In this issue Raluca Gheorghiu, Director Legal EMEA at UiPath in Bukarest and Joachim Grouven, Head of Legal, Tax & Audit Automation at UiPath in Cologne present their combined insights into 5 key trends of Legal Automation in 2022.
(1) Improve compliance:
Export control and know your customer (KYC) procedures will be a focus in 2022 considering the economic sanctions imposed against Russian companies and their affiliates, and the obligation of companies based in Europe and the United States to comply with such sanctions. Process automation will relieve the legal or compliance teams of the burden of undertaking detailed verifications for all transactions.
(2) A bot for every lawyer:
Some of the larger audit firms have implemented global automation programs involving thousands of employees and giving them digital assistants to support their daily work. Watch for an increasing trend at larger law firms to explore automations on a global scale delegating work to a digital law clerk, sitting on the desk of every employee of a law firm and taking away repetitive paperwork.
(3) AI-driven analysis of legal documents:
We foresee an increasing demand to analyze legal documents (contracts, NDA´s or legal correspondence), be it in law firms, legal departments or courts. Especially in the area of mass-proceedings or other high volume document processing, it will be crucial to understand text based on meaning, regardless of the choice of words. This way the legal practitioner can find content no matter how it’s worded – out of the box and without extensive training with underlying data. Look out for the development of this advanced technology – it will be a game changer.
(4) E-discovery:
Artificial intelligence (AI) and robotic process automation (RPA) will continue to dramatically improve critical legal processes. In the case of the e-discovery process — which involves volumes of structured and unstructured data that lawyers must sift through — these technologies have a drastic impact on how legal teams spend their valuable time. Currently, 62% of lawyers already engage with some sort of e-discovery review or case analysis solution, up from 56% in 2018 and this will continue to grow.
(5) Court & Public Prosecutor Automation:
This is one of the boldest predictions, but we foresee the increase of innovative automation trends in courts and among public prosecutor offices.
Court administrators will assist their judges and court clerks in better managing voluminous mass proceedings in order to avoid bottlenecks and lengthy court proceedings. Many of the responsibilities of the court clerks are repetitive and follow strict and clear rules. Examples are registration of claims or automated notification of the involved parties about procedural events and their ongoing changes.
Public prosecutor offices will deepen their understanding of how to use automation to analyze vast data pools across regions in order to manage the increasing volumes of cases.
