How RPA Helps Accelerate Automation in Legal Sector?

Apac CIO Outlook | Tuesday, March 30, 2021

Advances in legal technology provide law firms with various solutions, such as e-billing, e-signature, dashboards, workflow automation tools, and general compliance. These solutions have become a significant adoption for the legal sector as technology stacks and application integration are gaining momentum.

FREMONT, CA: In today's digital revolution, the legal sector is under tremendous pressure to keep up with transformation and trends. This means that law firms and professionals are needed to adapt their work and become more efficient. Unlike other industries, the legal industry is lagging in technological changes, mainly due to cultural reasons. However, changing customer behavior and increasing expectations have led the sector to take essential steps to meet this rapid transition.

Consider industry reports, only 10 percent of the top 100 law firms were using AI just two years ago to advance the accuracy and pace of processing vast amounts of information. However, it has risen to 40 percent, indicating that the sector has made significant progress with new, advanced technologies. Despite this, there are still things that need to be unbarred.

AI, Robotic Process Automation (RPA), and other technologies are also receiving a lot of attention from legal practitioners to managing partners, practice group leaders, and general counsel. It is found that RPA in law practice can cut prices by 20-40 percent while minimizing human error and increasing compliance.

RPA Capabilities

RPA can be beneficial in reducing time and costs, especially when the most common method of charging used by law firms is hourly. Using this solution strategically can help analyze the risk of taking on a new client and reduce civil cases' cost according to the FRC guidelines.

There is indeed a wide range of daily time-consuming, monotonous compulsory processes but do not necessarily require legal action. This is where the robotic process automation comes in and can handle this task. By automating repetitive tasks for software robots, lawyers' time is set aside to focus significantly on what matters.

RPA can also assist with public sector legal functions that address issues that require easy-to-deploy, cost-effective solutions, ranging from high-performance work to labor shortages, cost optimization, recurrent changes to regulations and policies, and departmental siloing.

RPA to Ensure Legal Compliance

A firm may protect itself against sanctions and fines by abiding with compliance checks before or after a trial. And here, software robots can automatically perform periodic due-diligence checks and flag suspicious activity with 24-hour vigilance and 100 percent annual accuracy. RPA software robots can fill out the Suspicious Activity Report and notify it when it's finished. By tracing the law firm's records, RPA can also automatically place the required information in the subject's details and the transaction details. RPA can virtually automate business and people's requests to ensure consistency and reliability across multiple systems and formats.