Kamal Patel
|
“I know first-hand how difficult it can be to run a business in South Africa,” Patel says. “Business owners are struck with incredibly high costs of compliance and operate in an environment that is often not as smooth-sailing as it might be in more developed markets.”
Patel believes it is important to view those who own and operate law firms as businesspeople, who simply want what all businesspeople want: not only to run their businesses as efficiently and profitably as possible, but also to work with tools that ease their day and minimise frustration. Because of this, his focus since arriving at Juta has been on digital transformation and technological innovation.
“Around the world, there has been a new appreciation for how technology can augment legal practice, making it easier, more efficient and more enjoyable. Automated drafting, document management and billing can make running a law firm cheaper, but this is just the beginning.”
Global studies indicate that small law firms only spend an average of 60% of their time on client-facing activities. The rest of their time is spent dealing with administration, billing and accounting. Large firms have, especially over the past 10 years, been investing heavily in automation, lowering their costs and, as a result, threatening smaller players.
But new technology is changing this. Lower cost ‘software as a service’ licensing and delivery models are making it increasingly possible for small law firms to access these technologies, improving their ability to compete and thrive against large law firms.
“Some of Juta’s customers, especially those who have been in the legal profession for decades, are surprised when they hear us speaking about technological innovation and digital transformation. They still associate us with book shops and hard-copy law reports,” Patel says.
While Juta is still very much in the business of compiling and delivering high-quality law reports, journals and textbooks to the South African legal profession, the bulk of its energies are now directed at making access to legal information more effective than it has ever been before.
The Evolve platform not only allows users remote access to Juta’s full online legal resource offerings (including law reports and journals), but also efficiently mines vast amounts of data to locate, structure and map the most important information a user may require, even before they know they need it. One of Evolve’s most popular features is visual ‘mapping’ of a particular judgment’s treatment in other courts. The tool vividly shows where a judgment has been mentioned, criticised, confirmed, or overruled. This gives the user a clear and instant sense of whether the judgment is good law, controversial law, or obsolete, and also what the other most important cases are on the relevant point of law.
