P2P

41 I L T A N E T . O R G I nterest in what can be automated, and what should be automated first, has peaked over in the past four months, with varied answers to the question "Why Should We Automate Now?": • risk mitigation (always a crowd pleaser) and new risks with WFA (work-from-anywhere) • efficiency and labor gaps, budget cuts • client and economic pressures • maturing automation tools and services *(see below for more on each of these) The really big question now is "What Should We Automate?" At a high level, here are priorities when assessing what to automate: Repeatable manual processes, highly labor intensive, high volume, repetitive, structured processes that are consistent and don't require major analysis or decision- making. Processes that require in-office presence - someone has to execute a process or physically run a series of steps on a computer in a specific office. Processes already automated by others that can be easily incorporated into your organization. Rather than having to build it from scratch, there are pre-packaged automation tools or managed services to run them for you. Legacy applications requiring extensive development to continue working, that could be automated and show a quick win and risk reduction. Legal Automation Categories and Tools When assessing what to automate, here are the main categories and types of tools widely used in legal organizations: Document Automation / Doc Assembly / Doc Drafting / Templates / Styles / Macros Lots of what we think of traditionally as automation in a law firm is connected with documents. The evolution from typewriter to basic word processor to templates and macros, has been steady. This work was done by admin staff (some still is), but more and more is now in the hands of the users (attorneys and paralegals), giving them the tools to quickly create the documents they need whenever and wherever they are. Consolidation in the document tools market means there are bigger players taking the best parts of the many products and building new and more comprehensive options. New ways to automate documents and templates are appearing every day. Practice Management Automation E-discovery and document review were among the first automated tools used in the practice of law. Now linguistic and visual analytics are automated, as are many aspects of estate management and legal transaction management. Social Media Monitoring Tools Social listening and analytics, searching, scheduling, managing, and reporting on social media content as well as logging and tracking the content and URL of social posts, are newer to the arsenal of automation tools that legal organizations are using. Email Management Filing email and compliance needs related to email are also now able to be handled by automation tools. Workflow Tools / RPA (Robotic Process Automation) RPA is at its core, configurable software that deploys computer bots. These emulate and integrate the actions of a human interacting within a software application to

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