Automating the client intake process through digitization of legal forms and implementation of interactive, custom web apps for law firms and professional services.
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Background
A successful law firm was overwhelmed by their manual documentation system. Every case generated hundreds of pages of legal forms, many of which were generalized and only contained a few fields of relevant data per case. These physical legal documents were vulnerable to damage and required and were painstaking to review.
Challenge
The goal was clear: give the firm the ability to send customized digital forms to their clients that were user friendly and offered a sophisticated storage, search and recovery workflow.
Security would be the top priority for this application. Legal forms have a large amount of highly sensitive, personal information as well as the implication of attorney-client privilege. They needed to be able to quickly and easily share documents and forms, without exposing vulnerabilities to anyone outside their organization - including the direct client.
Therefore, legal document access would have to be based on very strict data governance rules but the firm did not have the infrastructure necessary to enable that as they had no digital account management system in place. Email notifications were also important so that the attorney and legal secretary assigned to the case would be alerted when clients reached specific events in filling out their forms.
Finally, these legal forms had to be live so that they could review the forms in real time, as they were being completed, with their client so they could assist them on particularly complex aspects. Once completed, each custom legal form would then need to automatically generate a report that was fully compliant with court requirements, and file it appropriately.
Solution
While the idea of customized e-forms seems simple enough, the legal forms that needed to be digitally represented had a huge amount of variation and complexity. This complexity required detailed data abstraction in order to break the forms down into their most basic elements which could then be combined and nested together to create structures representing the most complex form with just a few clicks of the button. We helped them assemble these components into templates that they could easily be copied and modified on a case-by-case basis (pun intended).
In order to achieve the user permissioning that the law firm required, we implemented an Identity Management Platform to solve for the fact that the firm did not have any form of CRM. We selected Google Identity because it provides an elegant way to manage users through either an existing Google account or through any pre-existing single-sign-on service (SSO) for both ease and security.
Once a new form was ready it was assigned to a case, with its associated client and legal team identified through Google Identity. All parties were sent automated email notifications about the waiting form. The client was then directed to create a secure account using Google Identity and all document access permissions were then tied to these accounts which could easily be managed with groups and roles per case.
Documents must have a signature to be legally binding and so we implemented Docusign which allowed us to integrate a digital signature into the overall workflow. This automated flow was triggered once the client completed their e-form. The e-form would automatically convert into a legally compliant PDF and prompt an e-signature backed by Docusign within the application.
For high security data storage, we selected Google again for data and PDF archiving. All form data was encrypted and stored in Google Cloud Datastore, and all PDF documents were encrypted and stored in Google Cloud Storage. Digital form information was searchable by keyword and keyphrase search, allowing for instant retrieval of relevant documents.
We wrapped all of these features into a single custom web-app that contained both a client and an admin portal. No more wasted paper and wasted time. In the next versions of their tooling we will be implementing Google Document AI to help organize and categorize their previous case information. By applying machine learning to case data, the firm will be able to gather analytics that will enable them to increase their win rate moving forward.
Results
After the first month, the attorneys at the firm reported an average savings of 3 billable hours per day per lawyer as a result of the automated legal form process. With each attorney billing approximately $300 per hour, that’s an average savings of $216,000 per attorney, per year for the firm. In addition to massive financial wins, the user experience of the application improved interactions with their clients, which has driven a marked increase in repeat business.
