3 Ways Automation Is Changing the Way Legal Professionals Do Their Jobs
Will automation lead to vast improvements in productivity and freedom from mundane tasks, or loss of jobs and workplace disruption? In the legal world, automation is critical to stay ahead of the curve, particularly for litigation practitioners. Ediscovery is a moving target, an ever-evolving landscape in need of end-to-end platforms that are revolutionizing the way legal professionals work in the following ways:
Increased Efficiency
An analysis by McKinsey Quarterly concluded that 60 percent of occupations could save up to 30 percent of their time with automation, and 23 percent of the work done by attorneys can be automated by existing technology. To keep pace with the growing volume of documents in ediscovery, legal professionals must concentrate on increasing efficiency through automation and workflow optimization.
The largest case on Everlaw in 2019 contained over 68 million documents, equivalent to over 10,000 feature length movies. The time and effort to upload terabytes worth of data to the platform and then review this data is massive. Everlaw’s proprietary processing engine minimizes the time it takes from ingestion to review by handling up to 500k documents per hour while simultaneously automating error-handling, deduplication, deNISTing, OCR, and imaging. Ultimately this provides a more clean, culled down document set devoid of redundancies and reduces the time it takes to upload data from months to weeks, days, or even hours.
When automation is used to reduce redundant work and unearth meaningful information, these professionals are free to focus on areas that require their expertise: getting to the facts that matter and reviewing the most relevant documents to build a convincing case.
Decreased Review Time
Reducing review time (and costs) is the name of the game in ediscovery. Although legal professionals need to save time and costs and pass these savings on to their clients, this is virtually impossible without innovative technological solutions. Everlaw users are leveraging these tools to automate previously time-consuming tasks. In June 2019, Everlaw launched Auto-Code Contexts, an easy-to-use feature to help users automate the coding of documents with similar relationships, enabling litigation teams to start and finish review much more quickly and accurately.
From 2017 – 2019, we have seen users spend 48% less time reviewing a project, indicating that they are reaping high efficiencies from automated tasks like batch coding.
Improved Collaboration
According to one survey of corporate executives, employees, and educators representing diverse markets, 86% of employees and executives cite absence of collaboration or unproductive communication for workplace failures. Workplace communication problems are not unique to any industry, including law, yet increased collaboration will help power law in 2020 and beyond. By allowing for more collaboration in the handling of complex legal matters, automation will boost review efficiency, improve communication, and help eliminate knowledge silos.
Keeping Pace with Everlaw
Everlaw’s collaborative suite of tools help illuminate the truth, enabling faster reviews by allowing legal teams to communicate in real-time – significantly reducing the necessity for time-consuming emails, phone conversations, and manual document transfers. For more information on how automation is revolutionizing work within the legal industry, download our white paper “Ediscovery Trends and User Insights: A Year in Review” today.
