Part 2: Enhancing legal efficiency and automation with AI

In April, RWS followed up from our Legalweek February panel session on “Modernizing Legal Practices” with an in-depth discussion on “Enhancing Legal Department Efficiency and Automation with the Use of AI.” If you were unable to join, you can watch the recording of our session here. 

Our session was supported by a hugely-experienced panel of legal practitioners from law firms Paul Hastings LLP and DLA Piper and from M&A advisory firm JEGI CLARITY, moderated by RWS’s Senior Director of Legal Sales, Marco Marino. The talk covered real-world examples of how AI is orchestrating smarter, practical processes to adopt modern legal practices at law firms and General Counsel (GC) departments. In addition, the debate also included discussion on embracing the challenge of acknowledging – and not undervaluing – the preparation and training involved in supporting AI transformation programs. 

Who is driving innovation in law firms or corporate legal departments?

Our panel launched straight into a discussion on where innovation originates. Nikki Shaver, Managing Director of Innovation and Knowledge at Paul Hastings, highlighted the effort taking place in the sector to do things differently with the goal of improving outcomes. Often driven by clients, innovation is increasing efficiency, reducing cost and mitigating risk, and everyone in a firm or department should consider themselves a stakeholder. Shaver concluded that the responsibility for curating this transformation generally lies with specialists in Knowledge Management or Innovation functions.

Armin Hendrich, Partner at DLA Piper, agreed that a holistic, firm-wide approach is required and also that clients are the main motivation for change. They are expecting quicker responses to the need for understanding in what are often very large datasets related to cases, and that embracing the rapid development of technology solutions in this area is pivotal not only to efficiency, but also quality and overall competitiveness for a practice. 

Scott Mozarsky, Managing Director at JEGI CLARITY, concurred with Shaver that Knowledge Management or Innovation experts have a critical role to play in this area. Specifically, he identified the need for strong champions to overcome the inevitable challenges of not making progress due to internal difficulties like community decision-making, organizational structure, change management and cost.

What are the primary barriers to continual innovation in the modern legal sector?

These comments inevitably led to a broadening of the conversation on the barriers to innovation. Mozarsky continued that a key element for successful innovation is the initial commitment to learn and change – to overcome the risk as well as the aversion to being the first mover.

Shaver raised the separate – but critically important – issue of the billable hours model and how that continues to be an impediment to change; this challenge can manifest itself in a lack of commitment to streamlining processes where change results in fewer opportunities to bill. As alternative fee arrangements become more common, Shaver said, firms are becoming more open to automation.

She added that for in-house legal departments, the lack of resources was the most prevalent barrier to innovation and that GCs often turn to law firms for support. This is giving rise to increased opportunities for client-law firm collaborations around innovation and digital transformation, with law firms playing the part of strategic innovation partners.

Hendrich introduced the ongoing perception of security as a barrier to innovation. He identified that there is a movement towards increased regulation, particularly around cloud usage, and that even though legaltech actually tends to enhance security, this is often not how it is perceived by buyers and regulators. He ended on a hopeful note though that the (long-awaited) growing interoperability of technology platforms plays an important role in enabling firms to navigate a path through the challenge of data overload.

How have law firms and in-house legal departments transformed to keep up with automation and AI?

The panel turned next to real examples of how automation and AI are bringing about change in the industry. Hendrich made the distinction that “true AI” is not transforming firms in the immediate term – the current trend is more in areas like advanced analytics where meaningful processing of data by machines is working more efficiently than it can with humans. He asserted that law firms are ahead of legal departments in this area – for now. Wherever ”AI is put to work”, it takes over commodity work that will free up lawyers to provide better legal analysis for their clients.

Both Hendrich and Shaver used secure language translation as an example of how risk can be improved within a practice. By using an assured process that avoids data leakage outside of the firm, both agreed that secure end-to-end translation workflows are an example of how technology can improve trust between a firm and its clients.

Mozarsky added that great progress has been made in critical operational areas through the use of automation and AI, including technology-assisted review, online legal services, drafting pleadings and due diligence. These have allowed firms to focus on higher-value legal work, but practitioners should be cognizant of the challenge in costing technology-driven solutions appropriately and not giving them away either cheaply or for free. Shaver also provided the examples of machine-learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) where technology is delivering value, along with the established areas of eDiscovery, bulk contract review, and growing trends around workflow and robotic process automation (RPA); together, such technologies are increasing consistency and reducing risk across certain practice areas in the legal sector.

Hendrich concluded this section with a comment about the competitor landscape – that firms are recognizing that competitive advantage is possible through the application of legaltech and that this is driving increased adoption in some areas.

How will the democratization of technology shape the future of the legaltech space?

Finally, the subject of technology’s impact on the legal profession was touched upon. Shaver suggested that there are myriad processes involved in the more mundane elements of everyday legal work, especially for junior associates, and that technology has a major role to play in digitizing these aspects of practice. Hendrich agreed that legaltech presents an opportunity for law firms to assist young lawyers in the early stages of their careers.

The panel concluded with some strong statements about the future of legaltech:

• Firstly, that legaltech providers can help drive increased adoption through a more conscious approach to product development, particularly by improving intuitiveness of platforms through user-centric design.
• Secondly, that much development in the future will be dictated by the increased attention currently being shown to the legal sector from big tech firms – this will, in turn, lead to legaltech simply becoming tech without the need to specifically label its application to the legal industry. 

The webinar recording is here if you would like to see the full panel discussion, or here to read part 1 in the series. To find out more about our scalable and secure machine translation click here, or if you would like to learn more about our services into the legal sector then visit our dedicated industry page here.