Legal Tech

Legal teams and Law Firms are nowadays more and more confronted with an increasingly digitizing business world. The digital transformation changes the way legal advice is delivered. Legal Counsels faces the major challenges to organize a complete digital transition in a very short time frame. Lawyers are looking for tools to manage the ever-increasing mass of digital information and to use it efficiently.

Of course, most legal teams and law firms are nowadays already working very digitally, but there are still a lot of stumbling blocks.

Most law firms and legal teams store and save documents and e-mails in different folders, on a USB stick or even on unsecured file sharing sites, making them less discoverable in the future. Documents get duplicated and nobody knows what the most recent version of the file is. Old e-mails and documents from ex-employees seem to have vanished. Information that was accidentally deleted gets lost. Internal search engines that are not so smart come up with no or too many results.

This way-of-working, evidently, leads to chaos.

Fortunately, there are more and more Legal Tech solutions emerging which are useful support to the legal services landscape and their working processes.

Keep on reading to find out what Legal Tech is and how it can be an added value to your business.

Legal Tech, quid?

Legal Technology, from now on Legal Tech, is software and technology which is used by law firms or legal teams to facilitate their processes and improve their effectiveness. Legal Tech can be called as ‘the driver of the legal industry’ to succeed the process of digital transformation. The aim of Legal Tech is to simplify operations, optimize current workflows and improve the overall management of knowledge and information that exists in law firms or enterprises.

Within which areas or domains can Legal Tech be a huge support?

Legal tech automates various legal tasks, whether they are simple or complex. In recent years, Legal Tech has also evolved towards the development of online platforms for legal services. But in this article we go deeper into the different domains in which Legal Tech supports the daily way of working within legal teams and law firms.

The traditional and most common areas in which Legal Tech operates are:

• Accounting 
• Billing
• Document automation and storage – document management 
• Electronic discovery/ E-discovery
• Legal research
• Practice management
• Case management

On top of these mentioned traditional areas, nowadays Legal Tech also focusses on the next areas to support: 

• Cloud-based databases, to make data accessible for other employees across departments
• Data security, to ensure the security of legal records 
• Guaranteed GDPR compliant way of working (read more about GDPR here)
• Digitalisation & automation of legal workflows
• Offering platforms that facilitate contract management
• E-Signing tools
• Legal chatbots (Messenger, Chatbox, etc.),to offer users quick answers to basic legal inquiries

What are the benefits of using Legal Tech?

Benefits for managing documents and e-mails

• Avoid misuse of wrong versions or users continuing to work on an already obsolete version of a document.
• Search and find every e-mail that you need.
• Never lose an e-mail again.
• Ensure compliance with laws such as SOW, GDPR, privacy,…
• Your users can stop recreating text that someone else has already written before.
• Documents can be accessed internally and externally, from different locations, in a fully secured way.
• Benefits for managing matters and cases
• Securely manage matters like contracts, litigation, advice, …
• Fully integrated Entity Management and Corporate Housekeeping
• Users can stop recreating text and advice that was already written in the past
• Find & re-use terms, clauses, advice and prejudice hidden in documents, e-mail and websites
• Discover what you should know, and don’t miss anything
• Quickly find all relevant documents related to a customer / case / issue … related to the specific context that you are searching for.
• Get a 360° view on a customer / case / issue / …, with all relevant information.
• Integrate newcomers much faster

Legal Tech, for you?

Legal Tech has two different target groups to serve. On the one hand, Legal Tech must meet the legal digital challenges of law firms and on the other hand, it must support the digitization of legal departments. Two different target groups, with slightly different solutions. Knowliah has a custom solution for both of them!