its benefits.
If you are not yet fully familiar with the impact of new technologies on the sector, then today’s article was made exactly for you. Let’s talk a bit about automation in the legal area and how it is helping to completely transform the lawyer’s activity.
The lawyers and the technology
It is not today that advocacy and technology have formed a successful partnership. In fact, lawyers have always been pioneers in this field. This has been the case with word processors, personal computers, printers, pagers, cell phones and fax machines, for example.
The reception of technological innovations in the legal area
Despite being pioneers in technology, lawyers should take some special care when implementing new possibilities. First of all because they do not exercise a commercial activity, as is the case with companies, and secondly because they must obey the provisions, which prohibits some practices, such as, for example, the service to customers through the Internet.
This does not mean that lawyers cannot make use of information technology and robotization, since even the public administration is modernizing and adopting a more managerial management model, seeing the citizen as a client. What this means is that novelties must be submitted to the proper duty of care.
What is robotization
The word robotization, for some reason, ends up projecting in the lawyer’s head the idea of impersonality and automated standardization of the rendering of legal services. This, however, is a rather mistaken image of the role of robots within the context of law.
In fact, the idea of robotization is exactly the opposite! The idea is to allow the lawyer to devote 100% of his time to the actual legal activities and to turn his attention to what really matters: to sponsor the cause of his client. As a consequence, the lawyer is able to get closer to the client and offer a more humanized service.
Try to observe how many hours of your day you lose:
- registering clients and processes in the system;
- researching jurisprudence;
- filling in the qualification of the parts;
- seeking updated procedural progress;
- downloading pieces in the portals of the courts;
- searching for subpoenas in the name of the bank lawyers;
- accessing official journals, etc.
Information technology has already created tools capable of automating these merely formal tasks, which do not depend on decision making or the intervention of a skilled professional.
The secret behind the productivity boom of large offices
At this point, we have certainly figured out where we want to go with this. Information technology was the key for the large law firms to simultaneously increase their productivity and reduce labor costs. This was possible thanks to some automation features that we will see more calmly from now on.
Petition Assistant
Anyone who has seen the routine of a law firm up close knows that at least 90% of all workload is made up of repetitive causes. Even the courts have already adapted to this new reality with the incidents of repetitive demands foreseen.
From the lawyer’s point of view, the great waste of time is having to manually fill in the qualification of the parties, the addressing, the legal grounds and the applicable jurisprudence in each petition. Good software can help the lawyer with intelligent models, importing data from the system into the petition in order to facilitate this mechanical and repetitive work.
Automatic process registration
Another activity with which lawyers and administrative assistants usually waste a lot of time is the registration of cases in the system. Once again, it is an activity that simply does not need to exist, as the system itself – provided only with the case number – can access the information contained in the court portal and automatically fill in dozens of fields, such as the name of the parties, their attorneys, the rod in which the case is processed, the value of the case, etc.
Automatic update of process movement
Another bureaucratic and mechanical task that takes a lot of time from lawyers is to periodically seek the updating of the procedural movement of all processes under their care. And the way technology has found to solve this problem is to make the updates come to the lawyer and not the other way around.
Subpoena management
Subpoena management can be a real problem in a lawyer’s life. Sometimes the subpoena comes out in the name of a lawyer who is no longer following the process, and at other times it comes out in the name of the office, as well as it can come out in the name of several professionals.
The great challenge becomes to make the information reach those who need it, eliminating eventual redundancies. It is exactly for this kind of task that robots are used. They scan the data made available on the Internet by the courts in search of subpoenas filtering the results by the names and numbers of the lawyers and deliver this information in the most convenient way possible.
What the future holds
We can affirm without fear of making a mistake that the consequences that the digital revolution has triggered will be felt on everyone’s skin, even by the lawyers who have chosen not to adhere to the news. What we are trying to say is that many professionals let good opportunities go through the fear of change, not realizing that change is inevitable and that doing nothing is already doing something.
