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Automating a Company's Legal Process: Challenges and Key Steps

Published on : 15/12/2020 15 December Dec 12 2020

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Freeing lawyers from daunting tasks by automating various legal process is an approach that raises hopes and questions.
Considering the volume of legal documents to be reviewed and the multitude of their formats, most of which are not digital, it is obvious that projects require an organized methodology.

What are the main steps of a successful automation process? Automation frees lawyers from many tasks (reporting, efficiency, productivity, etc...).

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1. What are the challenges of automating the legal process?

Productivity

It takes 10 to 15 minutes to collect key information on a contract before archiving it., With artificial intelligence this task is performed instantaneously. For a hundred or so contracts integrated into a company's management system each month, this represents a saving of 25 hours of work, which can then be allocated to other tasks.

It begs the question of how to best manage operational risk:

The meticulous monitoring of contract deadlines detecting and the detection of clauses at risk are time-consuming tasks with little added value.

2. Steps in legal process automation

Migration of legacy systems

A distinction must be made between digitalization and automation.

Digitization consists of migrating all your paper documents, archiving them, and making them reportable.

Or you will have to enter this information into a software program, which is a heavy task that can discourage legal teams.

In other words, with the various technologies embedded in an automation system, legacy documents are loaded in an intelligent way to bring out the essential information without the need to enter it manually. Whether they are in paper or digital form. This is a considerable time saver.

With the help of OCR technology, all image and PDF documents are saved as an editable and searchable file.

With data mining, essential information is automatically searched and recorded in the correct field in the system.

Artificial intelligence will instantly perform all tasks that typically would take humans a lot of time.

Automation of contract generation

An automated legal process also allows additional services to be provided to operational staff, such as automatic generation of certain standard contracts.

For example, an internal client will be able to modify the variable fields and instantly generate an NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement) for their client to sign without having to ask the legal department.

Monitoring the life of the contract

When the entire document base is loaded and the data is accessible in a structured form, the automated legal process can begin.

Alert notifications
Assignment of tasks
Setting up an approval workflow
Electronic signature

Automation of reporting

Rather than spending time producing manual reports at the end of each month, legal teams will be able to automate their various reporting processes
.

Automatic generation and distribution of reports for operational staff
Automated legal communication
Analysis or KPIs of the legal department

The benefits of automating legal processes are numerous: modernization of working methods, productivity gains, risk reduction and enhanced responsiveness to serve the business and commercial sectors.

Making a success of this project is today's challenge, which will enable legal departments to make an even greater contribution to a company's performance.

Discover how automating legal processes can improve your department’s workload
through this infographic:

Read the infographic

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