How Legal Chatbots Can Increase The Profit of Your Law Firm
Today, most of the businesses across all industries face the challenges of eliminating routine work.
If you own or have worked in a legal firm, you will know that most of the time the employees spend their time doing redundant tasks. This prevents them from concentrating on important and complex tasks,
According to 2018 Legal Trends Report by Clio shows that lawyers spend only 28% of their day on billable tasks and the average utilization rate was 29% meaning that lawyers bill only 2.3 out of * hours every day.
The problem of routine and unbilled tasks
It is common knowledge that companies are always looking for ways to increase their efficiency and revenue and legal companies are no different. Law firms expect their workers to bring more money. But, most of the companies say that billing more hours ad growing the client base is of the lowest priority to them. Keeping in mind, the objective of increasing revenue and raising the satisfaction of the clients the lawyers end up working for more hours then they were planning.
77% of lawyers who work for more than they planned to say it is because they want to catch up on work that didn’t get done during the day. And 51% of attorneys say they overwork as they want to be available to the clients.
Routine tasks take time away from the actual work that you are doing for your clients. 77% of the firms think that hiring more staff is the answer to this problem while 58% of those want to reduce spendings. So, how can a legal industry increase income but work and spend less.
One of the solutions to the above problems is Chatbot.
Legal Chatbots
Chatbots are appearing in almost every work field and the law industry is no such exception. Legal chatbots are a great way to optimize work processes to save lawyers time and money. A chatbot doesn’t need vacations, week-offs or rest after a day’s work. It just works for your business every second after it is created and implemented. A legal chatbot works 24/7 to provide legal aid to the customers whenever they need it. Also, it is more agile and beneficial than a human lawyer consultation. Now, a common myth is that the lawyers think they will be replaced by legal chatbots. However, that is not the case, rather they are only little helpers that will simplify the work of the lawyers and free the lawyers time to focus on more important and complex tasks. Additionally, the human lawyers can work on a consultation capacity and also check up on the work of the chatbots at times.
Benefits and use cases of legal Chatbots
Be available to clients 24/7
People call lawyers all the time, be it morning, evening or at night. They expect the lawyers to be available for them all the time. This is one of the reasons why lawyers often overwork. This is further proved by the result of a customer survey which revealed that 67% of the surveyed customers choose a law firm if they answer their first call or email. Therefore it is important to be available to the clients at any time but it is not possible as it isn’t very convenient and not easy to follow over longer periods of time. Thus, there was a need for an alternative.
This alternative came in the form of Chatbots. Chatbots could provide answers to client’s basic legal questions and initial consultation. This led to savings both on time and money. Chatbots are your dependable employees. They work for you constantly without ever looking for breaks, week-offs or vacations. While a human employee works for 8 to 10 hours a day and looks for rest at the end of the day, a chatbot looks for opportunities to serve your business better. There are always willing to consult and provide clients with accurate legal information 24/7.
Ailira (Artificially Intelligent Legal Information Research Assistant ), a legal chatbot provides legal advice 24/7 and is accessible from any of your devices. You don’t need to visit a website just write directly to Ailira in Facebook Messenger and it would solve all your queries. You can chat with Ailira as you would with a friend using instant messaging.
Generate Legal Documents
Productivity can be increased in a law firm by the use of legal chatbots. The legal chatbot can generate legal documents, reports, and legal briefs. Not only that, the chatbot can perform a lot of the legal work in seconds while the same work when given to an average employee takes much longer time to complete. During the process of creating documents, chatbots can provide legal help and answer basic legal questions that a client must have during this process.
Additionally, from a user or a customer viewpoint is very economical. By the use of the chatbot Ailira, a user can get legal documents at a much lesser price as compared to the visit of an actual lawyer. A client has to just answer a few simple questions required to fill the specific document and after adding the necessary details to the document, the user has a complete document. If a client would like to review the document prepared by Ailira, then he can schedule a meeting with a human lawyer and this too can be done by Ailira.
Review and analyze legal documents
A typical day at the legal firm involves hours of analyzing and reviewing documents, contracts, wills and agreements that need to be signed. By the use of chatbots in legal firms, companies can give attorneys time for things that require their attention the most. Chatbots can also improve the rate of productivity in a firm as the chatbots can check the documents and rapidly give results.
For example, another legal chatbot ROSS is famous for its legal research feature. However, this bot can help you to review and analyze memos, motions, pleadings, and briefs. A user has to upload his document to ROSS, then it will process the document and show the negative treatments of cited cases.
Increase lead generation
Chatbots create a conversation that the users find casual, natural and easy to follow. This leads to a higher level of customer satisfaction and thus higher chances of conversion. These chatbots solve the problems of the customers on a daily basis. For example, one DoNotPay bot became highly popular by helping people deal with parking tickets, a common-law issue that a lot of people encounter. This bot helps find solutions to such small and specific legal violation, and quickly reached and engaged thousands of people, thus becoming very popular.
Automate lead qualification
While interacting with a potential client, a chatbot qualifies the lead by having a conversation to gather the required information for you. Instead of filling out long unappealing forms, people answer a few questions to the bot and they could also get additional informations or clarifications from the bot during any stage of the conversation.
A Montreal-based law firm EXEO launched an Immigration Virtual Assistant (IVA) to make the process of moving to Canada much easier and less stressful. There are people who want to migrate to Canada but don’t have huge financial resources. IVA is a very good solution for those people with free legal consultation. At the same, the chatbot qualifies the lead for the company. IVA asks a user a few questions to understand what are the chances of moving to Canada or accessing any immigration program. People can get legal assistance free of charge and the law firm gets qualified leads that are interested in moving to Canada, because of IVA.
Perform Due Diligence
One of the most monotonous and time-consuming tasks that the lawyers perform is conducting due diligence. Chatbots automate and speed up this process so that the employees can perform more meaningful tasks. Chatbots conduct a comprehensive investigation that includes reviewing tons of documents and asking plenty of questions to uncover background information and create a full report for you.
Access the information
The human lawyers and paralegals go through tons of information on a daily basis which is a very time-consuming work. They can rapidly scan volumes of data to find an accurate and useful answer. They can go through mountains of data in a very less time and provide relevant laws, regulations or similar legal case. On combining chatbots with CRM, attorneys can go through their database to find a related lawsuit in seconds.
Conclusion
Today, lawyers face the problem of routine and unbilled tasks. Their workdays consist of mostly administrative, financial and administrative tasks. However, they still have clients that need consultation, legal help and advice or legal documents created. The chatbots comes in and takes care of both the monotonous tasks as well as providing help to the lawyers, while also saving the money resources of the clients and the users.
Chatbots are the solution that helps you to concentrate on your clients. Chatbots help law firms to be available to the clients 24/7, generate and analyze legal documents, boost lead generations and qualification, perform legal information for you or your clients.