Legal Tech: Establishing, Collecting, and Analyzing Metrics for Success
Liza Pestillos‑Ocat
As legal tech vendors, we’re often asked, “What’s the ROI on your software?” Our response is familia(...)
Generative AI in litigation: Turning talk into transformation
Opus 2
In recent years, generative AI (GenAI) has captured the legal industry's attention, moving from buzz(...)
How do you calculate the return your legal firm will get from investing in a document management system (DMS)? To help with the answer, this article explains how to calculate ROI using ‘hard cost’ savings.
The adoption of a Cloud-based document management system makes sense on several levels, but how can you prove that it’s to the firm’s advantage to invest in a DMS before you make that commitment? Typically, firms guesstimate non-billable time (soft costs) via a formula that might look like this:
With investigations on the rise, effectively managing and reducing potential brand, reputation and financial risk is critical to all organizations. Research from Gartner recently found that legal and compliance professionals are experiencing higher than normal levels of work. These demands are often at odds with static or declining budgets and resources constraints.
As a law firm owner, your first and foremost need is to boost the efficiency of your business. I’ve heard this time and time again during dozens of conversations with law firm leaders from across the U.S. What I have also picked up is that advanced law businesses are leveraging legaltech to optimize every little part of every business process.
Some start with seemingly inconsequential tasks — and yield jaw-dropping results. From my experience, a small law firm can slash costs by $150,000 per year by simply bringing bits of automation to the process of contract review.
The sharp minds at Epona realize that for information to work for you, it needs liberty. It needs freedom. No lock-in from another 3rd party vendor database in the cloud. Employees need to be able to access content through applications they know and love natively.
Legal firms handle a great deal of sensitive information. This can include everything from corporate intellectual property, client and financial data to personally identifiable information (PII). In many cases, some or all of this information is accessible to employees via their work-issued smartphones and laptops. Your firm’s IT team is probably responsible for providing the firm with video conferencing, secure access to a whole host of SaaS-delivered applications and general internet sites through web browsers. In the same vein, they are probably also supporting requests for the use of non-traditional apps (in order to meet client preferences) for modern communication and social media interaction. It’s these kinds of apps that have the potential to put a firm out of compliance or give hackers an additional entry point to be able to compromise the firm’s data security.
Long-term home working will have had its pros and cons for many legal practitioners over the last 18 months. But, with new research showing that many law firms plan to switch to a permanent model of hybrid working as restrictions ease, questions and challenges are thrown up around privacy and compliance.
Here, Brian Rogers, Regulatory Director at law technology specialist Access Legal, discusses the most overlooked compliance procedures during the pandemic and the processes law firms should consider introducing to their remote working policies to ensure clear boundaries are set.
How confident are you that you really know what a document management system (DMS) can do and the additional opportunities that it can provide to the firm? I find people broadly know what it is, but their understanding only goes so far. Yes, a DMS allows for electronic filing of documents and emails into a virtual filing cabinet from where they can be easily searched and retrieved. But that’s ‘DMS 101’. What’s really powerful are the other things that become possible when paper is eliminated and the physical is transformed into the digital. This short article is about what can be achieved when you start to realise the opportunities beyond DMS 101.
In March 2021, Microsoft shared detailed information regarding a “state-sponsored threat actor” based in China that targeted a wide range of entities in the U.S. — including law firms. The highly sophisticated cyber attack used previously unknown exploits to infiltrate on-premise Microsoft Exchange Server software at tens of thousands of organizations across the U.S.
The American Bar Association published Formal Opinion 498 on March 10, 2021 which provides guidance for the virtual practice of law. They stress some of the same things they have previously such as the competence requirements of ABA Model Rule 1.1 and the confidentiality requirements of ABA Model Rule 1.6 and Formal Opinion 477R. They now go further and discuss some of the other rules that go beyond an individual lawyer working remotely to an entire law firm working remotely.
Recent research has shown that professional services firms face a variety of pressures surrounding pricing, competition, and client expectations. In the 2020 Law Department Operations Survey, 75% of respondents revealed their companies are actively trying to save costs by bringing more work in house. The recent Legal Pricing and Project Management (LPPM) Survey also pointed to a client-driven innovation trend, with firms implementing new processes for budgeting, proposals, and fee arrangements driven by the LPPM function and partner-led change management.
The COVID-19 pandemic has removed any doubt that for firms to remain competitive in 2021, they must embrace and invest in technology that will better serve the customer and reduce costs. Despite a historic resistance to change, the profession was already feeling the heat pre-pandemic as technology giants have set a new standard for customer communication and transparency. These redefined customer expectations cut across all industries — not just big tech.
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