Building the Law Firm of the Future with Cloud-Based Ediscovery Software
The rapid evolution of innovation within the legal industry has radically transformed the discovery process for legal professionals. The manually intensive processes of retrieving, storing, and sharing critical information are now increasingly automated through the use of sophisticated cloud-based ediscovery software, saving cross-functional teams time and allowing them to manage higher volumes of data with greater precision and an overall reduced possibility of human error. Whether you represent a law firm, government entity, or corporation, the need to utilize the latest and best ediscovery software for the optimization of outdated and time-consuming practices is becoming more urgent all the time.
Cloud-Based Ediscovery Software and the State of the Legal Industry
As a result of the pandemic, law firms and legal teams spent much of 2020 and 2021 adjusting to the need to work remotely. Law firms, for example, were meaningfully impacted, whether considering case-building initiatives throughout the discovery process, or navigating the complexities of arguing cases in virtual courtrooms. Attorneys and supporting staff members had no choice but to become more self-sufficient in their leveraging of technology, and legal organizations had an obligation to enhance overall technical competency in order to address a number of operational deficiencies.
One key operational deficiency still facing many legal teams is the issue of remote access. The need for team members at all levels to have unencumbered access to information in a remote setting has not — and likely will not — subside as the impact of the pandemic wanes. For law firms, the reason for this is not necessarily because legal teams will continue working in entirely remote settings for the indefinite future, but because the novel demands placed on legal organizations in 2020 have been transformative to the nature of legal work at large. As noted by Ari Kaplan, a prominent industry analyst and ediscovery thought leader, the pandemic has seemingly forced 10 years of change into 10 months in the legal industry, and the adoption and optimization of digital solutions are at the center of this fundamental shift.
The Legal Industry Has Entered a New Era
Today, building the legal workforce of the future requires technical competency like never before. Ediscovery tools for remote access have been instrumental in keeping legal operations afloat during the pandemic and have subsequently accelerated the speed and efficiency of legal teams, changing the nature of competition as well as fundamental expectations placed on attorneys by both their clients and the legal system.
In fact, many courts, mandated by bar associations, required a certain level of technical competency for legal teams to argue cases throughout 2020, causing organizations to speed up digital transformation efforts as a strict obligation and prerequisite to continued practice. Those who remain slow to cultivate such competency run much more than a theoretical risk, and could end up falling behind their competitors sooner than they expect.
Setting aside the potential pitfalls of operational deficiencies related to technical know-how, enhancing organizational capacity for remote access and leveraging powerful, cloud-based automation tools can provide a number of benefits to how legal teams operate. In addition to empowering attorneys and staff members with more access and control over how they collaborate on cases, automated workflows can significantly boost the speed at which work gets done and allow teams to accomplish more in increasingly shorter time frames.
Of course, not all automated workflow platforms will deliver the speed or ease of use necessary to make them workable solutions for all legal teams, and many cloud-based technologies are still behind the curve in these areas. Increasing the speed at which team members draft, review, and collaborate on cases will not make much of a difference if other teams are working even faster, and automated workflows will not be particularly helpful if team members are not leveraging them effectively.
Modernize Your Law Firm with Everlaw
Everlaw’s automation tools are designed intuitively, allowing attorneys and supporting staff members at all levels of the organization to set up workflows without the burden of steep learning curves and coding knowledge. We have optimized our cloud-based ediscovery software for speed and efficiency without compromising ease of use.
In other words, our technology currently leads the industry in document review, allowing reviews, enhanced by process automations, to happen at an unmatched rate of up to 140 docs/hour, approximately 2.5X faster than other cloud platforms. Additionally, the processing power of Everlaw’s platform provides for optimal remote access and collaboration, allowing for typical organizational datasets to be processed at the rate of up to 900,000 docs/hour.
Key to the workflows set out here is our leveraging of artificial intelligence (AI) in the form of supervised and unsupervised machine learning, which has allowed legal teams to maintain these impressive throughputs and improve on them simultaneously. In this way, automating workflows with Everlaw’s platform will boost speed and efficiency in the immediate term, as well as orient teams toward continued growth and further technological capabilities down the line.
Automation tools adopted out of the need to work remotely have increased legal teams’ abilities to collaborate more effectively, and these tools are bound to remain assets as legal organizations resume in-person and hybrid arrangements in the coming months. The time for gaining technological competency is right now, and the key is cloud-based software that allows every member of your team to get more work done, and faster.
Are you interested in learning more about how cloud-based ediscovery software can modernize your law firm? Check out our white paper, “Why Cloud, Why Now: The Future of Ediscovery is in the Cloud.” For more on ediscovery trends, see “2021 Ediscovery Trends: Collaboration and Security.”
