AI-Powered RPA Solutions - A Boon for The Legal Industry

With the impact of digitization, the legal industry has flourished worldwide with no signs of slowing down in the future. The Future Market Insights report states, “The global legal business sector is anticipated to grow at 4.6% CAGR while attaining a value pool of  $627.12 billion by 2030.”

Talking about RPA and AI, it is a match made in heaven. Together they’ve already impacted many industries, such as retail, healthcare, education, etc. The legal industry is not an exception. RPA is suitable for law firms because of the many voluminous tasks that legal team must perform on a daily basis as part of their due diligence and compliance duties. Adding AI capabilities to RPA in the legal industry enables law firms to improve business processes, realize cost efficiencies at scale, and become more responsive to customers.

In this blog, we will look at the combined prowess of RPA and AI and how they can handle the challenges faced by the legal industry.

Capabilities of RPA & AI

Applying Robotics to any industry is always interesting, but if you can infuse AI into it, it would be more productive and progressive. AI, as we know it, is artificial intelligence replicating human intelligence to an extent. In contrast, RPA is a program running on a server to execute several structured, back office, and information-intensive tasks.

AI matters with Robotic Processes; consider robots working more intelligently, i.e., providing resilience to the robotic capacities. Facilitating AI with bots makes cognitive RPA that helps enterprises to easily implement AI directly to their task in the cognitive process, i.e., allowing bots to make judgment calls previously reserved for humans.

Did you know?

53% of enterprises have already started their RPA journey.

With AI, robot can perform a wide range of problem-solving while making accurate decisions that people do. Unlike ordinary software, robots infused with AI can read documents and analyze and understand the intent of the same. That means AI supports RPA tools to get predictive outcomes through unstructured data and variable processes.

Practical Use Cases of RPA & AI in Legal Industry

The legal industry is facing challenges in managing data in the digital era. There is a splurge need to deal with routine tasks such as filing and retrieving documents, record keeping etc. An effective workflow, which can be done using different software, has become necessary.

Legal services of traditional nature, which within the framework of their activity, conduct monotonous work with many documents, such as due diligence or KYC procedures, can consider introducing RPA to reduce human effort and error rate.

It is already possible to apply RPA and AI in many legal functions, and many organizations have already done it. Let’s have a look at some practical use cases of AI and RPA amalgamation into the Legal Industry:

Data-intensive Paperwork

Like the BFSI industry, the legal industry heavily relies on content and data capture tools. To operate and adhere to compliance, legal professionals need to capture data quickly and accurately. Most professionals suffer from unstructured data, so the need for document automation is increasing significantly.

Now robotic process automation matches intelligent document processing technology or surpasses it with the advanced prowess of OCR and NLP. With the help of AI, RPA is making data capture smarter than ever by categorizing structured and unstructured data. Bots infused with AI can not only copy-paste or harvest data but can also calculate and analyze it with 100% accuracy and precision.

For example, ASTM International, a 100+ old standards organization, redefined its business model to survive in the industry 4.0 revolution. The organization employed RPA automation to transform old technical standards written in physical form into digital assets to make association members’ life easy. Icreon teamed up with the organization to implement computer vision API (NLP algorithm) to identify and extract data from the uploaded scanned files in the system. The team developed a web scraping rule-based framework that has helped the organization to find out meaningful data from the historical standards records through data extraction. Robotic process automation has reduced the manual efforts of finding information by up to 60%.

Compliance Management

The two most important aspects of maintaining powerful compliance management for any law firm are diligence and technology. Understanding and incorporating these two factors can quickly help firms minimize potential compliance risks and prevent any governing body’s objections.

With the help of AI-powered RPA bots, data compliance can be performed automatically. It can quickly monitor, scan, and update changes depending on the country’s requirements, eliminating fines and penalties.

For instance, a leading litigation firm in the US was facing a hard time withstanding heavy data collection & manipulation for their 150+ monitoring clients, who fight against non-compliance with laws and regulations. The organization implemented bots that collect, manipulate, and map the data to achieve the desired accuracy, reliability, and efficiency in the overall data processing and loss analysis procedure.

Data Protection

Gartner predicts that by 2025 around 30% of enterprises will be ready with data security platforms. Due to pent-up demand for higher levels of data security, the legal industry needs to be very careful with its data protection. Also, there has been a rise in automated software capabilities.

RPA bots can easily suspect and eliminate security-related risks to data by creating a suspicious activity report. Such reports consist of questionable and illegal activities within a firm, allowing the legal team to decide on report filing.

Contract Management 

Legal contracts often consist of essential data related to the clients. No legal firm can bear the consequences of putting these at risk. Tracking relevant data, deliverables, and important events is the main challenge in legal contract management. Therefore, streamlined contract management is required.

RPA and AI allow legal professionals to centralize all the contract repositories, automate repetitive contracting processes, and get some free time for strategic projects. Together, this help reduces contract risks, speed up contract execution, and drive alignment across teams.

Patent Management

Patent management is a crucial task, and it involves both legal and technical knowledge. Legal departments need to manage new and old patents while tracking patents for possible violations. It is a time-consuming task. If the professionals choose a manual approach to achieve this, it can delay the process by many days.

RPA innovations allow law firms to digitize the approval of patent documents and monitor the application statuses. RPA can enable your intellectual property lawyers to computerize the approval of patent documents and monitor the status of applications.

Keeping Pace with Cognitive RPA Implementation in the Legal Industry

The legal industry game is more significant than it seems. To stay ahead, you need to follow a proactive approach. Considering RPA tools and solutions, they come in handy when carrying out the essential tasks of legal facilities, as discussed above. Thus, there shouldn’t be any second thoughts on RPA adoption in your legal activities.

Many major players in the legal industry have started embracing new technology like RPA and artificial intelligence. Larger law firms use chatbots for marketing purposes and for providing clients with legal advice (e.g., chatbot DoNotPay). However, the application of RPA + AI should be more comprehensive than this. It should be explored and exploited to meet different horizons of the legal world.

Consult our digital transformation team if you wonder how this robotic automation can be applied in your legal business. Explore Icreon’s Business Model Innovation Consulting Services.