Digital White Papers

KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT Modern KM Is Automatic: Keep the Humans, Just Automate the Knowledge 62 WWW.ILTANET.ORG | ILTA WHITE PAPER Technology will be crucial to closing the knowledge gap created by these valuable partners' departures. While many firms struggle to capture and si through imposing amounts of data, those that quickly make use of their proprietary knowledge will emerge as the strongest competitors. Knowledge automation offers firms an elegant framework for capturing, managing and sharing this expertise across the firm before these critical partners retire. Further, internal and external knowledge can be integrated into a custom know-how repository that the firm's lawyers can easily search and manage. Combined with contextual search tools to help optimize the search experience, content most valuable to individual users immediately surfaces. Empower Lawyers: As clients demand faster and consistently higher-quality service from their law firms, lawyers must work smarter, not harder, which means bringing value, efficiency and cost-savings into the client relationship. Knowledge automation technology can evolve legal processes to maximize productivity and minimize the time lawyers devote to less valuable tasks. Using knowledge automation, firms can transform frequently used contracts into intelligent templates that lawyers reuse and share across the firm. By automating document assembly and creating managed workflows for transactions and litigation, firms can save time and resources, while also reducing risk and increasing accuracy. Consider, for instance, a law firm's new client engagement leers, which are important for documenting and establishing relationships with clients. In most firms, these leers are standard templates that are then customized with details regarding the work to be performed, responsible parties, billing and other information. Using knowledge automation, firms can transform these leers into automated templates, with legal assistants entering data into a guided online form and the appropriate information and clauses automatically appearing in a custom client engagement leer. Not only is production hastened, but the risk of human error is also decreased. Lawyers can spend more time listening to their clients' concerns, rather than draing documents. Mitigate Risk: Cybersecurity is a major stressor for most law firms; with increasingly complex regulations and other requirements, including the ACC Data Security Guidelines in the United States and the European Union General Data Protection Regulations, law firms will face even greater accountability for compliance and security, especially firms doing substantial transactional work. Fortunately, advances in knowledge automation are reinventing how firms can ensure compliance and mitigate risk. Most companies today audit their firms' security practices and pay more aention to how they handle and manage their clients' data. Knowledge automation systems allow firms to take client data security one step further with a process known as pseudonymization, which replaces the most identifying fields within a data record, such as a Social Security number, with artificial identifiers (pseudonyms). The process separates data from direct identifiers, so even if stolen, data cannot be directly associated with an identity. This critical information sits securely on separate servers to prevent aribution. Automatic encryption can also immediately encrypt client and personal data as they are entered into a contract form or knowledge system, effectively safeguarding the data. Knowledge automation technology also helps firms beer understand, implement and adhere to complex compliance regulations. As one lawyer makes a nuanced decision based on the data at hand, that expertise is modeled into workflows and processes through knowledge automation.

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