Historically, legal teams addressed legal problems as they arose. But a reactive model for legal support is no longer sustainable. As businesses navigate globalization, increased levels of regulation, and digitization, challenges involving legal touch every part of the organization. This has led to an increasing demand for General Counsel and the teams they oversee to work more closely with the business as a strategic partner and to do more to identify, manage, and mitigate legal risks.
By freeing up time once spent on manual tasks, technology enables legal teams to focus on the plethora of new demands and on higher value activities, such as strategic decision-making with the business. For example, court litigation management traditionally required lawyers to follow individual cases with no analytics information. Today this work is usually done in a platform that reports where each case stands, using analytics to track the overall status of the litigations.
In the coming years we expect to see more extensive use of technologies such as Cloud, robotic process automation , artificial intelligence , and blockchain across the legal function. Automation and AI can drastically reduce workloads by managing processes and documentation. For example, automation can quickly extract regulatory data from agreements and input it into risk management systems. AI can go a step further and help with basic decision-making and prognostication.