As a legal professional you are likely managing loads of legal documents and paperwork on a daily basis. It can be a challenging task to keep everything orderly and consistent—even for the most organized legal professionals. But, with legal document automation, you can put an end to the document chaos. Legal document automation enables you to streamline the legal document creation process by creating smart templates and forms that work for you automatically.
Through a centralized location for all your legal correspondence, agreements, contracts, advisory opinions and other legal documents you can boost your team’s productivity and efficiency as you spend less time creating documents from scratch and more time focusing on resolving your critical cases and matters.
There are numerous advantages to implementing legal document automation within your organization. Here are four easy ways to streamline repetitive tasks through document automation:
Four Ways Automation Can Help Alleviate Repetitive Tasks
- Self-service document generation.
If you are like most legal professionals, you work with a large number of documents each day. The amount of time spent drafting, customizing and editing each document can be extensive and repetitive.
Legal document automation can save you time and valuable resources by streamlining this process through the use of automated templates and forms. This occurs through the following steps:
- Template Creation. Users set up templates for standard documents that are frequently used or needed (i.e. Wills, agreements, contracts, forms and letters).
- Input Answers to Questions. Users input specific information in the template or automatically utilize information already contained in the file.
- Document Generation. Once the information is obtained, the document is automatically generated with the specific information that was provided.
- Document Finalization. Once you have reviewed the document that was created, you can make any changes as well as save all the necessary formatting changes.
There are no limits to the customizations and requirements that can be established to ensure each document is precisely tailored to your specific needs. Subsequently, when team members
need to access a standard document or contract, they simply need to respond to a few prompts,
and the document will be automatically generated with just a few clicks.
- Maintain compliance within all your legal documents.
Legal documents rely on consistency. One of the best ways for legal professionals to cut down on errors and discrepancies is through incorporating standardized templates and forms. You can ensure your legalese and formatting is consistent across all documents through built-in legal document automation.
With this feature, you can utilize any data stored in your cases or matters as a merge field for document assembly. Fully integrated with standard programs like Microsoft Word, the best legal
case management systems help you create and edit documents without ever having to log out of your system. You have full access to all the features of Microsoft Word for creating and formatting your standard templates.
Legal document automation has thousands of data fields (tokens) that can be customized to create master templates in line with your unique practice requirements. Users can also create their own tokens that prompt for data insertion when a document is generated. These options allow you to spend less time on administrative tasks and more time focused on resolving your legal cases and matters.
- Automated legal matter intake.
The advancements in legal technology today enable legal professionals to design a framework for intake that is seamless for both the requestor and the legal team. This new way to work eliminates the stressors that come with dealing with manual data entry and lost pieces of paper.
Legal automation can help you create a customized template for intake requests to capture all the necessary information you need to open new files without picking up the phone or a pencil.
The options are endless when it comes to the types of data you can capture. Typically, the following information makes up an intake request:
- Personal Information: This section includes fields for personal and contact information as well as department details if necessary.
- Legal Services Requested: This section can include a checklist of services offered so that the client can select any and all that may apply. You can also include a brief description of each service offered on the form.
- Case Explanation: This section provides the opportunity for the client to describe the incident or help needed. There may be specific prompts to include based on your unique organization to ensure you get all the information you need.
The beauty of customizable legal document automation is the opportunities are endless when it comes to creating intake forms that work for your unique department or organization.
- Approval workflow automation.
Once you have established the right templates and forms for all your various needs, legal case management software allows you to establish a customized workflow to help ensure standards are followed and deadlines are met.
Legal team members can configure workflows to trigger an unlimited number of responses to specific actions. Based on users’ responses, your legal case management system will trigger actions such as the creation of calendar items, tasks, email notifications, approvals and more. This automated workflow helps the legal process run more smoothly and saves you time as the system sends automated notices to team members to review or approve documents, complete certain tasks, indicate deadlines, etc.
One critical aspect to legal automation is the ability to alert each legal team member of calendar notifications, due dates or tasks through the legal case management system. This takes team productivity and efficiency to new heights as you can set your workflow up once and let the system work for you thereafter.
Legal Software That Works to Move Your Cases Along Automatically
In a world that moves fast and is continually asking legal professionals to do more with less, it is essential to consider how legal automation can help you become more efficient and productive. If you have consolidated your legal data in one location, why not leverage it to your advantage through automation?
Legal Files has built-in legal document automation features to help you get the most from your data—so you can spend less time on administrative, repetitive tasks and more time on larger, strategic goals and legal operations.
With Legal Files Software, you can utilize tools specifically designed to help legal teams be more productive through automation, workflows, standardized templates and more. You can also have the peace of mind that comes from knowing that your data is secure.
With more than 30 years of experience supporting organizations across a number of industries, Legal Files gives you the security, peace of mind and much-needed collaboration that can only come from a unified, centralized platform for all your legal cases, matters, issues or projects.
“We wanted, and needed, a corporate legal software with a workflow system. We developed a whole process for legal holds using Legal Files, up to, and including, the end of the cycle with a file closing procedure that reminds us to release the legal hold. We created the appropriate workflow wizards to trigger reminders at specific intervals and document templates to generate legal hold memos.”
Alayne P. Russom, a Legal Files Customer
Thrivent Financial for Lutherans
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