Data Is The Key To Survival In Today’s Competitive Legal World
Provide your clients with the best legal services possible by being efficient, competitive, and predictive.
Data has worked its way into nearly every facet of our daily lives, and legal work is certainly no exception. Yet while people seem willing to incorporate data into their personal lives, from using traffic data through Waze to accepting TV and music suggestions through the algorithms of Netflix and Spotify, lawyers, for whatever reason, have been more hesitant to adopt the usefulness of data into their professional lives.
A willingness to incorporate data-based applications into legal practice is not just a matter of convenience, but one of professional survival. Adopting data as a cornerstone of legal practice is the only way lawyers can hope to remain competitive in the increasingly digital field of law. It’s about more than simply adopting new tools and products — lawyers must adopt a data-driven mindset on the individual level and a new culture on the organization level.
Changing the way you practice law can seem daunting, but the folks at Thomson Reuters are here to help with The Legal Professional’s Complete Survival Guide, a comprehensive overview to get you started. The sooner you open yourself to becoming a data-driven legal practice, the sooner you’ll be on the road to providing your clients with the best legal services possible by being efficient, competitive, and predictive.
Practical Applications for Data in the Law
Accepting data as the foundation of your legal practice is the first step toward automating your essential processes. Automation will make you more flexible, increase your ability to handle changing client demands, and eliminate unnecessary time and effort wasted on the administrative tasks that distract lawyers from actually practicing law.
Legal practice has always relied on data and facts, it was just less efficient at it. Today, the combination of better data and sophisticated automation allows lawyers the ability to predict outcomes for their clients in ways that were never before possible. Litigation strategies can be formed around a full picture of the likelihood of success at each stage, based on comprehensive data regarding previous outcomes rather than the mere anecdotal evidence that was available in the past. Enhanced eDiscovery tools can better predict the likely responsiveness of the mountains of potentially relevant documents in a case. In the past, lawyers would spend hours trying to answer these questions. Today, data and automation drastically decrease that time expenditure, saving plenty of mental energy and stress in the process.
Making the Move to a Data-Driven Practice
Change doesn’t happen overnight, but making the switch to a data-driven legal practice is much easier than it might sound. Agencies can start with five simple steps.
Start slow and tackle the easiest tasks first. We might be light years away from robot lawyers taking over the industry, but simply analyzing the data in your agency’s matter management systems will have you well on your way toward better understanding your productivity, resources, and potential outcomes.
Organize your data. You’ll only truly be able to gain value from the data you have if you know what’s there and how to find it. Once you get your data in order, you can start building the processes necessary to capture it and reap its benefits.
Clean up your data. Once your data is organized, you need to standardize it in a way that makes it useful. Because your data likely comes from a multitude of sources, it’s unlikely to follow any uniform pattern or terminology. The initial investment in services that help clean up your data and make it usable is worth the payoff in the long run.
Work with data experts. Lawyers are trained in the practice of law, not the business of law. Acknowledging that and being willing to accept the help of those who are trained in working with data will allow your practice to thrive while you continue to focus on the part you do well.
Make real changes in your organization’s culture. A truly data-driven practice is only possible if your staff adopts data-driven thinking from top to bottom. In order to harness the power of data, your staff must be comfortable using it and relying on it.
Data is the future of legal practice, whether lawyers like it or not. The Legal Professional’s Complete Survival Guide will make the transition easier. Automation isn’t here to replace lawyers, but to help them enhance their expertise. Taking the first steps today to switch over to a data-driven practice is the best way to ensure that your agency will still be competitive tomorrow.
