Finding a hidden story can be crucial to winning litigation but finding it can often take a huge amount of discovery – which can be costly and takes time. Whether it’s buried among a thousand or ten million documents, legal teams need to be able to access the “hot documents” or the story telling documents quickly, to ensure they know the real story and can craft their winning argument. But, with external factors like hybrid working practices changing the way people work, legal teams must find new ways to stay ahead.
Unfortunately, clear thinking about the impact and the benefits of any technology investment is often coloured by short-term thinking and peer-pressure. Among law firms’ competitors often appear to have far too great an influence on many decisions around technology investment – “they’ve got it so we must have it” is surely not the best way to judge the benefits of new technology. Technology is generally the largest area of investment for the average law firm.
Data disposition is becoming an increasingly hot topic for law firms, both because the volume of data keeps growing, and because the risk of breaching GDPR by retaining excess data continues to rise, as Chris Giles explains in part 1 of the data disposition series.
Among the many consequences of the global pandemic, one was that it drove many law firms to embrace digital transformation. And in the course of enabling remote working, many introduced cloud-based systems and took the opportunity to scan existing paper records. This has led firms to believe that, to the necessary degree, they’ve “taken care of” their records. But is that entirely true?
For legal firms, customer onboarding is not very high up on the digital transformation to-do list. More eye-catching projects tend to grab the attention instead. Yet there’s a tremendous opportunity here to streamline business processes, improve efficiencies and productivity, and ultimately take accounts to profitability much earlier.
The truth is that legal practices can do much more than Robotic Process Automation (RPA). And they can do so without even needing to rip-and-replace legacy systems.
In today’s technology driven world, it is often assumed that everyone knows all there is to know about how to use the technologies that have become an indispensable part of almost every aspect of the practice of law. Discussion of how generational differences between old world lawyers and digital natives impact the workplace have given way to debates over exactly which skills are actually needed, who has them and how you can tell.
In the legal sector as in others, new technologies drive efficiencies and business growth. The legal profession is embracing a new reality of hybrid working, where the personnel working on any one project may be office or home based, and located in different cities or even on different continents. All team members need access to documents, the opportunity for virtual meetings and collaboration in real time wherever they are.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is a growing presence in today’s corporate legal and compliance departments — and for a good reason. With ever-increasing pressure on GCs and compliance officers to demonstrate value, any tool that increases efficiency and lowers costs without sacrificing quality and accuracy will be of great interest. But with the growth of AI comes a responsibility to ensure it is used ethically, which creates unique responsibilities for in-house counsel and compliance officers.
Edge Marketing, Inc. - formerly known as Edge Legal Marketing and Accounting Edge Marketing - is celebrating its 25th anniversary of serving the needs of legal and accounting professionals on a global basis. The agency has elevated hundreds of clients by delivering impactful, exciting results through its public relations, strategy development and implementation, branding and fractional CMO services.
Legal IT Professionals has worked closely with Edge Marketing for many years and asked Lisa Chontos to interview Edge Founder and CEO Amy Juers.
Seven Critical Factors & Four Underlying Principles
For years CRM systems, sales coaches, pipeline reports have annotated contacts/organisations as ‘Suspects’. Suspects being turned into ‘Prospects’ is a ratio often reviewed by the Management team with key metrics around how many suspects become prospects, then are taken through the sales pipeline to being a ‘demonstration’, then ‘proposal’ onto ‘negotiation’ and finally ‘closed – won’.
Sales is a process. There should be a process to identify the people/organisations that are looking for the type of solution your business delivers, so that time, effort, energy, and cost can be spent in the right areas.
Legal IT professionals have an important seat at the table when it comes to managing a law firm’s portfolio of domain names. In fact, their participation in the process is critical. Domain names are essential to law firms because they, along with the websites and email accounts they enable, represent the firm’s digital identity to the world. However, legal IT is often spread thinly with other diverse responsibilities, including hardware, software, network, training, help desk tech support, partnerships, and more. Their overwhelming workload leaves legal IT little time to focus on domain-related issues. Therefore, the best strategy is for legal IT to focus on the most pressing domain management needs to ensure they are tended to sufficiently.
Since the pandemic, many professional services organisations are (once again) paying attention to knowledge management (KM) as a discipline, especially as in a hybrid work environment, timely access to “knowledge” – in the truest sense of the word – has become essential for productivity. According to a Deloitte study, 75% of surveyed organisations said that creating and preserving knowledge across evolving workforces is important to their success over the next 12 to 18 months.
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