Not long ago, we wrote about how AI and legal technology is changing the legal sector. Now we have a new player to discuss. Data and data science are transforming the ways companies conduct business in the 21st century, and this digital evolution is particularly true for the legal industry. But what do we mean by data and data science?" 

Data science can be understood as a multidisciplinary field that combines various techniques, algorithms, processes, and systems to extract meaningful insights and knowledge from data. 

It involves a combination of skills from statistics, mathematics, computer science, domain expertise, and data visualization to analyze and interpret large and complex datasets. It works with numbers and data to give insights, something every business leader wants! 

The primary goal of data science is to turn raw data into actionable insights, predictions, and recommendations that can drive better decision-making and solve real-world problems.

Key Components and Activities Within Data Science

Here are some key components and activities within data science:

• Data Collection: Gathering data from various sources, including databases, sensors, social media, websites, and more.
• Data Cleaning and Preprocessing: Preparing and cleaning the data to ensure it is accurate, complete, and ready for analysis.
• Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA): Investigating the data to understand its patterns, relationships, and potential outliers.
• Feature Engineering: Creating new variables or features from existing data to improve model performance.
• Machine Learning: Building predictive models using algorithms and techniques to make data-driven predictions and classifications.
• Data Visualization: Creating visual representations of data to make it more accessible and understandable.
• Model Evaluation and Validation: Assessing the performance of machine learning models to ensure they are accurate and reliable.
• Deployment and Integration: Implementing data science solutions into business processes and systems.

All of these in some form or the other can have a great impact on operations. They can help make near accurate predictions, facilitating informed decisions, predicting risks, and more. 

Why Data Science is Important for Businesses

Data science is of paramount importance for businesses in today's data-rich landscape. By leveraging data science techniques, businesses gain a competitive edge, as they can identify market trends, optimize operations, and personalize customer experiences. Moreover, it enables cost reduction through process optimization, improves customer insights for tailored products and services, aids in fraud detection, enhances forecasting and planning, and drives innovation in product development. With data science, businesses can effectively manage risks, optimize marketing strategies, and harness the power of data to unlock growth opportunities, making it an indispensable tool for success across diverse industries.

In summary, data science is essential for businesses irrespective of field. It is useful and can benefit every business sector and help gain a competitive advantage in an increasingly data-driven world. It has applications across various industries, including finance, healthcare, e-commerce, manufacturing, legal, and more, making it a crucial asset for modern businesses.

Data Science Transforming the Legal Landscape

It is no surprise that data science is revolutionizing industries far beyond tech and finance. The legal industry, traditionally characterized by stacks of paperwork and time-consuming research, is now experiencing a profound transformation thanks to the power of data science. Here are the top 5 ways data science can help transform the legal industry: 

1. Predictive Analytics for Legal Insights

One of the most significant ways data science is reshaping the legal field is through predictive analytics. By analyzing historical case data, legal professionals can now make more informed predictions about case outcomes, helping clients manage expectations and allocate resources more effectively. Predictive analytics also allows lawyers to assess the strengths and weaknesses of their arguments, enabling them to craft stronger cases.

2. Document Review Automation

Legal professionals spend countless hours reviewing and sifting through mountains of documents during the discovery process. Data science has introduced machine learning algorithms that can automate this tedious task, saving time and reducing the risk of human error. Document review software can quickly identify relevant information, making the legal process more efficient and cost-effective.
 

3. Enhanced Due Diligence

In corporate law, due diligence is a critical aspect of mergers, acquisitions, and investments. Data science tools can sift through extensive datasets, financial records, and public information to uncover hidden risks and potential red flags. This enables legal teams to make more informed decisions, mitigating potential legal issues that may arise in the future.
 

4. Contract Analysis and Management

Contracts are intricate documents filled with critical clauses and obligations. Data science applications can now help in contract analysis by extracting key information, flagging potential issues, and ensuring compliance. This technology streamlines the contract management process, reducing the chances of contract disputes and legal conflicts.
 

5. Data-Driven Litigation Strategy

Data science also assists in crafting litigation strategies. Legal professionals can analyze patterns in historical cases to better understand opposing counsel's tactics, anticipate arguments, and adapt their approach accordingly. This data-driven strategy can be a game-changer in court.

Data science is undeniably transforming the legal industry. From predicting case outcomes to automating document review, enhancing due diligence, improving contract management, and streamlining legal research, data science is reshaping how legal professionals operate. By harnessing the power of data, lawyers can provide better services, reduce costs, and ultimately deliver more favorable outcomes for their clients. As the legal industry continues to embrace these technological advancements, it's clear that data science is an invaluable tool for lawyers in the 21st century.

Want to know more? Get in touch with us and one of our experts can answer your questions. 

Did you know that lawyers are using artificial intelligence (AI) to predict how successful their lawsuits will be? This is one example of how technology is altering the legal industry as we know it. Over recent years, legal technology has taken center stage in streamlining and automating traditional law practices, while also bringing new efficiencies to the foreground.

According to Statistica, in 2021, the legal tech market generated revenues of 27.6 billion U.S. dollars worldwide and is expected to reach 35.6 billion U.S. dollars by 2027. Gartner predicts that by 2025, legal departments will increase their spending on technology threefold. With this type of investment, it’s clear that technology is leading the way forward in the legal industry.

AI has rapidly found its way into the heart of legal technology. The combination of AI and legal technology is proving to be a potent mix that's transforming the legal landscape, creating more agile and competitive companies and redefining the way businesses approach legal challenges. 

How AI is Powering Legal Technology

When integrated into legal technology, AI can drive efficiencies, increase accuracy, and reduce the time and cost involved in legal processes. Legal technology solutions leverage AI in a variety of ways, from automating mundane tasks to predicting legal outcomes and offering innovative solutions.

One prime example is AI-powered contract analysis. Traditional contract review is notoriously time-consuming and prone to human error. However, AI can read and understand the contents of a contract, automatically identifying key terms, obligations, and potential risks. This AI-driven legal technology significantly speeds up contract review, while also increasing accuracy and reducing costs.

AI also powers legal research tools. These tools can comb through vast quantities of legal documents, cases, and statutes in seconds. They can understand and analyze the context of search queries, making it possible to find relevant information more quickly and accurately than ever before. It can even automatically redact information!

The Impact of AI on Legal Technology and the Industry

With AI and legal technology, law firms and legal departments can now manage their work more efficiently. Automation of routine tasks, like contract reviews or legal research, allows professionals to spend more time on complex legal tasks and strategy development.

Moreover, the predictive capabilities of AI, such as predicting the outcome of cases or identifying potential legal risks, can provide businesses with a crucial competitive edge. This capability helps businesses to be proactive in their legal approach, thereby preventing costly legal issues before they arise.

AI and legal technology also help improve accessibility for legal services. Advanced tools enable smaller firms and businesses to access services that were once only within the reach of large corporations.

The Future of AI in the Legal Space

As AI continues to evolve, it promises to bring more advanced capabilities to legal technology. The rise of natural language processing, for example, will further enhance AI's ability to understand and analyze legal documents. This could enable AI to perform more complex legal tasks, such as drafting contracts or legal opinions.

In the longer term, we could see AI becoming a digital assistant for lawyers, providing advice, suggesting strategies, and even automating negotiation processes. It's also likely that we will see AI-driven legal technology being increasingly integrated into business processes, leading to an entirely new way of managing legal tasks.

It's important to note, however, that the rise of AI and legal technology does not mean the end of human lawyers. Instead, these technologies are tools that can help legal professionals to do their jobs more efficiently and effectively. Legal professionals will continue to play a crucial role in interpreting the law, advising clients, and making strategic decisions.

Exela's Legal Services: Harnessing Legal Technology for Optimal Solutions

Having explored the transformative role of AI in legal technology and its industry-wide impact, it's crucial to understand how businesses can practically leverage these innovations. One prime example is Exela's Legal Services, which seamlessly blend professional legal expertise with advanced legal tech to deliver efficient and cost-effective legal solutions. Our holistic approach encompasses various aspects of legal aid, from intricate contract reviewing to end-to-end eDiscovery services, powered by the latest advancements in legal tech.

The essence of our services is underpinned by a host of benefits. At the core of this is the provision of expert legal advice, facilitated by our legal tech's advanced analytic capabilities. Our experts, supported by AI and machine learning, provide accurate, in-depth insights that guide your business decisions.

Cost-effectiveness is a vital advantage of integrating legal tech into our service delivery. We employ advanced algorithms and process automation, ensuring that our suite of legal services is both high-quality and financially accessible, no matter your budget.

The integration of our legal services with legal tech does not only provide functional benefits. It also offers peace of mind as you're assured of having a team of legal experts augmented by powerful tech tools working in your favor. This allows you to direct your energy and focus on your business's core functions, knowing your legal matters are being handled efficiently.

Moreover, Exela's use of legal tech to deliver legal services helps streamline your business processes. Through automation and optimization, we enhance your business efficiency, reducing your legal overhead in the process.

Exela's Legal Services leverage the power of legal technology to provide unparalleled, cost-effective, and efficient legal solutions. 

At Exela, we stand at the forefront of technology innovations, establishing an initiative to use AI to its fullest potential. We have integrated generative AI across our products and services, improving the quality of the services and software delivered to our customers across the globe.

Embracing AI and Technology in the Legal Industry

The potent combination of AI and legal technology is undeniably transforming the industry. It is driving efficiencies, increasing accuracy, and enabling more strategic and proactive legal approaches. As AI continues to evolve, its impact on legal technology is set to increase even further.

The legal landscape is in flux, but what's clear is that businesses that adapt to these changes and embrace the potential of AI and legal technology stand to reap the rewards. Embracing this reality is a strategic imperative for businesses aiming to stay ahead of the curve.

By leveraging AI and legal technology, businesses can not only navigate the legal landscape with more agility and confidence, but they can also redefine it. So let’s redefine it together with Exela’s Legal Services and create a better way to achieve great business outcomes. 

Historically, the legal sector has been one of the slower industries to adopt new technologies. However, the unique demands of the COVID-19 pandemic caused a sudden boost in legal tech adoption. This uptick in technology utilization, along with the increased acceptance of specialized alternative legal service providers (ALSPs), are changing the way many legal teams operate.

In this edition of PluggedIN: How Tech and the Pandemic are Changing the Legal Sector, we dig into how law firms and legal departments alike are finding new ways to increase productivity and efficiency.

The full issue is available for download now at: https://www.exelatech.com/pluggedin

It’s often said the legal profession has been slow to embrace digital transformation—and especially law firms. But this isn’t entirely accurate. Lawyers have been making use of digitized legal research tools such as Lexis/Nexis and WestLaw since as far back as the 1970s. These days, many law firms have fully done away with their law libraries—relying instead on electronic research. But the digitization of legal research is far from all digital transformation can do to enhance the practice of law. Here’s just a smattering of functions and processes ripe for digital transformation…if your firm is ready to embrace the efficiencies offered:

Correspondence files
Lawyers have been maintaining correspondence files from time immemorial. These chronological archives of every communication to cross a lawyer’s desk are a wellspring of information for the lawyer on clients, cases, and subject matter. At least theoretically. In practice, paper correspondence files are bulky, unwieldly, and essentially unsearchable. But these days, the availability of innovative records management solutions can turn your correspondence files into a secure and searchable database. When cloud enabled, the data becomes available anywhere you have internet access, rather than just in “that file cabinet” outside your office.

Document production
Traditionally, document production, whether in the context of discovery or due diligence, has been labor intensive, space-sucking, and prone to human error. These days, however, there are e-discovery solutions that can streamline document production. Documents are scanned and processed through automated systems utilizing optical character recognition and other forms of artificial intelligence to turn endless piles of paper into easily searchable sources of evidence and deal back-up.

Case management
Law firms were once dependent on a staff of clerks to keep track of cases, motions, appeals, and the like. Nowadays, litigation intelligence support solutions can digitally organize and centralize case tracking, legal claims processing, class action coordination, collection and disbursement of settlement funds, and conveying timely notifications to claimants.

Hospitality
It’s not just legal industry-specific processes that can be automated to your firm’s advantage. For example digital visitor and lobby management solutions, which include digital kiosks, virtual lobby ambassadors, and smart lockers, make use of integrated technologies to streamline, simplify, and enhance the visitor experience and present your law firm’s brand in the best light possible.

Rainmaking
Marketing and reputation management solutions can revolutionize the way you court clients. For example, hyper-targeted marketing solutions can aim your communications at the right audience, and  data analytics tools can help you find that right audience.

Billing and other back-office functions
Like any business, law firms can benefit from automating back office functions. For example, billing and presentment solutions mean you can spend more time actually doing billable work for your clients, and less time managing collections. Your mailroom can be digitized from end-to-end (which, in turn, supports your data management as a whole). And human resources and capital management solutions can streamline how you attract, acquire, onboard, and develop top talent.
***

But as we said, these are just a smattering of the possibilities. Here’s more on Exela’s legal industry-specific solutions.  And here’s more on Exela’s multi-industry solutions.

With so many promising ways for the legal industry to utilize business process automation to streamline the practice of law, it might be surprising to learn that only 2 in 10 legal departments (and even fewer law firms) are engaged in digital transformation initiatives. But that statistic doesn’t necessarily tell the whole story; what may be missing from the picture is “LPO.”

“LPO,” which stands for “legal process outsourcing,” refers to the transferring by law firms and legal departments of some portion of their support services to external vendors, both onsite and offsite, in an effort to focus more on their core business: providing legal services. While some might associate “outsourcing” more with “staffing” than with digital transformation, what we’ve found is that in practice, LPO can be a logical starting point for members of the legal industry in moving toward digital transformation. In fact, many of Exela’s legal industry customers have embraced LPO with great success.

For example, in the first year of Exela’s management of onsite support services for a global law firm, the firm saved 15% in equipment, 10% in labor, and 27% through our custom-designed Managed Print Services alone. In another unmitigated success, Exela’s LPO services netted a large multi-branch national law firm:

• $430,000 in annual savings and cost avoidance,
• 35% decrease in staffing demands over an 18-month period, and
• A reduction of leased floor space as a result of consolidation of print and copy processes.

Now, here’s where the notion of “LPO” begins undergoing its own transformation—from “legal process outsourcing” to what we at Exela call, “legal process optimization.” The second law firm customer referenced above ended up saving a full $1.75 million in three years, as a result—not of staffing changes, but of technology and process improvements—such improvements being made possible by the customer’s adoption of legal process outsourcing as a starting point.

This particular customer’s journey from legal process outsourcing to legal process optimization began with a paring down of the firm’s existing network of satellite-based print-and-copy centers—24 at the firm’s corporate headquarters alone—into a single, centrally-located holistic document solution center. Initially, our centralized document processing solution increased production capacity and reduced delivery times (and in so doing, dramatically improved not only their employee experience but the experience of their clients). Over time, however, this solution evolved to handle far more than just print and copy work. Among other things, it paved the way for the adoption of an advanced eDiscovery system and other litigation support solutions.

Another way our customers have stepped gradually into their digital transformation initiatives is by starting with Exela’s more traditional mailroom operation support and transitioning to automating various aspects of the mail process and, ultimately, large-scale digitizing of the “mailroom” (which we put in quotes because one of the many benefits of Exela’s Digital Mailroom is the promise of repurposing the “room” currently used to process mail). Digitizing incoming mail makes a logical first step toward document digitization, which, in turn, is just a hop-skip-and-a-jump away from enterprise information management, which, itself, is responsible for a great many digital transformation successes.

Of course, Digital Mailroom is, itself, only one piece of our Smart Office suite of solutions, which are used in multiple industries to streamline the workplace. These include Digital Lobby, Digital Concierge, and Digital Lockers, among others. For a more detailed look at how law firms (and others) are optimizing their businesses via digital transformation, don’t miss the 7 Ways Tech is Transforming Law Firms.

Wondering about your own business’s level of readiness to move forward along the digital path? Here are 8 factors we recommend taking into account.

What is digital mail?

Digital mail (or “D-Mail”) refers to a web-based, end-to-end workflow solution that electronically manages your organization’s intake and distribution of inbound mail. Using state-of-the-art technology that enables intelligent data extraction, indexing, and electronic delivery, a digital mailroom automatically routes paper mail to the proper recipient—but without the need for paper or an actual mailroom. Want to know exactly how D-Mail works? Join us as we follow a piece of incoming paper mail through the D-Mail process here.

D-Mail has the power to benefit virtually ANY organization

Digitizing you’re your organization’s mail intake and distribution system is an important first step in the direction of a more sustainable, paper-free office. That’s a really important goal, and one Exela takes seriously. But it’s just one of many reasons D-Mail is such a game-changer, which also include:

• Strategic re-allocation of human capital - Adopting a digital mailroom allows you to vastly reduce the number of person-hours you’re allocating to the opening, sorting, and in-office delivering of mail. This allows for new and improved re-allocations of human resources for increased productivity and improved efficiency, and perhaps even happier employees. This applies not only to mail personnel but to all personnel because, honestly, who doesn’t waste a whole bunch of time every single day dealing with incoming mail?
• Reduction of human error - Digital mail reduces, if not eliminates, human error involved in sorting and distributing inbound mail. No more mis-deliveries. No more unattended piles of paper. No more unnecessary copies made for the wrong people.
• Automatic electronic audit trail of all mail activity - D-mail translates into an electronic audit trail of all mail activity (volume of delivery, delivery time, trends, etc.) for better insight and analytics, especially if you apply such solutions as Cognitive Automation to identify trends, patterns, risk profiles, and produce accurate predictions at the touch of a button. 
• Automatic notifications and reminders - That envelope sitting on your desk isn’t going to remind you, itself, that you need to open it and deal with the contents. But D-Mail will, pinging you to remind you that you have mail that needs to opened and mail-related tasks that need to be dealt with.
• Paper documents have a natural entry into automated workflows - Paper isn’t particularly useful when it comes to automated workflows. When you get your mail via D-Mail, your invoices get routed to your finance department’s payment processes. Your claims get routed to claims processing. Your customer inquiries get pulled into your marketing channels

D-Mail possesses super-powers for the legal industry

D-Mail is especially beneficial in the practice of law, particularly in law firms. In addition to the benefits that would be applicable to any organization, these are all specifically applicable to law firms:

• Automatic digitization of content that will likely be used in document drafting.
• The ability for larger law firms with employees scattered throughout multiple offices to share incoming information across locations. Just think: a single source of truth about a particular client or matter…
• Entry of incoming mail and information into legal industry-specific automated work flows (here are four you definitely want to know about). Need help envisioning how to get that going? Look no further than Why the O in LPO Should Stand for Optimization.
• Improve response time to client questions about their matters (and every lawyer knows just how important that really is).

Learn more about what else Exela can do to optimize your legal business (spoiler alert: it’s not always just about the technology).