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.
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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).