Each year I look forward to the State of the Legal Market report in order to get a more granular look at the past year in legal services.
In 2022, the demand for transactional law firm services declined, most notably in Big Law. But law firms continued to hire apace. The result was a drop in productivity and profits. Profit Per Equity Partner growth was down in 2022. But PPEP is still at a healthy level compared to pre-pandemic.
That is the top line view from the new 2023 Report on the State of the Legal Market by Thomson Reuters with the Georgetown Law Center on Ethics and the Legal Profession.
The following three charts illustrate the slow down in demand and PPEP growth as well as the fact that profit per lawyer is still good compared to 1Q 2020.
This report is a one-of-a-kind. It has has 22 more charts, Including associate compensation, expenses per lawyer, lawyer turnover, collection realization, and more. If you work for a law firm, or if, like me, you provide solutions to law firms, there is certain to be data which will round out your view of 2022 and give you a picture of what 2023 may bring.
You can register for a free download of the full report here:
This fall I have been fortunate to mentor an internship with Blake and Joaquin, two juniors at Design Tech High School, “DTech,” in San Mateo, California. The subject of this internship was Workflow Automation in Legal. Blake and Joaquin did the research, wrote the copy, and created the graphics. They did an outstanding job.
Take a look. Do you now know what Workflow Automation in Legal is?
What is Workflow Automation?
Workflow Automation is the use of process improvement and software to increase productivity and efficiency.
What is Workflow Automation in Legal?
Workflow automation in legal is the use of software to automate legal processes,
“Workflow Automation in legal is the automation and optimization of the legal team’s workflows to maximize efficiency, eliminate errors, and provide more value to the law firm or legal department.”
Jake Link, bryter
What are Examples of Workflow Automation in Legal?
Client Billing
Scheduling Appointments
Client Intake
NDA Generators
Employment Contract Generators
What Companies Provide Solutions for Workflow Automation in Legal?
ActionStep – cloud-based, legal practice management and billing and accounting software
Centerbase – cloud-based, legal accounting, billing, and practice management software
Clio – cloud-based, legal practice management and billing software
Rocket Matter – cloud-based, legal practice management and billing software
Zapier – used to connect different applications and integrate their workflow into a single application
BRYTER – development platform for legal, procurement, and compliance to automate workflows, build applications, and digitize contracting
Matter Suite – cloud-based legal practice management software
Mobile Helix – encrypted mobile app for document workflows for lawyers
Why is it Important for Legal Teams to Engage in Workflow Automation?
Legal teams should engage in workflow automation because of the major impact it can bring to a firm, especially when it frees up the lawyers to bill more hours with clients. In addition, with workflow automation, lawyers and other employees can engage in higher level work which leads to greater job satisfaction and less stress.
Is Workflow Automation a Good or Bad Thing?
It’s definitely a good thing as it enhances the efficiency of a firm to allow for increased profits.
Blake and Joaquin made a one minute video about the internship.
Authors: Blake and Joaquin
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“Workflow Automation in legal is the automation and optimization of the legal team’s workflows to maximize efficiency, eliminate errors, and provide more value to the law firm or legal department.”
Its benefits are increasing time and productivity for the workers that normally have to deal with manual paperwork/data processes. Examples of workflow automation tools are legal intake tools, automatic NDA generators, and data breach reporting, and client billing.
Basic overview of workflow automation along with a list of legal practice management software that includes workflow.
“Workflow itself is defined as the sequence of industrial, administrative, or other processes through which a piece of work passes from initiation to completion.”
“Why Legal Workflow Automation is Important to Law Firm Success”. Mattersuite. July 27, 2021https://www. mattersuite.com/blog/why-workflow-automation-important-to-law-firm-success
Goes more into the ROI and the positive worth it brings to a firm, especially down the line in use of automation. Includes useful graphics that may be used for inspiration for future graphics or to source a quote from Mattersuite.
“Legal automation is designed to streamline the law practice operations smoothly. Automating document management to gaining more clients, everything can be achieved with legal automation.”
Terms of the deal were not disclosed. But we know that:
May 2019: Hg purchased Litera investment firm K1 Investment Management. At the time Hg Capital Trust stated that as part of the acquisition, it would lead an investment of $39M in Litera.
FOMO is nothing new in Silicon Valley VC-land. But it’s new and exciting in the world of what is broadly referred to as “legal tech.” Legal tech has been known for slow adoption and conservative processes, including mainly using software which is deployed on-premises at the law firm or business entity. In many cases this changed with the pandemic. The overnight necessity to support attorneys and staff working from home catalyzed adoption of cloud-hosted software throughout legal.
There’s more to this story. For example, FOMO leads to frothy valuations.
But for today…
🥳 Congratulations to the unicorns, the parties to M & A, the newly funded, and the rapidly growing companies in #legaltech! It’s an exciting time to be in legal tech.
If a picture is worth a thousand words then a video is worth a few thousand?
Our LINK app is so visual that we like to SHOW what it does. This video shows how LINK enables workflows for lawyers, especially document comparison and annotation.
Lawyers receive, annotate, and share documents using a single encrypted app.
Today at ILTACON 2017 you can see our new in-app annotation in LINK 3.3.
Lawyers can quickly annotate a document receive via email or a document stored in iManage Work® and NetDocuments® DMS. Then email the annotated document or check it into DMS with LINK 3.3.
“With the addition of PDF annotation, LINK now provides the industry’s broadest complement of workflows for lawyers on mobile devices,” Seth Hallem, CEO and Co-founder of Mobile Helix. “LINK workflows, whether annotating, editing, or comparing documents, ensure security and control of documents. Clients are imposing tougher security requirements on law firms. Our goal is to provide law firms with stringent security while making it easy for lawyers to get work done with LINK.”
Inspired by data from “Mobile is Eating the World” by Benedict Evans of Andreessen Horowitz venture capital firm, aka A16Z.
Smartphones and the software which runs on them are changing everything we do. How we take photos has radically changed. We pay for lunch with our phones and order groceries from an app. It’s easy and efficient.
I am interested in enterprise mobility. Some of the data in “Mobile is Eating the World” should be a wake-up call to businesses. Below, marked with bullets, I have cited a few data points from “Mobile is Eating the World.” My thoughts on enterprise mobility are in blue font.
Have you heard of Taste of TECHSHOW? These dinners are unique to TECHSHOW and a fun way to meet people with the same tech interests as you. Each dinner has a tech theme such as the Cloud, security or mobility. Some dinners are sponsored but most are “dutch.” Check out the selections and choose your favorite tech topic or Chicago restaurant. Taste of TECHSHOW will fill up so don’t miss out – register today.
The EXPO at TECHSHOW buzzes with energy. We’d love to meet you and to show you a demo of our LINK mobile app. With LINK lawyers can:
Work seamlessly with DMS including WorkSite, NetDocuments as well as with SharePoint and CIFS file shares.
Open, review and forward .nrl attachments.
Manage, search, sort and file emails.
Find, review and interact with email attachments.
Use SharePoint while mobile. Access SharePoint data, files, and lists are all easily available online and offline from a smartphone or tablet.
Enter our drawing for an Amazon gift card – see you at Booth 113!
Each week I share a few of the more interesting tech and business pieces which I have read. Uber and Barbie got a lot of ink last week. You probably read enough about Uber, but did you see the scorn of the book, Barbie: I Can Be A Computer Engineer? If Barbie wants to become a real developer, she should review the list of highest paying programming languages.
Interesting list. It tops out with Ruby-on-Rails at $109K/year. But becoming a Salesforce architect pays almost twice as much. By Lisa Eadicicco, @LisaEadicicco, in Business Insider.
In this post, Eric Carlson, @ericjohncarlson, of Propelics refers to new data from a recent Kinvey survey entitled, The State of Enterprise Mobility. The survey data indicate that the average app takes 8 months to develop at a cost of $270K. Kinvey, Propelics, and Mobile Helix each provide ways to make the development of enterprise mobile apps easier and quicker.
Did you read about this last week? A blog post about the 2010 book, Barbie: I Can Be a Computer Engineer, went viral. As one Amazon reviewer had written, “Barbie admits, ‘I’m only creating the design idea, I’ll need Steven and Brian’s help to turn it into a real game.’” In response, a Ph.D. student at Georgia Tech wrote a “remix” of the book with Barbie a full-fledged developer. You can view, and even download, the remix here. From hometown paper, The Atlanta Journal Constitution, by Adam Carlson, @acarlson91.
The Human Rights Campaign Foundation’s 13th report on workplace LGBT equality across U.S. enterprises has been released. This year 386 businesses earned the top score of 100%. The Legal sector is the highest scoring sector. Law firms make up 89 of the top scoring entities.150 companies in the Fortune 500 achieved a 100% score.
