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Digital Transformation for Law Firms

 With the pandemic starting in 2020, lot of companies went into digital mode. Some were forced to and some others already had plans to go digital. Thus, creating a digital transformation. British Petroleum (bp) has a month ago announced that they have partnered with Infosys to transform bp’s digital application landscape. Leigh-Ann Russell, EVP, Innovation & Engineering, bp, said “We are delighted to further develop our relationship with Infosys to help accelerate our digital transformation and scale growth through tech-enabled operations. Together, we look forward to delivering innovative solutions that meet the evolving needs of our customers and drive growth for the future."

And the question pops up - what does digital transformation mean and what would that mean particularly for a law firm?

Digital transformation is using the technology to change the way business is carried out for achieving operational efficiency and delivering value to customers. For a law firm, digital transformation means streamlining and automating the business processes and driving insights leading to increased efficiency, decreased errors, and improving client engagement, collaboration, and service delivery.

Thus, the result of digital transformation is two-fold – (a) improving firm’s overall efficiency and (b) adding value to customer. Therefore, digital transformation is a fundamental and a mandatory process for a law firm to remain competent in today’s world now that cloud computing is dominating every aspect of business and artificial intelligence (AI) is making its presence felt. 

How can a law firm achieve digital transformation?

According to Didier Bonnet’s article “3 Stages of a Successful Digital Transformation” in Harvard Business Review (HBR), there are three phases of digital transformation.

1. Modernization, i.e., simplifying and digitizing existing processes and functions.

This phase is about automating and digitizing different processes and functions in the law firm. Enabling resources to fill time sheet, providing centralized digital space for storing all documents, and creating invoices online are some of the examples of digitizing. Creating automatic workflows, case managements, document management, enabling automatic contract management including creation and review, automatic billing management, are some examples of automating different processes. This phase also includes having basic analytics and reports like un-billed time, billed time, outstanding, revenue, open matters, dormant matters, etc. 

2. Enterprise-wide transformation, i.e., changing complex cross-value-chain.

This phase is about use of technology for achieving efficiency across process and functions. Sounds tricky and is indeed tricky considering phase 1 is about “modernization”. Cultural change, collaboration and communication, adopting digital first strategy, hybrid working polices, adopting specific solutions like e-discovery, etc., integrating solutions like CRM with ERP, outlook and word with case management systems, are considered as some examples of enterprise-wide transformation.

3. New business creation, i.e., increasing the size of the existing pie or creating new revenue lines.

This is the most interesting phase as this is where ROI is generated and measured. Revenue cycle and pricing optimization, exploring new services or specific customized services, enhancing customer engagement, etc., are some of the examples of new business creation. As is logical, gaining insights from the analytics obtained after modernization and advanced analytics in this phase helps in pushing this phase. This phase enables having analytics that helps in differentiating between grunt work that can be automated and specialized work, understanding risks, and improving decision making. 

Digital transformation is a continuous and iterative process. Digital transformation doesn’t stop at identifying new services or revenue lines, for the new services will create new processes needing a new digital intervention. But resisting digital transformation is a sure-shot way towards failure with ever-increasing competition in the legal industry itself. 

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