Remote Working: The Future of Law Firms!

 Many organizations have ventured down the Digital Transformation route to refine work operations to improve work potency and safety.  The COVID-19 pandemic has triggered the need for new remote operating policies and protocols, offices to go virtual for a long time, and more.  

 Currently, now is the time for “virtual law firms” 

 

Virtual law firms seem to witness exponential growth within the future, and all the legal work operations must go online. We have a tendency to live in an exceedingly convergent world wherever the digital revolution paves a wave. 

Eventually, this transformation can facilitate elite companies’ transition to virtual law companies.  

 

Recent technological developments in machine learning, AI, and different technological advancements facilitate the terrible foundations of the way legal support services are practiced and delivered. 

 

According to a Forbes report, there was an astounding increase in investment up to 713% in the legal tech sector in 2018. That shows swift consolidation inside the Legal and technical school sector. Now, clients do not visit a lawyer’s office as they simply use a video, phone, or text option for communicating. E-signing is another major positive of remote working since courts have agreed to accept documents that are e-filed, e-served, and e-signed. Remote and virtual hearings are the “new normal”. Handshakes are creating taboos; entire deals are being negotiated and closed virtually.  

 

Alarming law firms' rates lead to in-house legal advisers being self-contained as a result of clients wanting immediate litigation services. To contemplate these points, organizations mitigate themselves against compliance hazards and draft new plans of actions to curb challenges like cloud security. 

 

Technology has had a colossal impact on the manner we have a tendency to live, work, and manage business processes. Law firms follow technology-powered models that can meet business demands and provide clients with extraordinary expertise to tackle the challenges they face. Besides, technology has also accelerated legal delivery’s transformation to promote efficiency. 

 

 

Reasons for the increase of virtual law firms: 

 

1. Thanks to the pandemic, lawyers are compelled to work from home, usually for the first time in their careers. They found this new tradition effective because it helped them avoid long commutes and enhance the work potency. 

 

2. Work from home flexibility makes their work-life balance sorted. 

 

3. Traditional law firms charge heavy fees from their clients. Clients get relief as they get individual attention from lawyers at affordable prices and cause less potential conflict issues. 

 

 

There is no doubt the coronavirus pandemic is gearing up the virtual law office trends. In May 2020, when the United States supreme courts reopened for business, they created a historical moment of hearing oral arguments over the phone. Supreme Court Justices are embracing the tech and moving with the times. 

 

 

Conclusion: 

 

Whether you’re firmly settled in your brick-and-mortar law workplace or are already a savvy virtual professional person, the time has returned. And that too, with several accessible technologies that will modernize the manner of managing your work operations and interacting along with your clients. 

 

 

Legal Support Services – The Ladder to Success for Lawyers and Law Firms

Most of the lawyers usually remain occupied with the goal of becoming successful, but due to the shortage of time, they often face difficulties in achieving their goals. Lawyers find it hard to cope with the rise in litigation cases, and they usually don’t have enough time to fulfill the requirements of all the clients solely; this is one of the barriers to their success.

If they get free from the core legal activities, then they can make strategies for their success and work on them. Thus, for lawyers and law firms, the real path to business expansion, growth, and profitability lies in outsourcing legal support services. Today, the LPO industry is almost as big in size and turnover as the legal industry.

 If lawyers want to reach their objective of exponential growth in the industry, they might want to opt for outsourcing legal back-office functions as they are the ladder to success. To make their business more successful, they can outsource the below-mentioned tasks to reliable outsourcing partners and make themselves free from the core activities.

Legal Research:

Legal research, though sounds simple, is not an easy job. It is the backbone of each and every case because, without any research, lawyers are not able to start proceedings of their cases. This is a more time-consuming task than others. There are lots of problems lawyers face while doing research such as

i) Legal process interpretation, which means a wrong interpretation can result in research not relevant to the case.

ii) The most crucial stage of legal research is the beginning of a case because all the facts and doctrines of the case are explored carefully.

So, lawyers can outsource their research tasks to a reliable partner and start working on the strategies for the growth of their law firm.

Contract Management:

Most of the law firms have to deal with thousands of contracts, and lawyers have to go through all of them with a complete focus, they don't get time for anything else. Besides, the contract management life cycle contains seven stages, such as contract creation, contract review, contract approval, contract execution, etc. Reliable third-party partners have the expertise to carry out these functions effectively not only in the beginning but during the entire contract management life cycle. To increase your law firm profitability and for success, lawyers can even look for specialized outsourcing agencies that match their primary area of activities in law.

Document Summarization: 

This is another task that lawyers can outsource. This task is also labor-intensive and vital for every case. It includes the preparation of documents, deposition summaries, reviewing the document database with definitive points, and some specific issues.

Concluding all said above, outsourcing might be the best way for lawyers and law firms to provide higher value to their clients on time and become more prosperous within a limited period. Moreover, it is also beneficial to increase profitability.

7 ways to protect your business against a legal fallout.

When we start a business, various types of risks come between it, that is related to finance and legal terms. As an entrepreneur, you have to play a big role in the growth and success of your business. No matter what roles you end up serving like you are the sales person, the developer, project manager, and the customer representative. This is important to remember that being a small business owner, you have to keep a check on business work on your own and can never free yourself from the liability of law.

It is essential for a business owner that he should be aware of the legal issues that may come in your way. This is not required to hire a lawyer at the initial stage, but you have a little knowledge regarding business law so that you can protect your business from legal fallouts.

Here are seven ways to protect your business from any legal fallout:

1. Always Prefer Written Agreements: When we start working with another party or business, whether they are clients, business partners, employees or service providers, signing a written contract is essential. Written agreements include all the terms and conditions clearly. In this way, we’ll be able to settle all the disputes easily, because everything will be mentioned in the contracts. If you do not sign a contract with another party, then they can easily ditch or cheat you. So, always prefer a written agreement during an initial stage.

2. Keep Your Paperwork Streamlined: Once you are done with all of the contracts or agreements, then the next level is to file and assemble your papers carefully. It is highly essential for a business to have an automated system at a place that keeps your contracts and agreements updated, whenever amendments made in the policies. Outdated paperwork is useless for business and missing information can create a misconception.

If you face any legal challenges, then hire a professional that will help you to reduce your burden by auditing a business.

3. Watch What You Say: Firstly, avoid making any public announcements and statement with your staff and client that that might be considered questionable. Always be polite with your staff and customer that is in your relation.

4. Read All Available Business Law: You may not be a lawyer by your profession, but the little knowledge about legal terms is better for you. It can help you to protect your business from legal mistakes.

Here is some necessary information that every small business should know:

• Registering Intellectual property, copyrights, and trademarks
• Financial Law
• Employment and Labor Law
• Marketing and Advertising Law

5. Remember to Register Your Intellectual Property: Intellectual property includes ideas and inventions that were created by you for your business. For example, if you have an e-commerce business that exists online then don’t forget to register your IP. Your competitors can copy your content and trademarks for which you invested huge amount. So, you need to protect your business identities like design, logo, and ideas, which is possible through intellectual property registration.

6. Get the Right Insurance: The best way to protect your business from legal fallout is to get the right insurance. As a business owner, this means looking for public liability, crime insurance, and worker’s compensation. Liability insurance can help pay for financial damages resulting from a lawsuit. Legal damages can be quite high, so this kind of insurance can protect your business finances and assets in case of an accident.

7. Seek Professional Legal Advice, When You Need it: If you are unable to understand the specific terms and conditions in any contract, seeking the help of lawyers immediately before signing the documents is an ideal way. A lawyer can help you to understand thoroughly all the terms and conditions of the contract. But, hire a lawyer is a costly process, so you have to opt for legal support services. They have a team of professionals that help in contract review and management process and enable you to make the right decision at an affordable cost.

These are some simple ways that will help you with the legal conflicts and protect your business.

Technology Trends that Affects the Legal Profession

Technology has become a growing trend in every business industry and legal is not an exception in this regards. There is no doubt that technology will constantly impact the legal profession in the coming years too. 

Here are the technology trends that will help lawyers and legal professionals to maintain better accuracy, efficiency, and overall performance in their day-to-day activities:

Artificial Intelligence: 

There is a lot of pressure on lawyers and law firms to exceed client’s expectation. Lawyers are still stuck in cumbersome, paper-based processes that are inefficient and costly. The challenge lawyers are facing is not only high competition but also to reduce their operating expenses.

With the help of this artificial intelligence, they can manage their whole work without any assistance. A recent study by McKinsey & Co estimates that 23% of lawyer time is automatable.

                                         

These AI tools work well in the unsupervised situation, where the software operates without human interaction. Systems look for patterns, relationships, and connections in unstructured data. For example, you just need to put your raw data into the system and those systems will give exact relevant information back to you with a proper summary.

Virtual Law Firms: 

In the coming years, we will also witness online legal services that have wider scope and greater flexibility how and where legal professionals work. It will change the landscape of the legal industry completely.

From virtual meetings to virtual legal assistance- everything will become seamless with the help of cloud capabilities. And it will offer a greater work and life balance for legal professionals overall.

Performance Measurements: 

More than 50% of top global law firms today are using some form of business intelligence to enhance performance management, and surprisingly this number will hit 75% or higher in the coming years.

Electronic Discovery: 

A few machine learning tools will help in the e-discovery process. With the massive arrival of digital data like emails, texts, voicemails, electronic calendars, etc., it has now open gate for analysis in legal proceedings, and lawyers need help to process all of that information quickly.

In other words, we can say that AI and deep learning will go a long way to make legal processes less cumbersome, and this will be a growing niche in the year 2019.

Cloud and Mobile: 

Imagine you are in court fighting over a stressful legal issue when your lawyer suddenly remembers: he left your files on his desk – back at the office. What do you do that time? These are the issues that mobile and cloud services help to eliminate.

Indeed, the fastest growing sectors in the legal market are legal process outsourcers and managed legal service providers employing both efficient processes and technology to capture work from traditional legal service providers.

Why Consider Legal Process Outsourcing for your Law Firm?

Today, many organizations are seeking effective ways to reduce their operating cost and focus more on core functions. And legal process outsourcing (LPO) is gaining popularity in this regards.

LPO is a basically a process where lawyer transfers their non-core tasks to external firms that have professional lawyers, paralegals, etc., that too at cost-effective prices. Recently a report cited by Novitex and ALA (Association of Legal Administrators) stated that 55% of law firms in the US entrust part of all their legal functions including document processing, litigation support, patent applications, contract drafting, brief writing, and e-discovery.

Legal Outsourcing Improve Services and Cut Down Costs

A latest report based on analysis of law firms in the US demonstrated that almost 9 out of 10 large legal firms and about 60% of mid-sized firms outsource a good number of back-office processes. Furthermore, approximately 33% pointed out that they considered on getting involved in increased outsourcing possibilities within the subsequent 2 years. 

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