Legal Apps and the Delivery of Legal Services
The use of legal apps by lawyers and clients can allow for more efficient and streamlined provision of legal services: by automating frequently performed, time consuming tasks, legal apps can free up lawyers to spend more time on engaging, complex and high level tasks.
What are legal apps?
Put concisely, legal apps are software programs that may be used by lawyers or clients to do particular tasks quickly and efficiently. They’re most effective when used to streamline common tasks that would otherwise be time consuming for a person to complete.
From a lawyer’s perspective, the use of these apps can free up time and effort that can be better invested in activities of greater value.
How can they be used?
The uses to which legal apps can be put are varied and wide ranging. In Australia, companies such as Neota Logic and Josef offer platforms on which these legal apps may be tailor made to suit particular contexts.
In-house
In the in-house context, legal apps may auto-generate common documents, such as employment contracts, or non-disclosure agreements. It may do this by using for instance, the details about the new employee – their address, their legal name and so forth – that the new employee has inputted into the app themselves. This makes it more convenient for the in-house lawyer, who then is spared the task of manually inputting this data into the employment contract.
If there is a matter in which the in-house lawyer requires specialist assistance, legal apps may match the lawyer with the specialist best positioned to provide that assistance. The app may select from a pre-defined pool of candidates, and find the specialist that best accords with the lawyer’s needs, by analysing factors such as speciality, time zone, promptness of work, and fees, as well as the weight to which the lawyer gives each factor. The lawyer is then presented with the most objectively suitable specialist in the circumstances.
Private practice
In a commercial context, an app may pre-screen a contractual document before the document is reviewed by a lawyer, and identify clauses that are likely to cause concern. The app may do this by searching for certain terms, separately and as combinations, that frequently raise red or amber flags, such that, when lawyers manually review the contractual documents, they are attuned to where the problems are most likely to lie.
An app may also be used to identify whether a particular transaction is compliant with the relevant regulatory scheme, and if not, further identify the particular steps still required to be taken by each party in order for the transaction to be compliant with the regulatory scheme. This may be accomplished by the app asking a set of relatively straightforward threshold questions to which the answers must be either yes, or no.
Community legal centres and not-for-profits
In circumstances where resources may be stretched, for instance, in community legal centres, legal apps may be used by prospective clients to self-help to the extent that they are able to. For instance, such apps may be deployed to educate a prospective client who claims they are owed wages by their employer. The app may inform the prospective client as to what evidence they might need to prove their case, and what steps are likely required to be taken in order for them to pursue their claim.
Community legal centres often have certain criteria that restrict the clients they are able to take. Prospective clients may use an app to judge their eligibility before phoning or attending the centre, thereby reducing the time the centre spends tending to low-value queries regarding eligibility.
Where prospective clients are assessed by the app to be eligible, the app may then further ask of the prospective client, the appropriate questions to obtain the information necessary to populate a new client intake form. Once complete, the app may then email the auto-generated and populated form to a nominated email address or upload the form to a database and alert the relevant person in the centre as to the existence of the form.
Why should they be used?
For in-house lawyers, the use of legal apps can streamline existing business processes and make new processes more efficient. For private practice firms, the legal industry has in recent years become a buyer’s market as clients seek more bang for their buck, and using legal apps to perform automatable tasks can leave lawyers with more time to do work of greater value. For community legal centres and not-for-profits, the use of legal apps by prospective clients allows the centre’s resources to be used more efficiently, and minimise staff spending excessive time on the traditionally time-consuming new client intake stage.
A caveat
While incorporating legal apps into existing processes in any legal context is bound to have positive effects, treating legal apps as being discrete from existing processes is unlikely to yield a highly beneficial result. To get the most out of an app, it must be integrated with the rest of the workflow – lawyers must be making use of the app as part and parcel of what they normally do.
The upshot
The upshot is that the use of legal apps by lawyers and clients can and does make the delivery of legal services more efficient and more streamlined. It gives lawyers more time to spend completing complex tasks and crafting bespoke solutions for the best possible client experience.
Rachel Ruan is a mentee in the TLF Connect Program and a penultimate law student at Melbourne Law School. Rachel’s mentor in the TLF Connect program, Jacqueline, is a senior solutions architect at Neota Logic.