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Digital Transformations in the Legal Industry
Blog //14-07-2021

Digital Transformations in the Legal Industry

by Doug Hargrove, Managing Director - Legal and Education

Despite the traditional roots and processes of the Legal industry, there is a growing trend led by the largest firms and chambers to switch to new, modern technologies. These solutions are helping to streamline processes, increase efficiency and keep documents secure and compliant. But the transformation doesn’t end there. These changes have meant that professionals no longer haul heavy briefcases to and from court and the office. With many using Cloud-based technologies to support working from home, court cases with remote proceedings are now being held via video conferencing.

In addition to this, with documents ‘going digital’, text can now easily be highlighted, indexed and bookmarked. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology allows for text searchability, reducing hours of high-cost-value time trying to locate information. Going digital has also saved printing costs and enabled the legal profession to become more eco-friendly, in line with a universal shift within organisations towards ‘greener’ business management.

These benefits aren’t exclusive to legal firms, legal departments can also gain from digital transformations. Over the years there has been a shift of expectations of legal departments. This has gone from requiring technical legal information, to now contributing to the strategic direction of the business, as well as using legal knowledge and skills to forecast and anticipate problems. This is set to increase as businesses continue to use big data to refine and optimise for success, and legal departments can benefit from data too. Analysis and interpretation of big data can also help yield information about market intelligence and changes in customer behaviour. For example, a deep-dive into the details of historic contracts may reveal data points that show how customer expectations and habits are evolving, and be used to inform the detail of future contracts.

Finally, keeping abreast of changes to regulation and compliance with new legislation is a challenge that has been exacerbated by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and more recently Brexit. This requires general counsel to maintain up-to-the-minute knowledge and understanding of changes, and wider insights into multiple trading and transport environments in new territories. Many document management systems contain robust security, governance and compliance protections that include data defences and loss prevention, encryption and authentications while ensuring all data is compliant. With a Document Management System such as NetDocuments you can migrate your data from datacentres to tackle issues such as Brexit.

Click here to find out why our solutions are trusted by legal teams around the world.

Blog Legal Document Management
Doug Hargrove

Doug Hargrove

PUBLISHED BY

Managing Director - Legal and Education

Doug joined Advanced in 2013 via an acquisition, and brings over 25 years of senior management experience in software companies in the UK and globally.

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