RPA in the Legal Industry. How Can It Help?

Law is not a law if it violates the principles of eternal justice. ‘Getting Timely Justice’ is an important and integral principle of eternal justice. But we often see, hear, and read about how cases go on for a long time. Sometimes, they extend for a time beyond imagination and generate a feeling of ‘injustice’.

Shortages of judges along with inadequate infrastructure is one reason for delayed justice that only the government can control. But the other part is the inefficiency in legal work that can be easily controlled and manageable. There are various repetitive and clerical tasks that a legal firm needs to execute in a very high volume each day. By doing them manually, significant time is consumed. You can automate all such tasks using robotic process automation to save time and speed up the wheel of justice.

In legal firms, a lot of research work is done to calculate the risk associated with a specific case. The enablement of RPA in the legal sector helps the legal team to automate anti-money laundering (AML) and Counter-Terrorist Financing (CTF) risk assessment work. RPA solutions by carefully doing risk analysis present client’s details that include location, service, relationship, etc., and prepare an automated report. You can also check whether to pick a case or not or whether it is worth fighting. Using an RPA tool or robotic process automation software, you can evaluate case-to-cost data, find a client’s credit rating, search accounts payable and get an accurate analysis of risk level.

When a capable legal professional leaves the firm, it is not just a loss of valuable manpower but also of the knowledge that he/she used to apply while managing cases. It is a common problem in the legal sector that can be handled with ease by embracing RPA software.

The enablement of RPA in the legal sector empowers you to create a technological framework to capture, store, share, and manage precious knowledge. Knowledge automation built using RPA technology helps you fill the knowledge gap easily and ensures the smooth functioning of legal operations. No matter whoever leaves your firm. You can share such knowledge automation systems with external agencies as well to gain from their experience and even help them with your knowledge repository as well.

There is too much simple but repetitive work carried out in the legal sector that consumes too much time, energy, and effort. For example tasks like filing information, recording, searching databases, making contracts & affidavits, etc. Legal firms hire paralegal teams to execute such tasks as those do not require great legal acumen for their successful execution. Usage of RPA in the legal sector assists legal firms to reduce their dependence on paralegal teams. RPA solution or RPA tool can help you automate and manage rule-based or clerical work with ease while saving your money. A successful RPA implementation frees employees’ time of legal firms and lets them focus better on strategic or critical legal work. It helps boost the productivity and performance of legal teams.

In the legal sector, especially in big legal firms, executives are overburdened with various mundane and time consuming tasks related to finance management. According to a research conducted by Deloitte, 91% of finance professionals want to automate accounts payable processes. RPA software for the legal department helps the enterprise to automatically fetch data from vendors’ invoices. Also, the RPA solution is capable of feeding data into the financial planning system to ensure smooth and timely delivery of payments. You can automate bill generation and dispatch work as well using RPA bots.

There are various stringent rules and regulations, mandated by the government and various other agencies that organizations working in the legal sector need to adhere to. Manually checking each protocol is not just time-consuming but error-prone as well. Moreover, even the slightest of error or failure in managing compliances can force you to pay hefty fines. In serious matters, it may lead to sanctions as well. Using RPA software, you can do due diligence, get aware of any suspicious activity or error, and act promptly to mitigate potential risk. The enablement of RPA in the legal sector gives you greater peace of mind and helps in running legal operations while managing compliance without pain.

Implementation of RPA in legal services helps maintain a robust communication channel between the fee earner and the client. Using RPA bots, you can collect documents and information required to run a case in court. Automated bots can process files and feed data into the system that can be utilized at the time of background research and case planning. If there are any discrepancies or missing information found, it can directly send an update to the client for its timely redressal. During the entire legal journey, the RPA system can auto-inform the client about court procedural updates and act as an effective medium to track the progress of the case.

It is said that over 50% of the time of a legal firm is spent doing tasks that can easily be automated. Saved time can improve the pace of the cases and help firms to deliver justice in a much shorter duration than usual. While seeing the current status of pending cases in top courts, it seems that it is the right time to enable digitalization in the legal sector. RPA is the leading solution in this that can help revolutionize the legal sector like no other means.