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Expanding Your Digital Strategy with RPA
Lawyers in firms of all sizes are under increasing pressure from all sides: from clients to boost efficiency while streamlining workflows, and from partners to find new ways to maximize billable hours. Firm IT leaders play an important role in their success on both fronts because automation is the key to doing more with less. Beyond improving efficiency, new advancements in Robotic Process Automation, or RPA, are helping lawyers do more billable work without hiring more people.
RPA: An Overview
Robotic Process Automation is a solution that uses technology to enable computer software (referred to as robots or bots) to perform routine tasks by interacting with your existing applications. The bots capture and interpret data, manipulate it, use it to perform a task, and convey the results to other digital systems.
RPA involves more than just automating processes. Essentially, RPA creates virtual workers to perform rule-based tasks. Currently, paralegals and attorneys are being paid to perform highly repetitive, time-consuming tasks that could easily be performed by bots, when those people could be better used to perform higher-value, billable work. Robots aren't here to replace lawyers. Rather, RPA can make lawyers better and more efficient at their jobs by freeing them up to focus on the most valuable parts of the job.
Boosting Billables with RPA
RPA is your key to streamlining your workflows in order to do more billable work without adding more billers. Among the tasks typically performed as part of nearly every matter, many are routine, involving little high-level thought and are also quite time-consuming. A great deal of legal work is rule-based, which doesn't mean the tasks aren't necessary or even important. It just means that these tasks don't need to be performed by staff who could otherwise be performing more valuable billable work for clients. By applying RPA to these routine tasks and freeing up attorneys to focus on billable tasks, firms can finally accomplish the ever-elusive goal of maximizing your billable hours.
The task of basic legal research, for example, is a prime candidate for RPA. While in certain instances legal research might require higher-level thought and analysis, a good portion of the research done on every case involves a paralegal or junior associate running regular keyword searches in research databases and compiling all the results in a handy file of PDFs for a more senior attorney to review. There's no reason for billable workers to be performing that research. Bots can be programmed to run through the exact same steps and produce the same work product, only they can do the work overnight and have it ready for you in the morning. In the meantime, your paralegals and junior associates can focus on billable work that adds actual value to your case.
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