You spend, on average, two hours doing a particular task every day. It’s a fundamental part of your job – you studied and trained for years to do this task. How well you do it has a direct and profound impact on the service you provide to your clients, and the performance and profitability of your business. However, you and most of your peers feel like you’re under too much pressure to even check that work properly.
Why not just let your computer handle it?
That’s not quite the question being posed by a major new piece of research, carried out by Briefing magazine and Thomson Reuters. But it’s close. Drafting and document automation tools have long-since gone mainstream in the legal industry, but they are yet to be fully embraced by a significant number of firms and in-house teams, who continue to sink a vast amount of time and money into a task which can evidently be automated. Perhaps one day automated drafting will seem as indispensable as email and smartphones, but not yet. Whether a lingering doubt over accuracy, or a fundamental philosophical objection to the idea of turning drafting over to automated software, the barriers to adoption are clearly still there. Briefing magazine carried out an in-depth survey with key operational decision-makers in the top UK firms to find out why firms feel the way they do about automation.
The full report takes a thorough look under the hood at the state of automation in UK law firms but the early results point to some interesting contradictions. For instance, while 78 per cent of firms surveyed already use some kind of document automation/drafting solutions (including links to know-how and precedents, automated proofing, document assembly and so on), only a miniscule 2 per cent say all those tools are fully used. The majority (56 per cent) say most of their solutions are partially used at best. However, the survey participants overwhelmingly felt – to the tune of 71 per cent – that the level of document automation positively affected profitability and productivity. So although most firms have some kind of automated document/drafting solution, and believe it’s good for their profits, large numbers of them don’t adopt those solutions fully.
36 per cent of firms do no reporting whatsoever on document drafting times and frequency of use
Why not? The full report dives into the detail, but some of the barriers to adoption are familiar: difficulty in selling the benefits to fee-earners, who are in turn held back by a fear of change, a lack of understanding, and uncertainty about the likely return on investment. That latter point is hardly surprising when you consider the survey’s discovery that 36 per cent of firms do no reporting whatsoever on document drafting times and frequency of use. How can fee-earners be convinced of the ROI that follows automating a process, when they have no idea how long it takes in the first place? At first sight it’s dispiriting that in the multinational business environment that is the running of a large law firm, there’s often no data whatsoever on the efficiency of such a key process. But on the other hand, it means that a great number of firms have been sitting on an efficiency gain that they’ve barely considered until now.
