In today’s digital revolution, artificial intelligence, automation, and robotics are causing a shift in the workplace as significant as that of the first industrial revolution.
According to Altman Weil’s Law Firms in Transition survey, the vast majority of law firm leaders now believe that the commoditization of legal work and smart technologies are a permanent part of the legal landscape. Law firms are under pressure from increasing client expectations for more responsive service and greater efficiency, delivered at a lower cost.
Think about the number of hours that staff at your firm spend creating new contracts or documents from scratch or starting with a similar existing document and using copy/paste and editing to create a new document.
How many hours of manual editing are spent generating new agreements, client intakes, or contracts? How often are errors found in forms, filings, or other documents, inflicting embarrassment or, worse, costly correction? Well, the numbers don’t lie, as they say, and the benefits of document automation are great.
2 Pounds of Paper Per Day
The EPA reports that the average office worker generates approximately two pounds of paper and paperboard products every day. From mistakes printed on the laser printer, bad photocopies, or old memos and reports to old periodicals, 90% of all office waste is paper. While legal document automation won’t eliminate all paper waste, it can greatly increase accuracy and reduce the errors that lead to wasted paper.
Manual vs. Automated Document Management: 3 hours, 6 errors or 15 minutes, error-free
A Legaltech News podcast entitled “How Document Automation Tools Can Help You Maintain Productivity in a Virtual Environment,” describes a law firm benchmarking exercise. Using the traditional copy/paste/edit method to create a new document took on average three hours and incurred six errors in punctuation, spelling, omissions, or printing. By comparison, the same document created using document automation software was completed in fifteen minutes and was 100% accurate.
90% reduction in time spent creating documents
Lawrence and Brickman found that when implemented properly, document automation software reduced the time to create documents to near zero. The savings result from a dramatic decrease in the need to create legal forms and correspondence by using templates that eliminate the errors that come from cutting and pasting. Each field, signature block, or caption can be populated instantly and accurately from a database of information specific to the client and case, generating ready-to-print documents with simple filling-in-the-blanks and mouse clicks.
45.9% of firms see significant results from efficiency efforts
The Altman Weil 2020 study of Law Firms in Transition found that 45.9% of law firms actively pursuing systematic reengineering of work processes report that doing so has “significantly contributed to firm performance.”
69.4 workdays per year = more time for clients
When using document automation for document creation or document management, automating 100 tasks over the course of a year will save 69.4 days of work! For many law firms, the task count is even higher than 100 documents, suggesting even greater time savings. Lawrence and Brickman explain the math in the aforementioned podcast.
See How Much Time You Can Save With Legal Document Automation Software
Caret Legal is a top-tier legal practice management software equipped with document automation software. Get a free trial of CARET Legal and see how you can start using document automation with the forms you’re already using, or get an in-depth demo.
