The biggest tech disruptor in decades was spurred by the pandemic. Legal technology brought with it a cushion for the legal world, softening the blow for a hands-on, in-person industry. It also introduced legal departments to a world of software and tools that significantly lightens their load, reduces their overhead expenditure, and improves quality.
Gartner notes that legal departments may automate up to 50% of their legal work by 2024. The role of legal tech is clear – it’s here to stay and grow aggressively. Legal tech has proven that law could, does, and will function successfully with augmented tech.
Legal Tech Benchmarks
With the benefits that legal tech offers, a question legal departments need to ask themselves is how to analyze and quantify the legal tech they use, or are looking to implement. Tools with measurable benchmarks offer legal departments the opportunity to improve their business and operations even further, while achieving their goals.
According to a Bloomberg Law article, legal departments are analyzing legal tech by their requirements and the benefits it provides. These are a couple of the benchmarks that help legal departments understand how legal tech benefits them, and where to improve.
Reducing Time Spent on Routine Tasks
One of the few industries to bill hours, legal is always looking for innovative ways to cut back on time, while staying efficient and cost-effective. Legal tech checks all these boxes and then some.
With legal tech, legal departments can automate routine tasks and focus their time where it’s needed most – on matters that require time and attention to detail.
Offering a Better Work-Life Balance
The pandemic unveiled the fact that professionals needed to juggle work and life at the same time. Legal tech allows lawyers at legal departments to juggle their work life as well as their personal lives. Work spilling over into personal time is no longer an issue, because automation solves that challenge.
Legal Tech ROI
No legal department integrates legal tech without considering the return on investment that the tool or software provides. Measuring ROIs is an effective way for legal departments to understand how legal tech puts their dollars to use, and allows them to determine which areas may need work, and which ones are doing well with legal tech.
Legal Tech KPIs
With the legal tech benchmarks listed above, legal departments can utilize the analytics they’ve collected to fine-tune their key performance index (KPIs). This makes for better operations, business goals, as well as improving efficiency.
A Clio article states that KPIs can be used to measure the success of a business. KPIs offer metrics that legal departments can analyze and track to ensure their business and legal goals are being met. Measuring efficiency, hours saved, and cases improved are a few ways organizations can manipulate KPIs to find out how legal tech is augmenting their goals. Legal departments can obtain tangible statistics to work with by comparing data from previous metrics.
