Streamlining Legal Operations with Artificial Intelligence

What is legal operations? 

In a law firm, many of the tasks carried out by lawyers are not strictly legal. Lawyers have to deal with financial, administrative, IT and vendor management tasks, while ensuring that the law firm operations keep on running smoothly. Not easy and extremely time consuming.

 In fact, there is a whole system that manages these processes as efficiently as possible, Legal Operations. Quite a few processes fall under the umbrella of legal operations, but the most common include improving workflow, standardizing tasks, extracting critical information from documents and optimizing resources.

Removing the clerical and administrative work from the equation improves performance by positioning law professionals to focus primarily on the legal end. In addition to increasing overall productivity, legal operations reduces the reliance on external forms of legal counsel.

 

6 Key Responsibilities of legal operations professionals

Legal operations professionals provide a variety of services, such as:

 

1. Strategise: Develop actionable strategies and initiatives that bolster process workflows to increase productivity.
2. Define/track metrics: Identify, incorporate, and track metrics to ensure that current or future processes provide clearly defined and measurable improvements.
3. Working cross-functionally: Add value to a team by incorporating various expertise and skill sets to meet a common goal.
4. Optimisation: Effectively leverage the firm’s internal and external resources to improve performance and increase VFM (value for money).
5. Tech-oriented solutions: Integrate technology, such as AI, into processes to maximize productivity and decrease labour costs.
6. Spend management: Manage outside legal counsel spend by maintaining visibility of spend, pursue opportunities to reduce cost, and budgeting.

 

Improving legal operations with artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence enables a whole suite of solutions to streamline legal operations by cutting down on time, cost, labour, and stress.

Time and cost: The automation of repetitive tasks with machine learning technology can drastically reduce the time required to identify and analyze relevant contract provisions. Unlike conventional labour, artificial intelligence maintains a consistent pace and reviews each line of text with the same degree of focus and effectiveness from start to finish.  Cognitiv+’s highly accurate machine learning technology can identify and analyze relevant contract provisions, resulting in customer-reported time savings of 30–70%.

Risk mitigation: Risks come in all shapes and sizes but share one key characteristic: they are costly. Artificial intelligence can offer a 360-degree approach to risk mitigation and can maintain an efficiency that is out of reach for conventional contract analysis. Artificial intelligence also addresses these three common problems:

 

1. Human error: Large workloads can make even the most seasoned associate slip up and make a mistake. For example, with M&A due diligence projects, associates are often tasked to review a sea of contracts to catch potential criticalities. These requests are often paired with a tight deadline and require an intense level of focus that inevitably diminishes due to tedium.
2. Availability bias: Unfortunately, this is a common problem plaguing the due diligence process that stems from only reviewing about 10–20% of a contract pool. More often than not, critical information is overlooked or outright missed until after the M&A process. Artificial intelligence remedies this by affording associates the means to analyse an entire contract pool. 
3. Identifying new info: Artificial intelligence can review documents with a larger degree of efficiency to catch inconsistent elements. Document review technology can even point out potential instances of fraud by identifying changes in the patterns of invoices over a select timeframe or an uncommonly invoiced item.

 

Establish a data-driven approach

Document review powered by Artificial intelligence excels in extracting crucial information from legal documents. Some examples of extractable data include prices, fees as well as termination dates. Further, this data can be used to help anticipate the collection of late fees or the renewal/termination of contracts. Cognitiv+ technology allows for extraction of data at scale, while you can use your domain-specific parameters and develop custom Machine Learning (ML) models for legal insight extraction without the need of data-scientists

Workflow optimization

Artificial intelligence is most effective when used as an integrated solution. The right application programming interface offers the best of both worlds by allowing you to enhance preexisting systems or create a new one with machine learning technology as the foundation. Cognitiv+ API allows for fast integration with existing DMS systems and other technology. 

 

Cognitiv+ Features

Cognitiv+ is an AI-powered document review platform that allows for fast and accurate document analysis, data extraction and risk assessment. Some of our features include: 

Document Vision Our latest VisionAI models render all documents into machine readable formats 

90+ Out-of-the-Box Legal Insight Models Identify contract clauses, entities, and obligations in a few clicks 

Clause type understanding Using proprietary Natural Language Processing (NLP) models, we build a most robust clause-type classifier with 350 defined clause types, including Favored Nation 

Customizable Machine Learning Apply your domain-specific parameters using the no-code builder and develop custom Machine Learning models for legal insight extraction without the need of data-scientists

 Multilingual support Ongoing development of transfer learning techniques enable you to use models you create into different languages