Staying at the forefront of innovative thinking and technology is crucial for maintaining the best possible quality of legal services. Modernising your legal service delivery means providing a better legal product to your clients and creating a more efficient environment within a legal firm. Here’s how future legal innovations could impact the delivery of legal services in years to come.
Strategic Data Usage and Analysis
Having a centralised view of legal data and a standardised approach to collecting, preserving, and sharing it will help to streamline legal processes going forward.
Scaling up data management processes and having access to larger volumes of case data affords legal teams a greatly increased bank of legal resources which they can use to provide more accurate guidance. Understanding historical case data and how it reflects on a case at hand will be more straightforward due to accessibility of relevant data.
Centrally managed data will also allow corporate organisations to provide access to external firms at the push of a button, rather than relying on a lengthy preparation process which needs to cater to the unique preferences of each firm. Being able to extrapolate the relevant data from documents, then isolate and transfer it over for third parties will cut down on costs and time.
Having access to a wealth of data gives legal experts a wider remit to employ the help of data scientists and other specialised peoples in order to better understand the legal landscape they’re operating in via data analysis. Risks can be flagged and regulatory issues will be raised earlier on via automated systems.
Automated Advice
Complex legal issues can present numerous ethical and regulatory strands that require unravelling to truly understand a situation. Leveraging data to inform decisions by using online tools gives firms a faster method of gaining insight and answers on nuanced legal precedents.
By having these tools be governed by specific subject matter experts, any changes in regulation or attitude can be accounted for – especially those differences across jurisdictional barriers if you’ve cultivated a global client base online.
Client Engagement
Reviewing how the relationship between client and firm is facilitated will likely result in the implementation of new methods for effective communication and transference of information. While the centralisation of data allows for ease of access, ensuring that anything transferred externally is secure will be paramount. Additionally, more and more emphasis is being put on ensuring access to adequate facilities for virtual working practices.
By setting out new data transfer protocols and processes, innovation will pave the way for creating more efficient methods for achieving this. Designing information transfer processes which become core to how a firm functions, revolutionising how work is carried out both internally and externally and allowing for greater online collaboration.
Innovation within the legal sphere isn’t there to replace legal experts with data and algorithms, but to enhance capabilities and ensure the right guidance is being given. While effective workflow and delegation solutions have helped legal firms become more connected now, it’s the relationship between client and firm which will be key to successful implementation of innovative legal service delivery solutions in the future.