The UUÂãÁÄÖ±²¥ report ‘Escaping the in-house legal labyrinth: using technology to demonstrate value’ shows a growing appetite for legal technology and benefits it can offer. More than 80% of respondents agreed, for example, that legal tech would play an increasing role in in-house legal teams in the coming years. And one of the most cited reasons for that growth in legal tech appetite will come as no surprise: the drive for productivity.
Almost three-quarters (74%) of respondents said productivity was the most appealing benefit of legal tech today. Legal technology helps lawyers streamline, automate, and optimise their work. Significantly for in-house legal teams, tech helps to reduce time-wasting, ensuring they can spend more time adding strategic value to their organisations. Legal tech, in short, makes in-house work far more meaningful.
In this article, I will take a deep dive into the results of the survey and explore how legal tech reduces the burden of smaller tasks, adds value, and allows in-house lawyers to focus on important tasks.
Our survey shows that nearly half of respondents still spend too much time on repetitive tasks, tasks that in-house teams could (and should) automate. That echoes findings in other recent surveys and research. A 2019 , for example, estimates that around two-thirds of in-house legal work is still considered repetitive or routine. Tasks such as legal , payment collection, document creation, contract management, and general data entry often take up significant working time, removing in-house lawyers from more valuable contributions to the business and failing to make use of their unique skills.
Legal tech and automation provide the solution. The merits of automation in the legal sector are well documented. Automation reduces costs by ensuring certain types of tasks can be completed at scale, rather than taken on by high-value lawyers. New research carried out by University of Manchester on behalf of UUÂãÁÄÖ±²¥ found that lawyers using Lexis+ for their research and guidance were saving over 8 minutes per legal task, on average, potentially adding up to over 8 hours a week.
Automation also protects junior members of in-house teams, ensuring they are not wasting their time on easily automated tasks and giving them the opportunity to focus on more interesting work. This in turn brings knock-on benefits, such as greater employee retention, improved morale, and higher productivity.
While automation has always been the ideal for repetitive, smaller tasks, it was not commonplace, not expected, other than on outsourced tech and on a small scale. But automation has fast become an expectation, a need and a necessity, something that in-house lawyers demand. In fact, according to the In-house Legal Technology Survey 2023, half of respondents said they would no longer join a company that had no legal tech.
In-house lawyers champion legal tech, according to ‘Escaping the in-house legal labyrinth: using technology to demonstrate value’, because it gives them space to add value and to perform meaningful work. More than half (53%) suggested that legal tech allows them to prioritise more valuable work, spending their time more effectively, adding commercial worth to businesses, focussing on the right tasks.
Legal tech frees up time, and time is the most vital resource for in-house lawyers. Time allows in-house lawyers to delve into deep work, embrace uninterrupted thinking, solve problems and find solutions, and make strategic decisions. In short, legal tech allows lawyers to utilise their unique skills, which in turn leads to the greatest return on investment for organisations.
And, on top of that, legal tech adds value by introducing efficiencies and giving in-house lawyers the best tools to complete valuable work. That might mean providing lawyers with easy access to extensive and up-to-date legal information at the click of a button. That might mean enhanced project management capabilities, allowing in-house lawyers to navigate the fast-moving legal sector and promote organisation-wide collaboration and communication. Or that might mean taking advantage of high-tech – AI, machine learning, , and so on – to improve analysis, predict trends, create immersive experiences, or train others.
The most appropriate legal technologies will ultimately depend on company size, resources, and the needs of the organisation. But, when properly researched and effectively utilised, the right legal tech can streamline processes, improve operations, and broadly provide in-house lawyers with the time and space to perform meaningful work and effectively add value to the business.
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