Legal transcription

Thriving in an era of legal automation

Like their counterparts in other industries, the legal profession has been transformed by technological innovation. In an environment where managing costs, while also maximizing an attorney’s most valuable resource, time, it’s imperative for firms to embrace new automated tools to thrive.

One of the advantages of my role at Nuance is hearing from customers about how our solutions help them navigate changing dynamics within their industries.  I was reminded of this recently from my sales team; they were discussing how our documentation and productivity solutions are helping many of our law firm clients improve legal documentation processes.

Like their counterparts in other industries, the legal profession has been transformed by technological innovation – from cloud-computing, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning, to automation of legal workflows; all having a large impact on their traditional business and staffing models.

Automating routine processes like legal discovery, billing and even onboarding of new clients is becoming increasingly common as pressure on the traditional “billable hours” business model has migrated some legal services to flat fees.  In this environment, managing cost, while maximizing an attorneys’ most valuable resource – time – is imperative for firms to thrive.

Fortunately, the same innovation that has disrupted some traditional business models is creating new opportunities.

Many of our clients are in the process of enterprise-wide implementation of both our speech recognition and documentation workflow solutions to help not only with the creation of documents and briefs, but also the routing of them via a rules-based system.   In combination, they are also looking at ways to equip attorney’s with “anytime anywhere” mobile dictation tools, with the goal to reduce costs, increase attorney productivity, and drive client service.

We continue to see the impact of automation, specifically as it relates to legal documentation, as evidenced in the recent 2018 International Legal Technology Association’s (ILTA) annual survey, where our solutions were named as leading tech tools for the legal sector. The ILTA survey also highlights the depth and breadth of the need for technology within legal, with almost one-third of firms (those with 700 or more attorneys) indicating that they use solutions, like digital dictation to prepare documentation.

If the past is a prelude to the future, we can expect the trend of automation to continue, especially in the case of industries like legal, that rely on creating accurate documentation and moving it in an efficient way.

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