The legal industry is currently undergoing a profound shift. Advancements in technology and data analysis have become impossible to ignore. Legal analytics, the application of data to the art of legal marketing and law in general, is growing. This trend has allowed law firms to predict case outcomes, become objective in strategic legal tactics, and improve the client experience. As a part of this change, marketing methods have taken a turn for the more objective, or data-driven, and have become more algorithmic and targeted.
Accumulated has taken command of this change, creating software engineered to maximize these legal analytics benefits in a law firm sales-hub environment, and properly distribute its advantages to other related marketing practices. Law firms looking to increase their annual growth and advance or maintain their position in the legal industry can now take advantage of these tools.
Looking into the future, this area is expected to become more central to the brain of a law firm’s work. Many say that this is the first "obvious" step toward improved artificial intelligence (AI) compatibilities in business, as superior AI machine learning abilities are coming into the market and establishing preferred investment areas for your firm.
Understanding Legal Analytics
Legal analytics is the application of data analysis to law—it relies on data to drive decisions, rather than documents. It applies to a variety of operations of a law firm or legal department to increase efficiency, best practices, and realize a competitive advantage.
Unlike raw data, a large and unmanageable combination of essential and moronic documents, data analysis is scaled to the user's needs. Given the texting metaphor that is most often used to communicate these days, there is no replacing the corpus for another.
Legal research of case law documentation is improved by recognizing a variety of relevant precedents that indicate judicial behavior. The development of legal research to this ultimate natural end is obvious—those damn judges get what they get… and that’s what we get. Such applications of data analysis to legal research also predict certain future outcomes for a developing caseload.
Applications of legal analytics to contract analysis are similar to virtually every other application of contract analysis. This is truly nothing new, but the scale of discovery, and the ratio of false positives to substantive positives, is awesome. For those of us who have done this on a three-ring (with or without electronic database review), the new standards in the art of alphabetizing legal representation set new goals to which to aspire.
Applications of legal analytics to litigation strategy are also relevant to general claims adjusters. Better than simply predicting a favorable outcome, predicting a butt-whipping before you go to trial allows you to tuck your tail between your legs and run for your life. Conversely, those who fail to do so necessarily determine only that they are the target of some other legal strategy that is, according to the numbers, more likely to impart wisdom to imbeciles and children.
Legal marketing software providers have embraced integration with legal analytics because, of all the things they do, a common marketing perspective of data is that "without data, you're just another person with an opinion." Considering multiple source-differentiating distinctions allows developers to modify their work and add both data-generating applications and those concepts that application developers incorporate as relevant to—but not directed by—widespread marketing principles providing clear value to the spread of the product and concepts—a targeted approach to marketing legal practice.
Key Legal Tech Trends Shaping the Future
The legal tech landscape is changing, and two of the most common buzzwords are AI (artificial intelligence) and machine learning. However, the real story is in legal analytics and predicting what a case outcome will be, expediting research, or managing a process.
AI uses software to analyze, like, hundreds of millions of legal data points to find trends that humans could not possibly identify with the naked eye or without the help of data analytics software. The services may be doing a variety of things, but at the end of the day, the AI user has a huge advantage over those who do not use AI in litigation or advising clients.
In law, the rise of big data brings new variables into the fold for both the lawyer preparing a strategy for a case and to the legal marketer. Users have more access than ever to information about case law, statutes, legal precedents, etc.
In marketing, the disruption has seen an explosion in software development across the legal profession because legal researchers and marketers are using similar tools (those tools being AI and machine learning) to interpret data.
The software is simply being used to generate marketing ideas. Indeed, these data analytics and big data software are determining exactly what a client's legal issue is, the best course to acquire a client, and how to market legal services in general, and more.
The Future of Legal Analytics
In the next 5-10 years, technology will play a considerable role in transforming legal analytics. Artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other technologies will enable the law industry's access to a large amount of raw text once difficult to analyze comprehensively and consistently. Artificial intelligence and machine learning will then take that raw legal text and will convert it into findable patterns.
At any scale, law firms and legal departments will gain insights into the law in ways that were previously underdeveloped. The same algorithms will also be used for marketing insights, helping law firms better predict which lawyers or paralegals fit their clients' areas of focus. Legal content marketing will also need to consider a more specialized focus industry-wise to cater to artificial intelligence.
Likewise, a similar analogy can be made with many other industries.
How to Prepare for the Future of Legal Analytics
Law firms and legal departments looking to compete in this environment need to purchase legal marketing software that aids in business development, SEO, and market research. This legal tech will aid in the pursuit of big data for law firms and make it easier to develop the types of analysis that will help to get your name in front of potential clients. Plus, there must be a focus on continuing legal education, as well. To continue to expand your virtual footprint, you need to do the same for your mind. Agencies need to require training on the use of advanced data analysis and big data for legal applications. Adopt the use of legal tech that requires additional research/training, and get your practice set and your team trained!
Otherwise, send them packing.
Last on the list is something every firm and department head is claiming victory for. There is a culture of data. They’ve got it. They are giving it away. They are so dependent on the culture of data, I would venture to say they wouldn’t know how to run their firms without it.
Case Studies and Success Stories
Take the case of one mid-sized law firm. This firm's focus was on intellectual property cases. The law firm was able to use player statistics to predict claims outcomes. This resulted in a greater than 20 percent increase in favorable case settlements. In this instance, the case outcomes that resulted were directly impacted by the assistance they received from data.
In another instance, a firm specializing in corporate law significantly reduced the time and costs involved in M&A. They did this by streamlining manual due diligence work that they used legal analytics to assist with.
In both cases (the one devoted to corporate law and the one settled via M&A), a very nice piece of legal tech advertising that a lawyer, law firm, or legal department would have gotten its answers from to resolve these advertising issues was something—if the law firm already had it and had originally purchased it for another use—the law firm found insider its Accumulated low-cost suite of legal dashboard tools.
Several months earlier, the firm designing [product 6] to fit client behavior needs had already gone to the website of the same low-cost analytics advertiser. It got its most-likely legal marketing solutions from there. This same tool that provides marketing and business intake solutions for this law firm is the same tool that can provide a selective list of tools to import what is (who are) most client-compatible to address a firm's local, national, and global legal marketing problems.
The most wanted and correct legal tech software for this particular law firm would be a selective list of tools that [Product 6] recommends to import. The correct import recommendation was de rigeuer prior to advising [Product 6] what to do.
A law firm also got these correct import instructions as: To make these import instructions, a lawyer, law firm, or legal department would have had to non-manually pick and choose some software from within your own law firm (from some of its other software putting it in predicament as to what to choose now!) from a list of products from within the.]]
Modern law practices need to stay on top of what the "new modern" thing to do is. The landscape of technology is evolving so rapidly that there is always some new company coming out with a better software to help with something your firm needs: your phone service, client management, case management, website, etc.
Make sure you have/find the right tools
If it were just that easy, we wouldn't have jobs as attorneys. No matter how tech-savvy you are, I bet there are some annoying busy-work type of responsibilities that you just don't think about or want to invest the emotional brain time to do it. Good news! There might just be a company that does it for you. Accumulated has a great legal marketing software that essentially just eliminates having to worry about the administrative side of things so then you can put on your lawyer pants and do what you need to do. What two extra hours a day of work might look like tomorrow : Automatically see where marketing money goes and where cases fall off. I think the software speaks for itself. Check out some of Accumulated's offerings, request a demo, and have a real conversation about it. It can make a difference in efficiency. We will never send you something that we wouldn't use ourselves.
