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How any lawyer can massively upgrade their capabilities and efficiency

Legal professionals are always busy. Are they always efficient too? Maybe not.  

Do lawyers spend a lot of time doing things that they could do much more quickly if only they had the right technology? Definitely. 

You may already have HighQ and enjoy all the ways it helps you boost productivity with automated workflows, document management, and secure collaboration. Or you may have Document Intelligence for accelerated drafting, negotiating, and document search and review. 

By using both together, you can elevate the service you’re providing. It’s not just about process improvement or spotting risks in contracts. It’s about turning efficiency and insights into improved outcomes. 

 

Let’s imagine some familiar scenarios you might encounter on any given day. 

 

The task: Drafting 

First passes of drafts are usually done by less senior lawyers. It’s not work that anyone really has a burning desire to do. Even worse, junior associates are not realising their full billable hours potential by labouriously drafting contracts – they could spend two hours trying to find a document with relevant wording, and then another hour copying and pasting that wording. This could obviously hold up deals closing.  

 

The solution 

With HighQ and Document Intelligence, that file could be found in seconds. With Document Intelligence, any lawyer can draft faster and negotiate more effectively by quickly accessing preferred language, minimising escalations, and more. Eliminate tedious, time-consuming steps so you can spend more time on higher-value tasks.  

 

The result 

Junior lawyers can feel more confident, having access to everything they need to draft a contract faster without leaving Word. And their billable time gets used more effectively. 

It’s not just juniors who will benefit from this speed and assisted intelligence capability. Senior lawyers often do their reading off-hours. This means very highly paid professionals could be reading and reviewing contracts late at night when their attention and focus is not 100%. Imagine looking through hundreds of pages at 10pm with tired eyes, trying to find a clause or wording that is not even in the document.  

HighQ and Document Intelligence can make this, too, a task that’s done in seconds. And because of that, it’s one that doesn’t need to be put off.  

 

The task: Locate critical information  

Senior lawyers can’t always claim to be familiar with the nuances of all their clients’ contracts. Deals are market-driven, and even an experienced practitioner may not be familiar with current market conditions or language changes. To take a couple of obvious examples: force majeure would not have included terrorism 25 years ago; and “pandemic” clauses may or may not now include COVID19. It simply takes too much time to locate critical information buried deep in contracts,  

In situations like this, the best resource for any lawyer is another lawyer who has already identified key provisions, alerted you to deviations, and also let you know what’s missing. But another lawyer isn’t always available to ask, let alone one who has the time to walk you through all the nuances of contracts.  

 

The solution 

This is where HighQ and Document Intelligence are invaluable. The AI is trained by Practical Law editors, leveraging their vast knowledge and experience, specifically for contracts. It’s like having an experienced attorney do all the tedious, manual work for you, so you spend less time on paperwork and more time on legal work.  

Together, HighQ and Document Intelligence help you look for the most important key clauses or find things you may not have thought about in your searches. Information buried in agreements could severely impact business, and it’s incredibly time-consuming to discover. But these technologies can help you turn a potential disaster into profit – finding simple omissions, clauses buried late in a document, such as an evergreen renewal clause that no one has spotted, advance notice of breaking a lease, penalties, and price escalations – the possibilities are endless. But it doesn’t stop there. With HighQ and Document Intelligence, you can also create actionable tasks and automated workflows based on key provisions. This enables you to analyse, manage, and report on your findings so you can capture risks with ease.  

HighQ and Document Intelligence are partners that you can trust not to miss the critical details. Together, they bring contracts to life – with just four clicks, you can resuscitate a dead document that’s been filed away for years and make it talk. 

 

The result 

With this combined technology, junior lawyers learn faster by leveraging AI trained by their experienced peers. And the best senior attorneys know that they shouldn’t be doing tasks the way they did them ten or 20 years ago – so they can apply all their hard-earned judgment to the most up-to-date contracts. 

It’s easy for any attorney to send documents to Document Intelligence and pull the extracted data back into HighQ to display in an iSheet. This enables them to work on the extracted data within HighQ and see, for example, which contracts are missing certain provisions, and which are coming up for renewal – without having to read through each one individually. You won’t even need to know Document Intelligence is there, as it’s a single workflow, working away in the background. 

And for existing users of either tool, all this extra capability comes with no extra training or additional logins. For legal professionals at every level, that is priceless. 

 

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