Is technology shaping the way legal department’s work?
Few positive changes result in massive motivation, adding growth all over a department. Who doesn’t want to earn a profit? Who doesn’t want to grow and learn? Molding the new trend into legal departments is not just helping in-house teams to streamline their work process, but also giving them a relief to manage all their day-to-day tasks with little physical effort.
Technology has earned its position in the legal market. Every law firm today is aiming to streamline its work through some of the other tools available online. But to become successful it’s quite important to know about what are the trends going on. Workflow automation is the new key to success for most sectors. Even lawyers and law firms are shifting towards softwares that provides them with all day-to-day help to tackle administrative work successfully. There are many new trends, but some trends are miracles for the legal departments.
Throughout this blog, you will gain insight into what is happening in the in-house legal departments and will realize the topmost recent trends in the legal industry.
Most exemplary changes incurred in the legal departments
Over the past 2 years, in-house legal departments have come a long way to explore, achieve and grow through new trends and innovations. Here are some new trends that are popular in the current time for legal departments.
- Highly Focused on Cybersecurity
Protecting data from theft, damage, and outside access is really crucial for every legal department. With the rise of cyber cases, the need to find and adapt the correct solution is highly needed and important to be implemented in every legal department.
By understanding the concern of security, many legal departments have adopted new methods to secure their data from outside access. The online shift towards cybersecurity is really helpful and beneficial for majorly all departments of the in-house counsel. New regulations and guidelines to protect data are on the hike and legal departments are working towards implementing new guidelines in their workspace.
- Major Shift Towards Artificial Intelligence
How time-consuming can legal research be for a lawyer? Research involves various elements, sources, techniques, and many more to deliver and receive helpful data from the same. Legal departments have to run thousands of research papers to win different cases involving different complexity.
One of the major trends seen in the in-house counsel was the acceptance of artificial intelligence in the workplace. It is used to seamlessly perform research work through higher security support with the help of AI. Artificial intelligence is not replacing lawyers but is a helping hand to many legal departments to streamline every part of their legal case whenever they need it.
- Legal Spend Increasing Towards Technology
One of the biggest trends going on with the in-house counsel is the increase in total expenditure on technological tools and softwares. More and more legal departments are shifting towards automated work with the help of different software applications available online. Not just this, but various helpful integrations in the software are also helping legal departments to cope with the pandemic situation hassle-free, incurring no additional costs.
According to a Gartner Report, legal spending will increase rapidly in 2025 by the in-house legal departments. Technological effects have been positive and eye-opening for many legal departments. More and more legal sectors have been prot]fitable with the use of high tech and helpful technological solutions.
- Increase Use of Online Instant Messaging Software
Working from home and meeting clients’ needs is really difficult with legal departments. Communication is one of the strongest assets that attract more clients and increases the overall client intake of any legal department. But how to streamline communication in remote working?
With the stress of the pandemic, many departments have incurred huge losses because of the unavailability of proper online communication mediums. Using online messaging tools like a flock, and slack, came into existence and a lot of departments were able to smoothly communicate with their staff and their clients from anywhere, anytime.
- Adoption of Remote Working
Manual operation from the office was the all-time acceptance for any in-house legal professional. Whether it be a large firm or even a single legal department, everyone preferred to work from the office and never thought of shifting remotely. Work from phones started with the pressure of the pandemic and then slowly became the new normal for all the professionals.
With the results of working remotely, legal departments are now focusing on increasing profits by cutting down their overheads from what they were incurring before. Flexible working is highly accepted and executed by various counsel legal departments.
- Improved Client Experience
When there are thousands of clients on your list, it’s difficult to manage them. Every organization, whether small or big, works for retaining clients through several techniques, which may include marketing, content posting, timely communication, and many more. Legal departments have researched and experienced the use of a client portal to be one of the finest solutions to deliver clients with all updates.
The client portal allows lawyers and law firms to communicate securely with clients. It also gives access to both lawyer and client to view documents, case status, and event dates anytime needed. It assures client’s about their casework and gives them satisfaction every time.
- Automation of Documents in the Workplace
It has always been a challenge for legal departments to store documents. The management of many paper files was neglected and access to these files was difficult. Documents are one of the most used and needed sources to study a matter or win a case. Even the trial period needs proper documentation before directly presenting it to the jury.
Legal departments have adopted new document management software to easily manage multiple documents from anywhere with no trouble storing them. Document management solutions are enormous and the best ones provide a lot many benefits by giving helpful features which help these departments seamlessly carry out their cases hassle-free.
Frequently Asked Questions
Conclusion
Technology may seem like a tedious task for the legal sector, but it is the one thing that made the remote working of the whole legal sector seamless during the pandemic. Since every sector is now digital, it has become the new normal for law firms to adopt technology as well. Technically advanced law firms gain an edge over their counterparts who have not yet accepted the new normal. Profits are hard to be earned when the work gets flexible, but with perfect tools in hand, in-house teams can benefit a lot more than their old manual working methods. Corporate departments have achieved a lot with the going trends and are continuously working on achieving even more than today.
