The new age of legal workflows

Both in-house legal teams and law firms have utilised legal workflows for years, often un-documented, manual, and time-consuming ways of working. It is no longer sufficient in the modern environment to do something simply because it has always been done a certain way. It makes sense to review processes and explore how they can be improved or digitised, as even small iterations can make a noticeable difference.

Let’s discuss the new age of legal workflows and how they will benefit your legal function.

What are legal workflows?

The term ‘legal workflow’ refers to the systematic process of completing a legal task in a series of steps from beginning to end. Having clear, predetermined, and structured workflows is particularly advantageous for legal professionals and can help to organise the complex processes and protocols that often involve numerous internal and external parties.

Why should they be automated?

As featured in ‘What are legal workflows and why should they be automated‘ – using technology to digitise and automate the receipt, approval, and delegation of legal tasks is an opportunity to create standardised, consistent, and accountable workflows.

What is the new age legal workflows?

Automation, as discussed above, is not new. What is new is the flexibility and capabilities of workflows as they apply to complex legal, compliance and regulatory functions, often involving numerous internal and external stakeholders. Traditional enterprise technology usually has limitations that prevent it from being successfully implemented in the legal function. For example, it may not allow for: appropriate permission structures for confidential or sensitive matters, clearing of conflicts, or the ability to be configured and adapted to meet the unique needs of each organisation’s legal function. With modern legal technology, however, you can build and deploy in-depth and intricate legal workflows to streamline processes, creating efficiencies and reducing risk. Lawcadia, an end-to-end legal operation platform for in-house legal teams and law firms, has been leading the charge with highly configurable no-code workflow automation capabilities, powered by Lawcadia Intelligence, an automation engine.

New age legal workflows allow for the following:

• Designing internal workflows with unique questions or reportable fields that enable reporting to a more granular level, facilitating on-demand reports and metrics.
• The creation by law firms of client-facing workflows that automatically trigger actions such as task allocations to lawyers and notifications when a task is overdue, ensuring client service legal agreements are consistently achieved.
• The creation of a multi-level approval process empowers the legal team to track individually triggered workflows to different business areas based on conditions of other workflows, ensuring all actions are created before the signatures of executives are sourced.
• Designing detailed regulatory compliance workflows to assist in collating information, assessing and reporting on potential breaches covering thousands of legislative requirements for legal, privacy, data and cyber risks.
• Advanced reporting and analytics that can map each workflow data point and collate it into actionable reports to prove the legal team’s value within the organisation.
• Engaging law firms for legal matters, incorporating the clearing of conflicts, detailed instructions, and responses back by law firms with fee estimates and alternative fee arrangements.
• Requesting monthly or quarterly responses by panel firms on important metrics such as diversity and inclusion and value adds.

Conclusion

Legal workflow automation has benefited legal teams with increased efficiencies, streamlining processes and minimising manual handling. The new age of legal workflows will elevate this to the next level to solve specific pain points for internal teams or clients, transforming how legal teams work.