Robotic process automation (RPA) is one of those rare technologies that has the potential to impact every aspect of a business by automating repetitive and manual tasks that exist in every industry. RPA is especially suitable for law firms because of the many rote and volume-driven tasks that legal teams must perform on a daily basis as part of their compliance and due diligence obligations. According to HFS Research, many services-based industries within the BFSI space have been at the forefront of adopting RPA; however, many law firms have barely scratched the surface in exploiting the potential of RPA.

Law firms can benefit from automating certain front-office and back-office tasks — from processing case inquiries and forms to searching for documents to organizing files — enabling attorneys and legal assistants to focus on white-glove services for their clients. Examples of how law firms have leveraged RPA include classification, extraction and processing of structured and unstructured data from legal documents, as well as contextual searching of information across data sources. Imagine a bot that creates indexable PDFs of all documents related to a case — a potential game-changer for use in litigation and in presenting documents to opposing counsel.

Automation technology can provide broad opportunities for law firms to streamline their processes, reduce costs and free up more time for their legal teams. Process automation is just the first step. Machine learning, AI and predictive analytics can play an important role in marketing efforts and client assessment scoring. For example, these tools may be used at the client intake stage — instead of manually searching records and performing background checks, RPA could gather and collect the relevant information and run data through a machine learning algorithm to help score and standardize risk assessment, allowing a law firm to predict its labor costs in a case and the financial risk associated with representing a prospective client. Read On: