By Angus Chudleigh, VP Commercial, ThoughtRiver
Many things aren’t represented accurately on the big (or small) screen. Poker games rarely end with eight players going all in with increasingly superb hands. Hospitals, sadly, aren’t exclusively filled with wise-cracking and devastatingly good-looking medical staff. Yet perhaps one of the most egregious is the representation of the lawyer’s day-to-day life.
The Reality Check
Sure, there are ‘eureka’ moments over the tenth coffee of the night, or a brilliant off-the-cuff argument which unexpectedly sways a case. But there’s also an awful lot of paperwork and daily grind. In reality, teams of the best and most highly qualified lawyers around the world are spending a large part of their day trying to keep the ship afloat rather than setting the legal world ablaze. I’d like to look at why this is, what organisations are doing to change this, and the deeper, sometimes hidden benefits of the automated solutions they are starting to apply.
In today’s environment, legal departments are under increasing scrutiny in terms of what value they deliver to the business. Expectations are raised; senior stakeholders want to see demonstrable benefits and also lift the lid on the processes underpinning their legal team to create business improvements. We’ve written previously about how legal automation can give General Counsels a much firmer footing when it comes to proving value to the board, but the fact remains that lawyers are being asked to do more with less at the same time as making their expertise more widely accessible to their non-legal colleagues. This demand on their time is only being exacerbated by the current pandemic.
What Does It Mean To Be A Better Lawyer? - Read more in our article in Artificial Lawyer
