For lawyers, there’s never enough time. Even with all the extra hours you dedicate to work, there seems to be no end to the important tasks, each of those calling for your undivided attention. Sometimes it seems like the world is trying to stretch you in as many directions as possible just to see how much you can take.
Have you ever left the office in the evening with a backlog bigger than it was in the morning? Right, it’s easier to say when you haven’t.
To help lawyers deal with an increasing amount of tasks, we have decided to research why this is happening, and find a solution to help you better manage your daily routine tasks.
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Do more, spend less
The reality is that, with the use of technology, your clients want customer service with zero friction, and will easily give preference to someone who’s more innovative. At the same time, corporate lawyers need to become strategic partners to advisory boards and dedicate their time to helping the business grow and scale.
96% of legal departments act as an advisor to the company board, while 91% play the role of an internal business partner.
But all of this still does not mean that lawyers don’t have to do the job they were doing before these emerging trends. Quite the opposite, really.
According to the KPMG 2021 benchmark survey, 96% of legal departments act as an advisor to the company board, while 91% play the role of an internal business partner. 68% of legal departments take part in proactive risk management, while only 24% are the main point of contact for innovative ideas.
In order to stay on top of your game, you need to take care of more tasks, and spend less time doing that. This is where innovation and legal technology come to the rescue.
The innovation era
Technology has become an inseparable part of our daily lives. We use apps to get products delivered directly into our homes, get university degrees from our phones, visit online museums, and hold business meetings with video conferencing tools. With innovation, our lives became different, allowing us to delegate routine tasks to software and allocate more time to focus on processes that we can only take care of in person.
In the business world, innovation is aimed at tackling tasks faster, at lower costs, and with less resources. Sales teams use CRM software to keep track of their clients, marketing departments create automated campaigns to focus on strategy, and factories use manufacturing lines to reduce the risk of human error and put production on a streamline.
Legal industry, however, is one of the most innovation-resistant industries in the world. Lawyers tend to stick to old-school processes, even though this means constant routine, more work hours, higher risk of legal burnout, and losing potential clients to innovative competition.
Everyday it becomes harder for lawyers to live in an innovative world without embracing the innovative processes, thinking that robots are here to replace them. But that’s not true. Technology is here to make your lives easier, and the numbers speak for themselves.
Rising trend of legal technology
In 2018, nearly $1.8 billion was invested in legal technology. This was a 700 percent increase compared to the year before. Today, law firms of all sizes, private legal practitioners, and corporate legal departments adopt legal tech into their processes.
Here are some legal tech stats from the KPMG 2021 benchmark survey:
- 33% of legal departments and law firms have a budget for legal applications
- 24% of legal departments are using document workflow automation software, while 14% are ready for the adoption of software
- From those companies that don’t have a budget for legal technology, 36% don’t know what to invest in, 15% lack knowledge, and 4% face resistance from the management board
- 58% of departments already have a legal operations team, while 33% don’t even consider it yet
- 54% of legal professionals make document workflow automation their top priority for the coming years
- 80% of surveyed departments mentioned legal spend and cost one of the key KPIs that they measure
- 55% of departments mentioned the quality of work as one of their KPIs
Even though many legal departments don’t have digital adoption specialists, legal operations, or lack the knowledge of what technology to use, you can see that more than half of them understand the importance of document automation. At the same time, 80% of departments want to cut legal costs in order to boost their performance.
How does document workflow automation help?
The process of document workflow automation is simple. Document automation software takes your existing legal documents and creates automated templates for your future use. Such documents include, but are not limited to:
- Purchasing document
- Master service agreement
- Non disclosure agreement
- Wills and trusts
- Power of attorney
- Statement of Work
- Commercial lease
- SOC 2 report requests
When the template is created, all you need to do is fill in a questionnaire, and the document automation software will adapt the current contract template to your current project and client.
Document automation software takes your existing legal documents and creates automated templates for your future use.
With AXDRAFT document automation software, you can experience 80% faster contract workflows, and save up to 40% of your legal budget. But that’s not it. Document automation software removes human-caused bottlenecks and creates more free time for lawyers by taking care of routine processes, such as:
- Document drafting from scratch. Forget about spending hours, or even days to draft another MSA. Answer a few questions and have a contract ready in less than 10 minutes.
- Searching for the right template. No need to browse through all the folders in your computer and copy paste the needed clauses from multiple templates’?your document automation software already has every template you need.
- Updating existing documents. Even after you manage to find all the old copies, going line by line to update the document to meet your current needs is very time consuming. With document automation software, that work is taken care of automatically in a matter of seconds, with 0 errors made.
- Onboarding new employees. Yes, a new lawyer will have to get up to speed with your company’s contracts and best practices. But what’s better: spend days and weeks on showing each contract to your new teammate, or give them access to document workflow automation software and let them create compliant contracts under company’s guidelines?
- Drafting routine contracts for other departments. Give other departments the power to not distract you every single time they need to draft or review an agreement. Set up conditional approval flows in document workflow automation software and only step in when it is really necessary.
- Printing a contract to sign and scan back. Paper contracts kill 3 very important things in our lives: trees, time, and money. Forget about having to print a 100-page contract, sign every page, and scan it back. Forget about spending thousands of dollars on paper and ink for your printer. Use document automation software with secure cloud storage, sign and deliver your contracts online, and help your business go green.
Manual contract management is a waste of legal resources. With an average hourly rate of $90/hour, lawyers should take care of work that is more impactful and valuable than document drafting and legal review. Luckily for them, document automation software can help lawyers remove themselves from routine work, and save time and legal costs doing that.
But don’t just take our word for it. This blog post is called ‘?How much you can save with document workflow automation’. But the numbers for hours and dollars that you can save will vary by industry, company size, and type contracts that you want automated.
To show you these numbers, we have prepared a list of case studies that demonstrate the difference that AXDRAFT document automation software has made on the contract management performance of companies from different industries.
How much companies save with AXDRAFT
AXDRAFT works with clients from various industries, solving various problems related to contract management. Our main goal is to understand your contract-related pain, and make it go away with the magic of contract automation. Below is a good example of a software company that needed to streamline their invoices and speed up contract workflow in order to process a large amount of customers.
By integrating our document automation software into your contract drafting workflows, we make sure that your contracts can be drafted, processed, stored, and accessed with the least amount of effort from your side. And the more documents you need to draft, the more you will save time and money with document automation software. Check out the example below. The next client is slightly smaller than Creative Mobile. But they draft more than twice as many contracts. And the numbers are changing dramatically.
Document automation software does not only help you save time on drafting contracts. It reduces the time required to review every contract, because machines don’t make mistakes. Thus, reducing the risk of human error, you can be sure that your contract is pitch-perfect and ready to use as soon as you click the ‘?Magic’ button when in AXDRAFT.
By the way, document automation software is used not only by corporate legal departments. Law firms also want to keep their contracts organized, and don’t like to draft 20-30 similar contracts manually every day. Like our client from the case study below, some law firms have already started saving time with document automation software.
Some startups are so focused on their product, they forget that they need a legal team. Especially when dealing with thousands of routine contracts every month. Glovo is a delivery startup that has a very high flow of workforce, and needs to sign new couriers on a daily basis. Aside from that, they need agreements with restaurants and stores that want their products delivered.
Just by creating automated contract workflows, Glovo managed to save time spent on document drafting, improve their reputation with mistake-free contracts, and decrease their spend by over half a million dollars every year.
Visit AXDRAFT Customers page to discover more case studies from our clients.
Spend 0 minutes on contracts with self-service workflows
Self-service contracts is a new word in automated contract workflows. Solutions like AXDRAFT QuickDocs let you set up fully automated contracts directly on your website and let your clients do all the filling in.
This is a great tool for companies that have to regularly process simple contracts, such as NDA, DPA, and SOC-2 report requests. All you have to do to start spending 0 minutes on contract processing is set up a public-facing template with a simple questionnaire and give your clients a link.
With self-service document automation you can save up to a week of your lawyer’s time and budget, and forget about back-and-forth emails with your clients during the onboarding process.
Conclusion
Technology brings change into our lives. But only to help us cope with the fast-paced environment we currently live in. Overworking is not among the key performance indicators anymore, especially for lawyers. Business values your insight, your legal expertise, and your ability to guide the company towards a prospering future.
However, one problem remains. Your legal expertise is so unique that you cannot delegate the most time-consuming part of your job’?contracts’?to anyone and be sure that every piece of paper will remain compliant. Good news is, there is a solution.
With document automation software, you don’t only save enormous amounts of hours and dollars. You create space that you can use to grow and become better. The world sees value in your knowledge and seeks your advice. Document automation software gives you the opportunity to be the lawyer that you always wanted to be.
Visit AXDRAFT to learn more about the opportunities and benefits of document workflow automation. Try our instant demo and see how you can get a pitch-perfect, ready-to-use NDA in 57 seconds.