Deconstruction of legal matters – instruction

Oneof the themes for the magazine this year is the deconstruction of legalmatters. We believe that one of the skills for future lawyer will be legalproject management. As managers they should have the ability to deconstruct thevarious components of a legal matter and be able to continually make the processas efficient as it can be. In this issue we look at the first of six elementsthat are common to nearly all legal matters.

The first and arguably most importantelement is instruction. This is a new or existing client’s ability to providework to a lawyer. For lawyers who deal primarily with larger businesses, theinstructions are likely to come via email as governed by a service levelagreement. It may be the case that a lawyer working on a large client mattermay never see the client at all. For those lawyers working on the high street,it is likely to be the opposite purely by the nature of being located closer tothe people they serve, as well as the personal services they provide.

While the legal sector is economicallyhealthy there are still a significant number of businesses and consumers who donot seek legal advice from lawyers, despite it being advisable to do so. Somekey reasons surround cost and lack of knowledge about how to instruct lawyers.Making the process of instruction easier with a clear indication of how much itis likely to cost will allow greater growth in the sector, especially for smallbusiness and personal legal services.

Technology is clearly a great way ofimproving these two issues. Instructions can now be taken from remotest ofplaces, and at any time of the day. We now live in a world where access toinformation is at the touch of a button and it is important that law firms areable to keep up with consumer demand. For those law firms providing personallegal services, it may be worth considering chatbots to allow clients to askquestions (and more importantly get answers!) at any time of the day. It canalso be used to book appointments without human interaction.

With fixed fees becoming more and morecommon, and the Law Society crying out for price transparency, now is the timeto create automated questionnaires which can provide clients with an estimateof how much their legal work will cost, as well as showing the assumptions thatis based on. Undoubtedly some work will be particularly complex and willrequire further discussion and that should be factored into the questionnaire,but for everything else it should be automated.

Following on from that, if the result of their questionnaire is that they are happy with the quote and they would like to instruct then why not get all the information required at that stage. That information can feed directly into all the relevant internal systems and even get the ball rolling on drafting the document from the outset.

All in all, I hope this gives a bit of a summary about what tools are available at this stage of a legal matter and how they could be used. Making it easy for clients to instruct a law firm, as well as providing quotes, with little human interaction is clearly of benefit to law firms. There are undoubtedly other ways and I hope they form the topic of more extensive articles during this year.