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Legal robot use case

RICHARD WEINER
Technology for Lawyers

Published: October 18, 2019

A couple of months ago, we covered Robotic Process Automation (RPA) in the law office. Probably nobody who read that column immediately decided to hop on board the legal RPA train at that moment.

Well, there may now be a path for the adventurous among you to do so.

Again, an RPA is a little robot that automates desktop tasks. It can be written to be as simple or complex as it is needed to be.

UiPath (https://www.uipath.com/) is the world’s fastest-growing software company. It offers users tools to create their own RPAs without the user needing to have a technical background. Programming without being a programmer.

UiPath’s business approach includes an emphasis on the law office. In fact, Baker Hostetler is a member of Cleveland’s UiPath user group, and recently presented its findings to that group.

When UiPath decided to create a user case in the law office, it turned to its own in-house lawyers and had them create their own robots. It took about a year for them to train, develop and deploy their own.

First, the lawyers had to be trained on implementing a business approach to their office. This included adopting an “automation first” outlook and taking the approach of connecting business needs with a technical solutions team (you know, rather than doing the research and writing that brief/contract).

Lawyers used to legal analysis had to learn a different way to analyze situations—delineating a business problem, deciding how to automate a business solution, and then applying that analysis to a legal situation. They took ownership of the automation process.

Then, the lawyers started building robots through UiPath’s robot building studio. You can do the same thing. These robots were pretty simple. More complex projects or projects that developed complexity could be assigned to the technical staff if necessary.

The robots that the staff developed included automations for export control, regulation monitoring and updating, conflicts of interest (making conflict checking instantaneous instead of labor-intensive), GDPR user data requests, document retrieval, a contract robot, and a legal chatbot.

The “automation first” approach makes these kinds of usually labor-intensive tasks automated, which frees lawyers up to do more lawyering.

Time to get onboard, folks.


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