Against the backdrop of a global pandemic and ailing global economy, legal technology is providing a significant opportunity for law firms to add value to their clients, differentiate themselves from their competitors and reduce costs. This is something that law firms clearly recognise, with a recent study by Wolters Kluwer revealing that 76% of legal professionals rank the importance of legal technology as being the top trend to impact their organisations over the next three years. This is not empty talk; some legal technology providers are seeing procurement increase at an astonishing rate. Legatics, for example, has seen a record-breaking summer, with a 200% increase in the number of new matters opened on our transaction management platform and a 500% increase in new customers in the April-September period.
Many popular legal tech solutions started out as tools created by lawyers to make the more repetitive and time consuming parts of their jobs, such as management of checklists and tracking of documents, less onerous. Our CEO Anthony Seale, who previously practiced at a Magic Circle firm in London, created Legatics as a tool to manage and close transactions more efficiently. The benefits to lawyers are clear; with everything in one centralised place, the risk of error is reduced and with less time spent on manual and administrative tasks, such as creating and managing checklists, managing signing and completion and generating closing bibles, lawyers will have greater job satisfaction and more time to spend on higher value, technical legal work. However, the hours of time saved and the lowered resourcing requirements for repetitive and administrative work also presents a significant cost saving opportunity for both law firms and their clients.
In Legatics’ case, digitization also means increased deal transparency, leading to significantly greater client satisfaction. Instead of being left in the dark as to the status of a transaction, Legatics allows lawyers and their clients to see in real-time what the status of their deal is and who needs to do what next and no longer have to rely on weekly all-parties calls or email updates from their lawyers. Empowering clients and giving them a better deal experience not only helps law firms to win new customers but to retain existing ones as well, particularly in an increasingly competitive legal landscape where law firms are under more and more pressure to differentiate themselves from their competitors.
As legal tech becomes more and more widespread in the industry, it is already becoming routine for law firms to be asked as part of RFPs to explain how they are leveraging technology to help deliver their services, a clear signal of the value that clients see legal tech providing. This is something borne out by our own experience, where we are increasingly witnessing law firm’s clients insisting on using Legatics on their transactions with external counsel. Law firms who fail to innovate or who drag their feet risk being left behind in the context of rapidly evolving client expectations around service delivery. The biggest risk for law firms, therefore, is not whether they should change how they operate, but failing to do so or doing it too slowly.
To request a demo or to find out more about how Legatics can help you to transform your legal transactions, please visit Legatics.com.
