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How To Use Generative AI For Document Extraction & Processing
How Legal and Compliance Automation Works
Reduce risk, ensure compliance and improve job satisfaction for your people with intelligent automation (IA) and robotic process automation (RPA) in legal services. Enact top-tier legal compliance throughout your digital transformation efforts. With legal and compliance law firm automation and an IA digital workforce, you can support your people and get better results.
How Can Automation Make Legal Industry Better?
Administrative tasks
Case management
Contract lifecycle management
Administrative tasks
Office automation reduces rework by automating error-prone manual, routine tasks such as data entry, allowing administrative staff to access relevant information seamlessly from multiple sources. Use IA to automate client appointments, assist in answering simple questions through AI-powered chatbots, prioritize tasks based on urgency and send notification reminders to ensure you never miss a deadline.
Legal document automation
Digital workers can assist employees in creating standard legal documents such as contracts. They collect data and fill it into predefined templates through intelligent document processing (IDP) tools such as SS&C | Blue Prism® Decipher IDP. Powered with generative AI, your digital workers have the potential to summarize contracts and other documents to make data extraction and contract review even easier. Digital workers can help with:
- Document assembly: IA tools can automatically generate drafts based on predefined templates and data inputs.
- Analyzing documents: With natural language processing (NLP), your digital workers can understand the content of legal documents to extract relevant information or highlight key clauses.
- Contract review: IA can review contracts to identify inconsistencies, errors or missing clauses.
- Legal research: Automatically search for relevant case laws, statutes and legal precedents.
Legal research
Digital workers can analyze large volumes of legal data to identify precedents and relevant case laws. They scan for any critical information that might help lawyers with their research and provide valuable insights to augment their casework. This can involve:
- Online legal databases: Your digital workers can scan through a vast repository of legal documents, including case law, statutes, regulations and legal publications to search and filter relevant information quickly.
- Analyze documents: NLP digital workers can analyze and understand legal documents to help you summarize and categorize them and extract key information.
- Legal analytics: By analyzing patterns in vast data sets, digital workers can give you insights into certain case outcomes or litigation trends.
Approval processes
IA can route documents and forms through predefined approval workflows to ensure the right individuals review and approve the documents at each stage. Automation platforms can also integrate with electronic signature platforms. This allows legal professionals to electronically sign and approve documents remotely. IA improves law approval processes with:
- Automated document routing: Send documents automatically for approval to the appropriate people based on predefined rules, roles and permissions to reduce delays in handoffs.
- Electronic signatures: Documents can be signed digitally so you don’t have to print, scan or mail documents, reducing waste and administrative overhead.
- Workflow automation: IA can automate your entire approval workflow including document creation, review, revision, approval and distribution.
Compliance monitoring
Compliance automation helps law firms stay compliant by monitoring and updating processes to align with changing laws and regulations in your industry. This ensures your compliance is always up to date. Here are some ways law firms can utilize compliance automation:
- Regulatory monitoring: IA can track regulatory changes and updates relevant to specific practice areas. It can scan regulatory websites, government publications and news sources to identify changes in laws, regulations and compliance requirements.
- Compliance audits: An IA platform can streamline compliance audits for clients by generating checklists, collecting the relevant data and analyzing compliance gaps.
- Policy management: Compliance automation can centralize and automate all of your compliance policies, procedures and documentation.
Data security
IA helps ensure consistent, controlled and secure work throughout your end-to-end business processes. It protects sensitive data by enforcing better controls such as two-factor authentication. IA does this without requiring organizations in the legal field to change their IT infrastructure. IA enables:
- Data encryption: Encrypt sensitive data both in transit and at rest so it’s always secure, even if it’s intercepted or accessed by unauthorized parties.
- Access control: Implement granular access controls to restrict who can look at sensitive data based on user permissions. This reduces the risk of data breaches or insider threats.
- Multi-factor authentication: IA can enforce a user to verify their identity if trying to access critical data. It requires them to provide multiple forms of authentication such as passwords, biometrics or one-time passcodes before gaining access to confidential information.
- User activity monitoring: IA can monitor and log user activity within the system, including login attempts, file access, document edits and system configurations – enabling you to detect suspicious behavior and investigate potential breaches in rea-time.
Electronic discovery (eDiscovery)
Legal automation tools can assist in litigation processes by identifying, collecting and analyzing electronic information relevant to the legal case. This frees up the time-consuming manual effort from litigators and allows them to focus their valuable time on decision-making. Here’s where IA can help:
- Data collection and preservation: Automate the process of collecting and preserving relevant electronically stored information (ESI) from various sources, including emails, documents, databases and social media platforms.
- Data processing and filtering: Process and filter large volumes of ESI to identify and prioritize documents for review.
- Document review and analysis: Facilitate document review with advanced, AI-enhanced search capabilities.
- Redaction and privilege detection: Automate redacting sensitive information and detecting privileged communications within documents, such as personally identifiable information (PII), confidential business data, etc.
Billing and invoicing
Automation tools can track billable and non-billable hours and use that data to automatically generate accurate invoices. This reduces the need for manual processes such as data entry, which can be prone to human error and keep your people from higher-value tasks such as client-facing services. Use IA to:
- Track and capture billable hours: IA time tracking software can integrate with case management systems to automatically record time entries as lawyers work on tasks related to client matters.
- Track expenses and reimbursements: IA can track expenses incurred by lawyers and staff on behalf of clients, including capturing data from receipts, credit card statements, etc., with intelligent document processing (IDP).
- Generate and review invoices: Automate invoices by deploying digital workers to read time entries and expenses and apply discounts or adjustments where necessary based on instructions.
- Deliver and distribute invoices: Automate client invoice delivery through various channels such as email, client portals or electronic billing platforms.
Benefits of Legal Automation
There are many advantages of using automation technologies when addressing legal matters. This can be administrative tasks or those taken by house lawyers and your general counsels. Automation software saves countless hours for your people, which improves efficiency and opens your capacity, encouraging the growth of your firm.
Seamless legal automation software integration
Automation systems can seamlessly integrate with your existing legal technology and databases to allow data to flow between legal processes.
Accurate audit trails
IA generates real-time audit trails of your legal documents at every step of the process. This allows for better transparency and a traceable record throughout your workflow.
Insightful performance analytics
IA generates analytical reports based on process performance. This helps law firms identify bottlenecks, optimize workflows and enhance process efficiency.
Improved client experience
IA simplifies every step in a legal process and enables faster response times. It does this by ensuring internal clients are notified as soon as information or signatures are required of them. It can also use chatbots to answer simple client queries, helping them get better services sooner.
Better competitive advantage
IA makes your legal firm more agile. It opens your capacity for more clients, helps you produce accurate information quicker and improves your compliance to uphold your organization’s reputation.
Free up resources
By reducing manual legal tasks, you’ll see an increase in resources for your human workforce. IA empowers collaboration between your people and digital workers. This allows your systems to function cohesively with digital workers and act as assistants to your human employees’ higher-value work.
Where to Automate
Automate your legal department throughout your workflows to streamline and optimize your legal practices.
Use Cases for IA and RPA in the Legal Industry
Extract data
Digitize and manage contracts
Reduce complexity and repetitive tasks
Ensure data security
Extract data
Your AI-powered digital workers will read and interpret documents to facilitate human-led processes. This includes decision-making and addressing unique cases. IA improves your people’s e-discovery capabilities by extracting data from multiple sources and collating it into one system.