How Legal Chatbots Can Increase The Profit of Your Law Firm

If you own a legal firm, you’ll agree that most of the working hours your workers concentrate on financial, marketing and administrative tasks that interrupt them from doing billable work.

Recent studies show that lawyers spend only 28% of their day on billable tasks and the average utilization rate was 29%, meaning that lawyers bill only 2.3 out of 8 hours every day.  2018 Legal Trends Report by Clio

Does it look familiar?

The problem of routine and unbilled tasks

Recent studies show that most of the legal companies want to increase their efficiency and revenue.

Well, who doesn’t?

Law firms expect from their workers to bring more money. But, most of the companies say that billing more hours and growing a client base is the lowest priority to them.

In a hunt to increase revenue and raise clients satisfaction, most of the lawyers work more than they were planning.

77% of lawyers who work more than they planned, say it’s because they want to catch up on

work that didn’t get done during the day. And 51% of attorneys say they overwork as they want to be available to clients.

Have you ever noticed that routine and unbilled tasks are stealling your time from clients?

77% of the firms think that hiring more staff is the answer to this problem, but still, 58% of those want to reduce spendings.

So, how can a legal industry increase income but work and spend less?

One of the solutions is chatbot.

Legal Chatbots

Chatbots are appearing in almost every work field, and the legal industry is not an exception.

Legal chatbots are a great way of optimizing a work process to save lawyers time and money.

A chatbot doesn’t need a rest or vacation. It works 24/7 to provide customers with legal help whenever they need it. As well, it is much more beneficial and agile than a human lawyer consultation.

As a lawyer, you might think that legal chatbots are going to take your place. But bots are like little helpers. They do the routine work instead of you to free up your schedule for tasks that need your attention the most.

Here, have a look. 

Benefits and use cases of legal chatbots

Be available to clients 24/7

Do your clients email or call after your working hours? Do you feel like sometimes you have to respond?

Well, if yes, you are not alone.

One of the main reasons why lawyers are overworking is because clients expect them to be available at any time of the day or week. Moreover, 67% of surveyed customers said they choose a law firm if they promptly answer the first call or email.  So, it’s important to be available to your clients at any time. But it doesn’t mean you have to dedicate your time for that.

Your law firm can save on money as well as time by implementing chatbots to provide clients with answers to basic legal questions and to conduct initial consultation. Chatbots are your dependable employees. They don’t require sleep nor breaks and are always willing to consult and provide clients with accurate legal information 24/7.

Let’s take a look at Ailira– Artificially Intelligent Legal Information Research Assistant. Ailira provides legal advice 24/7 and is also accessible from any of your devices. You don’t even need to visit the website – talk to Ailira chatbot directly in Facebook Messenger. You can chat with Ailira as you would with a friend, using instant messaging.

Generate legal documents

How to increase productivity in a law firm?

Try implementing chatbots into your practice to generate legal documents, reports, and legal briefs. A bot chats with a client to gather the required information and then creates his document in minutes instead of you.

While creating docs, chatbot can provide legal help and answer basic legal questions that a client might have during this process.

Let’s look at Ailira again. She instantly generates Australian legal documents for your business and personal use, much cheaper and faster than a visit to a lawyer would take.

The client answers a few questions required to fill out the specific document, and Ailira quickly adds the necessary details to a document. And, in a few minutes, a person has a complete document. If the client wants a human lawyer to review this document or he would like to discuss something more complex, Ailira will notify you and help to schedule a meeting.

Review and analyze legal documents

How does the typical day at your firm look like?

Does it include hours of analyzing and reviewing documents, contracts, wills and agreements that need to be signed?

By implementing chatbots, law companies can give attorneys time for things that require their attention the most. Bots will check the documents and rapidly give results.

For example, another legal chatbot ROSS is famous for its legal research feature. However, this bot can help you to review and analyze memos, motions, pleadings, and briefs. A user has to upload his document to ROSS, then it will process the document and show the negative treatments of cited cases.

Increase lead generation

Chatbots create a conversation that leads to conversion. Using natural real-time communication, chatbots increase lead generation by solving simple legal violations that people run into every day.

For example, one DoNotPay bot became highly popular by helping people deal with parking tickets, a common law issue that a lot of people encounter. By helping users find solutions to such a small and specific legal violation, this bot engaged with and reached thousands of people and quickly became widely-used.

Automate Lead Qualification

While interacting with a potential client, a chatbot qualifies the lead by having a conversation to gather the required information for you. Instead of filling out unappealing forms, people answer a few questions with the possibility to ask for additional information or clarifications from the bot during any stage of the conversation.

A Montreal-based law firm EXEO launched an Immigration Virtual Assistant (IVA) to make the process of moving to Canada much easier and less stressful.

IVA assists people that want to immigrate in Canada with free legal consultation. At the same time, the chatbot qualifies a lead for the company. IVA asks a user a few questions to understand what are his chances for moving to Canada or accessing any immigration program. Thanks to IVA, people can get legal assistance free of charge and the law firm gets qualified leads that are interested in moving to Canada.

Perform Due Diligence

One of the most time consuming and monotonous tasks that lawyers perform is conducting due diligence. Chatbots automate and speed up this process, leaving you time to do more meaningful tasks. Chatbots carry out a broad investigation that includes reviewing tons of documents and asking plenty of questions to uncover background information and create a full report for you.

Access the information

Daily lawyers and paralegals go through mountains of information. Chatbots can rapidly scan enormous volumes of data to find an accurate and useful answer. They can quickly go over tons of information to provide relevant laws, specific regulation or a similar legal case. Combining chatbot and CRM, attorneys can search through their database to find a related lawsuit in seconds.

Conclusion

Today, lawyers face the problem of routine and unbilled tasks. Their workdays mainly consist of administrative, financial and advertising tasks. However, they still have clients that need consultation, legal help and advise or legal documents created.

Legal chatbots are the solution that can help you to concentrate on your clients. Chatbots help law firms to be available to clients 24/7, generate and analyze legal documents, boost lead generations and qualification, perform due diligence and provide legal information for you or your clients.