5 Key Benefits of Legal Workflow Automation for Law Firms in 2023

Legal practice can get quite overwhelming at times.

It’s because, for legal professionals, time management, precision, and client satisfaction always get top priority over everything else.

But that also comes with immense challenges.

Tedious and monotonous tasks can take away a lot of valuable time from a lawyer’s billable hours. Then there is document management, contract drafting, error correction, and a few other rather manual tasks.

What’s more interesting, clients also expect attorneys to be always available for service. So you need to be responsive and deliver quality at the same time.

However, by automating some of these repetitive tasks you can change how you onboard your clients, manage contracts, and generate revenue. In fact, a McKinsey report projects that about 23% of a lawyer's work can be automated.

In this article, we’ll explore five ways legal workflow automation can benefit your legal practice and open up new opportunities for growth.

Let’s get started.

1. Enhanced Efficiency

Every law firm has to go through administrative work regularly.

Many lawyers have to spend their precious time on low-value tasks such as data entry, document drafting, and case management.

These tasks are time-consuming and error-prone.

Lexion conducted a poll of 450 in-house legal professionals and reported that many legal professionals spend too much time on low-value tasks.

Sometimes, law firms need to deal with complex legal matters. These special cases require them to be up-to-date with the latest laws and regulations.

When dealing with a high volume of work, you can also face issues with handling so many cases and clients altogether. If you automate these tasks, you could save tons of time and resources while saving yourself from headaches.

When you implement automation software to tackle these challenges, your associates can free up their time and spend it on strategic and value-added work.

And for this, there’s a ton of legal workflow automation tools you can use for managing legal documents and automating repetitive tasks like document generation, reviewing, and contract drafting.

It’s one of the benefits of legal workflow automation because you’ll be able to organize all the laws and regulations so you don’t have to look them up every time.

These automation tools will reduce the time spent on administrative tasks and minimize errors, ensuring more efficiency.

Ronald S. Canter was able to learn how to organize legal files by leveraging LexWorkplace to replace his stack of old technologies with one automation process.

With LexWorkplace, Ron’s law firm automated the billing and accounting, documents, and email process, a process that also allowed his team to work remotely easily and efficiently.

2. Better Risk Management

Being in the law department doesn’t exclude you from the realm of law.

Attorneys and practitioners often fall into the dilemma of keeping them updated on the ever-changing legal regulations. This can result in non-compliance and legal consequences. To put it straight, law firms face all sorts of risks.

There is technology risk (cyberattack, data breach, software vulnerabilities, Artificial Intelligence), human error risk (miscommunication, bad time management, failing to file), and client-related risk (poor cooperation, insufficient resources, lack of expertise).

FTI Consulting, in partnership with Relativity, did a survey where 100% of chief legal officers reported risk management as one of the areas of overall concerns and strains on their capacity. However, with legal workflow automation in working, you can employ compliance monitoring and conflict-checking systems.

Risk management software can lend a hand in sorting out different types of risks law firms usually face including data security, conflicts, and compliance. So, conflict-checking tools use special algorithms to find conflicts of interest and reduce the chance of any malpractice.

You can track all document changes and communication with recording tools and automated audit trails.

You can also use security technologies that are built into most legal workflow automation tools to fight back against cyber criminals, ensuring security and privacy for both yourself and your clients.

Strong encryption tools can save your confidential documents.

With rapid growth, Normet needed global transparency with its contract management, which is a critical aspect of legal processes.

By partnering with ContractZen, Normet achieved great transparency and security by leveraging. They couldn’t figure out how to securely and safely store their materials. ContractZen provided cloud-based automated solutions to handle these legal documents.

3. Simplified Case Management

How can automation facilitate case management?

Effective case management is perhaps the most crucial for the success of any law firm because it’s what your practice revolves around.

But without an automated workflow, this can be a tiring process.

For example, many lawyers find it difficult to keep track of case progress, deadlines, and document updates. This can often lead to missed case dates and client dissatisfaction.

So it’s another one of the areas where you can benefit from legal workflow automation.

In fact, a survey by Wolters Kluwer conducted among 700 law firms and legal departments shows that case management is actually one of the top challenges they face in their practice. Manual collaboration and communication with clients can lead to potential miscommunication. This increases confusion among parties and can potentially hurt your reputation.

With legal workflow automation with case management capabilities, you can handle all your cases and clients in a centralized platform.

These tools can store all case-related information, which ensures you always hit deadlines and have access to updated documents.

Communication is also streamlined.

Task automation technologies can assign tasks, review, and approve them, improving teamwork. It also sends reminders to the appropriate member to finish the remaining work.

Apart from case management tools, legal document tracking software also provides an audit trail of document changes.

By deploying these systems, you can simplify case management, improve collaboration, and bring better results for clients.

Jerry Hoffer, Attorney at Law, P.C. couldn’t properly communicate and collaborate with his clients, since he was using different scattered platforms.

However, by incorporating Mycase, a legal case management software, into his legal workflow he was able to simplify handling even complex cases. What’s more, he’s now able to practice actual law more often than doing administrative work.

4. Better Customer Satisfaction

What’s the key to customer retention?

High-quality services determine whether you’ll be able to keep your current clientele or face a high churn rate.

However, manual workflow processes can hinder your productivity and in turn, reduce the quality of your service.

From onboarding clients to transparent communication, if you have to go through every process individually, this will impact how much output you can give and also affect its quality.

Lawyers often face challenges in meeting client expectations. Many clients think lawyers would provide swift responses and clear communication. However, the tedious administrative tasks add extra stress.

Having to do work that a lawyer wasn’t supposed to do will inevitably cut away from his main tasks, which is even more reason to leverage legal workflow automation tools.

Putting up an automated process means that you can focus on what matters the most—do knowledge work, which will improve your customer satisfaction.

A legal practice management tool, for example, can help your firm automate the client onboarding process and handle tasks like data collection, document review, and e-signatures.

Features like client portals provide secure and real-time access to the ongoing case data, allowing you to keep yourself informed. By delegating such tasks, attorneys can put more effort into their real service in order to give their best.

A survey from Bloomberg Law shows that 9 out of 10 attorneys report that legal technology has improved their provided service.

Automated systems can thus result in effective service delivery.

Justikal, for example, is an eCourt system that was recently implemented by LOBOS. It provides you with automation features you can implement to achieve faster and efficient proceedings.

It’ll enable your firm to automate notifications, OCR, personal annotations, e-signing, and electronic seals. So you can literally achieve great levels of customer satisfaction through legal workflow automation.

5. Easy Client Management

Having a healthy relationship with clients is essential for any law firm.

You need to track client information, visit the communication history, and memorize each case detail efficiently.

This can get more challenging if you’re dealing with a lot of clients at the same time, which is a common scenario for many law firms.

What’s more, a recent ABA Benchmark Study found that 42% of the time, law firms take three or more days to reply to a prospective client. This reinforces the reasons why you need a workflow management system in order to scale case management.

Inefficient client intake, delay in communication or lack of it, and not updating your clients promptly about their cases, will only make your clients dissatisfied.

With automated processes, you can nail these tasks efficiently and in less time.

Legal case management automation allows you to text your clients securely. You can conveniently communicate with them and let them know about the latest happenings.

A CRM designed particularly for legal practitioners enables you to automate the whole client intake process.

This ranges from setting up forms and fetching information, booking consultations, and tracking clients, to invoicing and billing. In essence, a CRM can help you achieve more and let you provide a better experience for your clients.

If a client finds you invested in them, it will go a long way in terms of building relationships. J.W. McClure & Associates LLC, for example, was able to cut its intake time from 3 hours to 20 minutes by leveraging Clio.

Clio helped them use email templates for campaigns and streamlined the client intake process using its form system. Jed has since taken his law firm and legal practice to the next level, thanks to workflow automation.

Conclusion

The significance of legal workflow automation for law firms can’t be overstated.

Legal technology can transform your legal business into a new paradigm. These automated tools will save you hours, boost your productivity, and help you generate more revenue doing what you’re good at—practicing law.

A legal market report from Thomson Reuters states that 70% of legal businesses say that using tech to simplify workflow and manual processes to cut costs is their top priority.

By automating repetitive and mundane tasks, lawyers can focus on higher-level research, strategy development, and client engagement.

They can also add extra value to clients with counseling and case preparation.

The legal industry is becoming more and more competitive. To remain competitive, you must streamline your operations to save time and costs, which is the main benefit of legal workflow automation.

With real human experience and machine precision, law firms can empower their lawyers to master their craft.

Here’s to successful legal practice!