Moving the work remotely is a challenge not only for companies but for individuals. Many people have to face self-organization that some might find difficult. Though there are positives to working from home, there are plenty of distractions that affect productivity. Once again, technology comes to aid employees struggling with maintaining productivity.

How to choose the right tool for your practice?

With the abundance of diverse tools for personal productivity, it might be hard to choose one that will perfectly suit the needs of your specific occupation. For example, if you work in law, you need to pay more attention to time management and meeting arrangements, but if you are in medicine, you will hardly need the tool for these purposes.

We asked some legal practitioners to share their methods of choosing the right tools. Navin Mahavijiyan, a globally experienced leader in the legal operations and legal services community, gave his answer and shared advice for colleagues:

Lawyers need to think about the problem they are trying to solve when acquiring technology. A very transactional/document-heavy firm (including in-house teams) can greatly benefit from a matter management or workflow tool that can automate common tasks and document generation. Almost all legal practices can greatly manage from a DMS system that they can use to easily store and manage all manner of data/document types. Lawyers that spend most of their time on contracts should look to use a Contract Lifecycle Management tool to automate and help them negotiate contracts more efficiently.

Legal technology thinker, speaker, and writer Colin S. Levy backed this opinion up: 

"Before even looking at a tool, they need to have a holistic view of their existing processes. They need to understand how they complete tasks and where the pain points in their existing processes are. They need to understand why the pain points are pain points. They also need to understand what roles specific individuals play in those processes and why they play those roles.”

Best samples of legal tech tools

Reviewing contracts and managing meetings are only two of the many tasks lawyers have to deal with daily. Their to-do lists are much longer, and they can hardly manage without technology’s help. We have gathered the tools and systems that can be handy with legal practitioners’ everyday tasks. 

The tech tools help lawyers in many ways, according to Navin Mahavijiyan:

The use of technology can help in three core ways:

(1) automating the more administrative aspects of legal work, e.g., generating initial drafts of contracts, sending reminders to clients/counterparties, automatically tracking legal matters/tasks and providing reporting for time spent, volumes, etc. 

(2) augmenting more complex legal work, e.g., artificial intelligence-based redlining of contract documents or automated application of billing policies to law firm invoices (though this is typically applied on the client side, but law firms should be familiar with e-billing); and 

(3) Document management systems (DMS). This is a critical factor for almost all law firms as file, email communication retention matter greatly, these allow for effective filing, saving from other tools like Outlook/Word and elaborate document tagging to make searching significantly more effective than your typical G-Drive/OneDrive solution, and accessible to the lawyer and other members of the firm from anywhere.

Legal Research

Legal portal Lawyerist collected the list of tools that can be used specifically by law firms. Some of the applications the portal recommends for legal research:

● Fastcase is a research tool powered by artificial intelligence that helps look for information in many available sources for case preparation. As mentioned on the company website, “The Fastcase library includes primary law (case law and statutes), legal blogs, law review articles, briefs, pleadings, expert witness databases, analytics, and secondary treatises. It includes 129 treatises from Aspen and CCH and over 100 titles from James Publishing, as well as 79 labor and employment treatises from Littler. Through Fastcase’s new imprint, Full Court Press, it has about 30 titles in production. Fastcase also provides access to law review articles through its partnership with HeinOnline.”

The tool provides a free trial if you are unsure whether it will be helpful for your work or not.

● Casetext helps lawyers enhance their research process. When you give the application a specific fact-pattern, it uses artificial intelligence to look for the relevant laws, statutes, and regulations. 

Harvard Law School recommends using the National Law Library that offers for many states 50 years of case law coverage, state statutes, constitutions and other materials.

Legal Analytics

After conducting the research, the process of legal analytics begins. This stage can also be made easier with the help of tools.

● Premonition is the litigation database that helps lawyers to predict the development of the case and the likelihood of winning. The company states that its “predictive analytics are consulted by decision-makers at Fortune 500 companies, global law firms, leading academic institutions and nonprofits that improve the lives of millions in the developing world.”

The software also provides such features as scanning claims to know the case type and judge, predicting possible risks and outcomes. The advantages of this tool is the information coverage since it has one of the largest databases in the U.S.

● Brainspace is the global analytics platform that has a complex of features to help with legal research. The advantage of the software is the convenient data visualization apart from the analytics of possible risks during case development. 

● BRYTER is a tool that helps automate your workflow and makes everyday tasks more organized. Legal technology thinker, speaker and writer Colin S. Levy recommends the tool as one that gives a lot of assistance in his job organization.

Preparing and analysing contracts is the routine of the legal profession. Even though with time you learn how to do it faster, these processes are still time-consuming and boring. Here, technology comes to help once again. Some services can scan contracts for you, give feedback on the possible mistakes, point out the uneven prices, and so on. The algorithm often sees more than a human’s eyes, which is why lawyers appreciate the help of tools. 

Contract Drafting And Management

Some of the contract drafting and management tools that can make a routine more bearable:

● LinkSquares gives the convenient way to work with contracts, edit them and organize all information in the papers. Many big legal firms use the application and it has a detailed approach to contract management. You can work in collaboration with your colleagues, collect analytics and insights that will be valuable in your future work, even build document templates all in one app.

● Zola Suite is the perfect contract management tool for law firms, but it is not available to solo practitioners. Among the features the application provides are contact checking, task management, emailing clients, and synchronization with colleagues. If you are working in a company that often has to have open access to the information, it will be extremely useful to have a tool that will synchronize your actions.

● A tool for editing and analysing legal documents, Loio has a number of features that help to manage contract drafting more easily. 

This analysing tool helps with numerous tasks that legal practitioners go through every day: reviewing contracts and highlighting any variabilities, pointing out possible mistakes, and suggesting edits.

● Josef is a legal automation service trusted by many law firms in the U.S. It takes on client communication, data analysis, and document drafting all at once, so if you’d like to have a minimum number of tools for continuous flow, it might be a great choice.

● Some legal practitioners trust Coparse with their documentation, and Levy is among them. The tool will catch critical errors and highlight the ones that might require attention. Also, it can do document summaries if you require some.

Time-Management Tools

The contract drafting, emails, meetings, and other managerial work is way easier with time-management tools:

● Woodpecker is a tool that will connect your channels of communication into one. With the service, it’s easier to track emails, manage all tasks, look for social media accounts, and create campaigns.

● Since legal practitioners in the U.S. set their prices by hours, they need to have reliable tools for time tracking. RescueTime is one of the services that will make this process easier. The tool helps in tracking meetings, setting time for the tasks, and making sure that all your tasks are complete. Here, technology is a savings when it comes to busy schedules and a load of meetings.

● Xakia is a legal matter management tool that allows companies to track their employees’ workloads or help with the individual tasks. Sometimes lawyers have to manage thousands or hundreds of matters, which is almost impossible without any time-management system. You can create as many matters as needed, prioritize them, set deadlines, make assignments to your colleagues and track budgets.

● If you find the previous tool inconvenient, you might pay attention to My Hours. The service creates analytics and weekly reports on the time you give to the specified tasks, and, also, it allows you to work in teams, which is essential to law firms.

● Clio Manage is a tool specifically created for lawyers, which is why it helps with almost every step related to contracts, cases, and court appearances. Levy also relies on Clio in his work. If you like the features on this website, Clio allows trying all in the demo version. 

Here is the list of tools that Navin Mahavijiyan finds helpful in his practice:

● Mithratech TAP for matter management and workflow;

● Checkbox for matter management and workflow;

● highQ for matter management and CLM;

● Evisort for CLM;

● Malbek for CLM;

● NetDocuments for DMS;

● SimpleLegal for ebilling.

Also, we asked Levy about his favorite legal tech tools. He emphasized that there are so many tools, and the ones listed below are just some of the many great ones that exist in the market today:

● Clio;

● BRYTER;

● Josef;

● CoParse;

● Documate;

● Woodpecker.

Conclusion

As you can see, many everyday tasks may become easier and more doable if you reach out for technological help. As it is, if nothing more, these programs help people manage their work and be more productive.

This article is an extract of the free eBook Lawyer’s Work and Productivity in a New Normal. Written by Lawrina team and top legal innovators, this eBook contains 80+ pages of recent researches and brand-new approaches to lawyer’s work, productivity, and effective communication in a post-pandemic.