Top 3 Legal Tech Tools & How to Benefit from Them

In the past couple of years, around the world, the legal industry has been forced to face an irrefutable truth: that their work is not solely confined to their offices or courthouses. As businesses in the post-pandemic age continue to adapt to a more hybrid work environment, technological tools have become important components in practices – all incorporated into daily processes and functions with the goal to improve efficiency and better serve clients. Many in the industry argue that the pandemic has simply got the ball rolling. Experts predict that legal departments are expected to triple their current spending on legal technology by 2025. With 9 out of 10 attorneys reporting that legal technology has improved the services they provide to clients and is essential to meeting client demands (Bloomberg Law Legal Operations and Technology Survey, 2022), we wondered as to what the top 3 rated legal tech tools were and how businesses could use them to their best advantage.

#1 Billing Tools

Today, thanks to a healthy dose of disruption aided by the advancements in legal and justice technology, tech-enabled billing systems, i.e., legal billing softwares have become quite the norm. It has been proven repeatedly that tech-enabled standardised systems protect the interests of clients, value the lawyers’ efforts, and ensure higher productivity. Billing software has made a significant difference in how law firms spend their time, money, and effort, as well as how they reduce risks and errors. Equipped with an entire range of customisable features, the billing tools available today can create branded invoices, customise billing plans, accept digital payments, and when integrated with the law firms’ accounting and case management programmes, they have become indispensable.

#2 Research Tools

The days of lawyers spending hours in the legal library searching through endless case files to locate the correct help for their case are long gone. Legal research is now completed in a matter of minutes, thanks to the variety of research tools available on the Internet. Technological solutions like optical character recognition, natural language processing, machine learning, and artificial intelligence can efficiently sift through case files to produce results that match specific keywords, paragraphs, or even case structures. What used to take weeks with the support of a staff of interns and paralegals is now completed in minutes. This has broadened the scope of research approaches and prevented human effort from being squandered on monotonous jobs.

#3 e-Witnessing and e-Signing Tools

Bridging one of the biggest concerns of law firms and institutions, technological improvements today have made it feasible for us to witness and sign documents, as well as participate in legal and administrative proceedings, all from the comfort of our homes. For many contracts and formal documents, the use of electronic signature systems, such as DocuSign eSignature or VITNI, is now a well-established business practice. Integrated with video conferencing facilities and secured using latest solutions like blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), today’s e-witnessing and e-signing solutions prioritise people and their efficiency, all the while making sure that documents can be witnessed and signed in a safe and convenient manner.

The 2022 Bloomberg Law Legal Operations and Technology Survey polled 190 law firm and in-house attorneys about the use and implementation of legal technology at their firms, the challenges they encountered while utilising the technology, and the improvements they believe are needed. Through the survey, while it became clear that the recent technological shift has had a fairly positive effect on the workings of the legal community, it also pointed to a clear concern for sustained growth and development. With technology advancing at a rapid pace, the survey expressed a consensual lack of technological knowledge and familiarity with the IT tools utilised in workplaces. If left unaddressed, this skill gap would likely widen, limiting lawyers’ capacity to keep up with legal innovation. Perhaps the time to change that is now.