Author: Gloria Qiao, Founder & CEO of Trusli
Lately, we have written a lot about law firm automation and why it is key for law firms to deploy AI for their automation workflow. So where do law firms start?
1. Document automation is the lowest hanging fruit
While there are tons of processes to automate and apply machine learning for law firm practice management software, a great place to start is document automation for large and small law firms. Here is why.
- Document automation is typically a repeatable, programmable process where AI does its best to serve
AI and machine learning may not be the best unsuited to handle the more nuanced and sophisticated work that lawyers are necessary for. However, they excel at learning simple, repetitive tasks that currently cost your legal team countless billable hours. Machine learning algorithms learn from data so that they can identify patterns in that data and rules that they must follow. Consequently, they learn how to do simple tasks with clear-cut rules over and over. Take a self-driving car, for example. While programming a self-driving car, you would feed it various images of things it must avoid colliding with: pedestrians, bikes, pets, and other vehicles. Over time, that car will recognize things that it must be cautious of and learn to avoid. Self-driving cars have come so far in this past decade simply because these types of tasks are what machine learning and AI excel at. This same principle applies to creating any legal documents automation software, whether it’s legal document assembly software, legal document preparation software, legal document generation, or document review software. By using existing legal documents, machine learning can learn how to complete time-consuming, tedious tasks and empower you and your team to spend your time much more efficiently.
- Legal document automation is something that many law firms spend a lot of billable hours doing which can be easily replaced by machine learning
At law firms, having lawyers spend copious hours manually dealing with legal documents bogs down progress and productivity. Document automation allows lawyers to focus on important tasks, such as complex legal drafting and negotiations, which in turn boosts profitability and efficiency at your law firm. For example, document assembly software for lawyers can reduce painstaking hours spent crafting contracts, engagement letters, NDAs, and more by instantaneously generating templates for you to use. At a law firm, document automation is absolutely key to increasing growth, efficiency, and profitability, and it just so happens that machine learning is perfectly suited to document automation.
- Law firms are built on documents. This is where a law firm’s technology innovation can start and can be expanded into the adjacent areas
Using AI-based document automation for lawyers is the first step toward using technology to optimize your law firm. Documents are the core of legal work: nearly every step that lawyers do has something to do with drafting, analyzing, or reviewing legal documents. We’ve talked a lot about efficiency and how document automation saves you valuable time otherwise consumed by monotonous tasks, but the benefits of machine learning don’t just end there. AI-driven document automation significantly reduces the chances of errors in documents. Moreover, by having machine learning adapt to and learn about these tasks, your team will retain a lot of know-how that would be otherwise lost as lawyers leave your firm. Having document automation be a part of your firm allows you to streamline the very core of your law firm while also serving as a launching pad for you to experience all the benefits— efficiency, accuracy, profitability, and more—AI and machine learning will bring to your firm.
2. Document automation for lawyers is where Trusli can come in and custom build for you
While every law firm works a bit differently, document automation is an area where we can come in and document your existing processes, and quickly build out machine learning-assisted automation for you.
Our roots are in self-driving cars. We have always believed that if cars can drive themselves, lawyers should not spend their time completing repetitive tasks such as filling out forms repeatedly. Take our friends at Magstone. They used to spend 20+ hours per week filling out forms to fill out Delaware C-corp formation documents. We evaluated their current processes and determined that we can easily automate all of them in a matter of a few weeks. Now, their automation is working and the associates save an average of 70% of their time by leveraging this automation. The partners are happy as their associates can spend much less time on a given formation, giving them the ability to lower the pricing to clients. The associates are happy as they don’t need to spend hours filling out the same forms over and over again. Now not only do they tend to make much fewer mistakes, but they can also focus their time on real legal work, such as drafting and negotiations.
3. How does Trusli automate legal document generation differently from others
These days you hear a lot of buzz words such as artificial intelligence and machine learning. However, very rarely do software systems apply true AI to their automation processes.
Here at Trusli, we think differently. We want to apply true intelligence to automation processes.
So instead of having the lawyers fill out forms after forms, our AI actually detects the lawyer’s intent and predicts the next steps for her or him. If a lawyer writes to a potential client, “Attached please find our engagement letter”, our AI figures out that this lawyer wants to send an engagement letter, pulls a template of it, and automatically fills in the potential client’s information so the entire letter is almost ready to go. The lawyer would only need to review the letter, make some adjustments if necessary, and send the document off. This level of document automation is very different from the traditional ways of lawyers creating templates and typing in every detail.
4. The Trusli document assembly software understands the context, predicts intent, and suggests next steps
Relating to the last point, how we are different from other software systems is that our AI is truly intelligent and understands context.
If you have always generated a set of documents for a certain matter type, our AI will learn and detect that. It will then create a to-do list for you, and suggest every item on the to-do list which documents that it is already aware of. Whether you would like to follow the to-do list and/or the documents is up to you. But ultimately, if you are repeatedly doing something, the AI would know it and suggest it.
Of course, here at Trusli, we have developed multiple automation tools. Our automation ranges from vetting the client, converting the potential client to an actual client, tracking their documents and actions, calendaring what needs to be done, sending out documents for signatures, and ultimately billing the clients for the work the firm has done for them.
All of this should be contextual, intelligent, and pain-free for lawyers. Once it’s set up, the lawyer just does her or his work as usual, with a lot of less tedious tasks, and ultimately bills the clients for the work. No more searching for documents, filling out repeated fields, and sending documents for signature. Here at Trusli, you just click a few buttons and it’s done. Surf during the day and lawyer at night. Trusli enables you to do all the things you didn’t dare to dream about before.
