An increasing amount of case law, regulations, and compliance demands prompt law firms and legal teams to deliver quick, accurate, and risk-free resolutions. Advanced technology is essential for enhancing legal research, contract management, compliance, and document review processes, making them faster and better organized.
Key factors such as accuracy, data security, and responsibility are crucial for legal practitioners to employ technology effectively. The focus has now shifted to how legal professionals can use technology to improve their processes while maintaining professionalism and integrity.
In this episode of Analytics Insight Podcast, host Priya Dialani talks to Deepak Kapoor, founder of ManuPatra, about the changing legal landscape, the use of technology in legal workflows, and more. The following are highlights of their discussion.
Due to technological advances, the time required to undertake legal tasks has decreased. These activities include drafting summary judgments, preparing timelines, translating documents, drafting first drafts of legal documents, and conducting legal research, among others. Another task that has changed due to the advancement in technology is legal research.
In the past, people conducted keyword searches, which led to results that were both partial and unrelated to the topic of interest. Contextual search enables the lawyer to locate relevant acts and principles related to the issue under review. Technology has helped manage contracts by analyzing key clauses, comparing them with previous ones, and assisting with drafting.
Generative AI can increase productivity, but it should not be taken as the ultimate source of answers. Working with legal documents requires absolute correctness of approach; otherwise, the results may be extremely unpleasant. Such software can provide wrong statements, citations, or conclusions. Thus, the legal profession should treat information provided by generative AI as only a first draft that still needs further review.
A person’s role remains crucial at this point. Each answer must be carefully looked through before its application to any contract, opinion, report on regulations, or even judicial proceedings. Information security is also a crucial issue, especially when dealing with personal clients' data. Thus, technology can greatly facilitate the process, but responsibility should remain with professionals.
The first thing is recognizing that there can never be perfection in any system. Legal departments need to implement processes to ensure that the data used has been verified. Everything produced should be checked against its sources or other legal databases. Verification is an essential step of the process, and not something else altogether. Using applications built on legal data sources is preferable to relying solely on online data.
Training is also critical. Lawyers must learn how useful but also how risky these applications are. They must ask questions about the output, verify sources, and test conclusions made by the systems. The objective is not to eliminate all risks, but to ensure that technology does not impede professionals.
Through technology, legal services will become more readily available and affordable. People and smaller firms will have easy access to the legal system and to legal advice. It will simplify tasks by enabling one to do basic things such as creating an agreement, understanding one's legal rights, analyzing documents, and performing other routine procedures in accordance with the law.
Nevertheless, it should be remembered that the accuracy of the information provided should be high, as incorrect information might cause more harm than good. Through technology, the provision of legal services will increase by enabling lawyers to handle more clients simultaneously while focusing on complex issues.
Technology needs to be seen by legal specialists as an effective means of advancing their field rather than as a complete replacement for it. The problem is that such technologies often face resistance due to the high value placed on precision, accuracy, and established routines in the legal field. Thus, the most reasonable course of action would be to start with practical examples that would clearly demonstrate their effectiveness.
Training should be provided. Training will be necessary, as people need to know how to use them, validate results, and determine when human judgment is still needed. It will also be useful to have some policies on their use and review. Furthermore, one needs to bear in mind that not only will costs be reduced, but more efficient actions will also be taken.
Listen to the full discussion on the Analytics Insight Podcast.