Today’s corporate and legal environment is complicated. Law firms and legal departments are facing increased pressure from clients and C-suite executives to modernize their practices, lower costs and demonstrate ROI. How can law firms and legal departments continue to deliver value while also being a better partner to the business and clients?
Innovative Partnerships
One way of achieving those goals involves collaborating with legal technology companies that work with alternative legal service providers (ALSPs). Legal technology vendors at the cutting edge of their fields are increasingly partnering with ALSPs, bringing important innovations to traditional business practices.
These partnerships are playing a pivotal role in redefining and reshaping legal services to provide legal departments and law firms with more innovative, scalable, cost-competitive, and cost-effective solutions. In and of themselves, legal technology vendors and ALSPs can have significant value. But legal technology and ALSP partnerships magnify that value and provide law firms and corporate legal departments with optimal efficiency. The result for clients is lower transaction costs, more deals, or both. When legal departments work with legal technology-enabled ALSPs, they benefit from higher margins and lower costs.
Technology is transforming the legal industry with law firms and legal departments increasingly looking for tech solutions to solve their business problems. According to the 13th Annual Law Department Operations Survey by the Blickstein Group, technology and artificial intelligence (AI) are top of mind for legal departments, as two-thirds believe they will use AI for their legal work in the next three years, an increase from 58% in 2019. The survey participants also agree that their law firms are becoming more innovative, with 53% stating technology helps them deliver legal services more effectively and efficiently, up from 51% last year. ALSPs understand this and are often early adopters of cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence, blockchain, predictive analytics, and smart contracts. According to Lisa Hart Shepherd from Thomson Reuters, “The focus of ALSPs on technology innovation gives them a critical edge and makes them ideal partners to take on increasingly important tasks, such as project management and consulting on legal technologies.”
Optimizing Inefficient Contract Review
An example of how collaborations between legal technology vendors and ALSPs can help legal teams is by reviewing and marking up contracts more efficiently and at a lower cost. Contract work is among the most tedious and time-consuming work lawyers do. The process of pre-executing, editing, and marking up contracts involves repetitive work and seemingly endless back and forth exchanges between businesspeople and attorneys. ALSPs that work with AI contract review technology can offer time and cost savings for legal teams and allow them to capture historical information, in order to develop better and more consistent contracts. With AI, the contracting process is faster while maintaining a consistency that’s hard to achieve with human reviewers. With AI-powered contract review, 70% of the review time can be automated, resulting in a much faster turnaround time for significantly less money.
As legal departments struggle with new technologies, pressure on their bottom line, and more complicated legal work, law firms must differentiate themselves from their competition while continuing to prosper financially. This is where the right technology and third-party partners can make all the difference. With the help of innovative partnerships between legal technology companies and ALSPs, legal teams can improve efficiency, gain analytical insights, cut costs, and demonstrate innovation, all while focusing on high-level work. As a result, law firms, legal departments, and clients alike will see more success and opportunities. To read more about how BlackBoiler partners with ALSPs, click here, and our recent partnership with ALSP, Factor, click here.
