Law firm managers and administrators deal with a flood of information — possibly even more than lawyers themselves. While lawyers use volumes of prior judgements and supporting documents for a case, it’s law firm administrators who are responsible for storing, retrieving and maintaining files for cases all across the firm.
A recent survey done by e-discovery specialists showed the average case had 6.5 million pages, 10-15 custodians and 130 GB of data — that’s a lot to file. Why so much? The spread of data comes across tools like Microsoft Teams, Slack, cloud tools and social media apps. These hold the conversations and documents used to support a case. Unstructured data makes up 80% or more of these items.
To handle this flow of information, firm administrators need established workflows and attention to detail. While automating structured documents (like a tax form) is common, the same isn’t true for unstructured data. Unstructured data administration is typically done by hand — or at least it used to be. Modern artificial intelligence (AI) has made it so that more manual tasks in law firms are becoming automated, including handling unstructured data that would have been near impossible before.
This use of technology helps — not hurts — legal jobs. And admins will need to be efficient when assigning workload if they want to optimize their time (and the billable potential of the firm). So how can you automate your law firm’s workflows? Here are four steps to consider.
How big is your firm? Automation can benefit administrators and managers for law firms of every size. However, the administrative team of a major LLP and an administrative manager of a solo law office will face dramatically different volumes of data.
The explosion of AI into legal technology means there are options available for all types of firms. To use them, you’ll need an understanding of where the bulk of your workload lies. For example, onboarding, discovery or document review might all be areas where your admin team is short on time.
You should also consider the resources (such as IT support or infrastructure) you already have in place, and what areas can get you the best return. Some law firms have schedule optimization software, client onboarding portals, or time-tracking that will help you find this time.
Automation needs to complement your existing workflows — and be inserted at the right part of the path. For example, if you have an assistant collect client data through an onboarding checklist, and then have your paralegal team handle processing and requesting the paper files, you might need to digitize your documents first.
Then, your administrators can automate the process by uploading them to a medical summary platform to index and store. To skip a step and streamline this process, the administrator might upload client documents immediately into the digital portal, collect discovery documents electronically or have an AI tool request and pull them via email. Like a chain, each step of the process will depend on the previous stage — so it’s important to visualize all the steps and identify where automation can improve the process.
Automating workflows in your law firm can not only save you money — it can also free up managers’ and administrative staff’s time. Reducing manual tasks and repetitive work can lead to processing documents 83% faster.
“Firm associates and administrators can only handle so many files at a time, and admins will need to be efficient when assigning workload if they want to optimize their time (and the billable potential of the firm).”
In addition, part of the legal management workflow is work allocation. Associates and lawyers can only handle a certain amount of work. This is also true for a legal admin team. Client portals are often part of the legal process, and the documents that clients upload will all need to be reviewed, filed and stored. Optimizing work allocation between managers and administrators — especially if your firm is large — is another task best suited for a machine rather than placing this burden on legal administrators. Even purely administrative tasks like invoicing can eat at your bottom line and impact the efficiency of the team.
Billable time is the most important factor for your law firm’s profitability. This is still important for the admin team, who may not always be directly billing time. Associates and lawyers are billed out for these skills, and administrators provide crucial support in collecting and preparing the information. Unfortunately, these administrative tasks can often take up more time than the firm can spare. Document review, legal research or proofreading can all be frustrating and lengthen processing time, especially when these documents are long, unstructured medical reports.
AI platforms are able to generate medical summaries, chronologies and indexed medical records for each file, meaning associates, paralegals and administration can get the info they need in minutes. Machine learning-powered platforms can remove duplicates, index files related to a case, summarize long texts, and custom-sort your documents by keyword or by rules your firm defines.
The result is a clean, easy to use document — and that perfectly complements your human tasks. All this means your operations can move more than 80% faster. It won’t eliminate legal jobs, but it will take some of the stress out of paperwork and speed up the process for clients, benefiting everyone involved.
