Wouldn’t You Like To Make Legal Technology Work For You For Once?
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/ Mar 15, 2016 at 3:30 PM
Ed. note: This post is sponsored by Thomson Reuters.
Deals are more numerous, more complex, and more contentious, so clients expect their lawyers to work faster, better, and cheaper. Can’t deliver? That’s no problem for the client. They’ll just hire a new firm or, better yet, a consultant or alternative legal provider. Better still? They’ll start to do the work on their own. It’s happening everywhere: More than three-quarters of large law firms say they’ve lost business to new competitors in the market, and clients have taken some $8 billion in business in-house over the last three years.
Just how will they do that work on their own? Well, they’ll hire your best associates to do it.
You know, the ones you trained specifically to perform just those kinds of tasks at great expense to your firm since no client is willing to pay for the inefficient work done by first- and second-years anymore? And because, as it turns out, young lawyers today aren’t all that interested in giving up sleep to do thankless, repetitive drudge work for a slim shot at making partner. Not when law firm partnership isn’t the golden ticket it used to be. No, they’ll take their growing talents for thankless, repetitive drudge work in-house, where they get to go home at 5 and do the yelling while you stay up all night and get yelled at.
How will you cut that Gordian knot? The same way all those legal process outsourcers have been eating away at your business: with the sword of technology.
Now, surely, you’ve got all sorts of research platforms at your fingertips. Many of them are great; invaluable, even. But many are cumbersome, imprecise, a little behind the times. (How much time, exactly, do you spend reformatting text you copied and pasted from some website? You know, the reformatting which never seems to stick?) And how about all of those hours you’re going to have to write off… the hours your junior associates spent entering the exact same search terms into a dozen systems to (hopefully) find what they need?
“That’s probably the most significant challenge we face, just dealing with technology,” the downtrodden lawyer says.
Enter Thomson Reuters’s Practice Point, uniting WestLaw’s authorities with Practical Law’s reams of up-to-date legal know-how curated by a team of experienced lawyers, among many other helpful tools, organized intuitively and in one place:
“In a matter of about five seconds, I can get to content which is relevant and valuable—very, very valuable,” one user says. “My practice is so fast-paced: You get a call from a client, you’ve got a task to do, you’ve got to turn it quickly. And then you get the call from the next client. You don’t often have two or three hours to sit down and spend solely on the research and churn through a bunch of information. So that time saving, that efficiency, that ability to get directly to the content, is invaluable.”
“Very often I’m looking for a particular type of agreement, or information on a particular concept or type of transaction,” another Practice Point user says. “In this format, I can click through the menus to more carefully and more directly find the types of agreement I’m looking for.”
And there’s more to it than just streamlining the research and drafting process, saving time, and making associates more economically efficient — and happier, alongside the client.
“The documents and the information are maintained and updated on a regular basis,” another user notes. “We’re very, very confident that we’re getting the best and most accurate information we need.” And with the time it saves, one has “a greater opportunity to go back and double-check our work to make sure that the agreement says exactly what it needs to say.” Because nobody wants to get that call from a client who just realizes that someone he’s paying just cost him more money than he cares to count.
“There’s no downside,” one satisfied customer says. “There’s only an upside, whether that upside is being more profitable or more responsive or being able to get more work done.”
