Legal Technologist QA - Ashurst Advance

Advancing the practice of law through legal technology

The role of in-house counsel is rapidly evolving. GCs and their teams need to deliver timely, high quality and high value legal services to businesses undergoing unprecedented regulatory change, while managing ever shrinking legal budgets. The twin pressures of growing workloads and demands for efficiency dividends can make new technology a compelling proposition. However, the sheer number of competing legal technology packages in the marketplace can make it difficult to navigate.

The Ashurst Advance Legal Technologist team has a dual mandate: assisting Ashurst legal experts to work more efficiently and focus on higher value advisory activity; and facilitating the provision of technology enhanced legal services directly to our clients.

In this post, part of our continuing series looking at our Ashurst Advance platform, we talk to Tae Royle who leads the Legal Technologist team and ask him how technology is shaping the practice of law.

Tae, what is the Legal Technologist team and what do they do?

"We have a fast growing group of Legal Technologists based in our UK and Australian offices. All have law degrees and a passion for technology. We provide entry level positions straight out of law school. Some of our more senior team members are lateral hires from private practice while others have run legal tech start-ups. 

Our Legal Technologists understand the legal issues which drive complex, fast moving matters. They work alongside our legal process design experts to create solutions which enable repetitive legal tasks to be delivered quickly and cost effectively. We are constantly scanning the market for new innovations which we bring inside the firm and share with our clients. We evaluate new technology on its ability to provide frame-breaking efficiency benefits – will use of this technology allow us to carry out an activity at least ten times faster while maintaining quality and increasing consistency?"

Can you give us some examples or use cases?

"We utilise machine learning software to undertake first cut reviews of portfolios of legal documents. With the right conditions and set-up, accuracy rates can be much higher than for human review, and we can even achieve accuracy rates of over 99% on documents which share strong common characteristics, and automatically pull that data out of the documents and into a database. We always agree with our clients how much human review is required and some clients tell us that they don't want us to ever look at the original documents, they just want us to work with the machine-extracted data. By going straight to the data, we can bypass the manual elements of document review resulting in huge time and cost savings on large portfolios.

Once you have used machine learning to transform a portfolio of .pdf contracts into a structured database, you can do some amazing things with that data. We can create visualisations which will graph and measure systemic legal risk issues in a client's portfolio. We can push the data into our document automation system to create hundreds of documents with the push of a button. We can then issue those documents for execution by the counterparties through our electronic signing software, and track progress through a centralised dashboard."

How is technology shaping the practice of law?

"We think there is a quiet revolution happening right now in certain practice areas. That revolution is an unbundling of traditional legal workflows, facilitated by technology. Previously you had big teams of lawyers working on large matters, reviewing and drafting transactional documents. Now on some deals we can delegate certain review and drafting tasks to automated systems, and other aspects to our Legal Analyst team. This frees up our lawyers and partners to focus on the strategic and high value components of the transaction. Technology is by no means a magic bullet and you cannot use it everywhere, but it is incredibly powerful in the right hands."

How does this benefit clients?

If you unbundle the method of work, and deliver it in a different way, using process engineering, alternative resourcing strategies and advanced technology, then the results can be transformative. Here at Ashurst Advance, we want everyone to be able to have their cake and eat it too."

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to get in touch with Ashurst Advance co-heads Chris Georgiou and Mike Polson.