The role of AI, automation and digital legal homes

In the modern legal world, processing legal data efficiently is becoming increasingly overwhelming. The challenge lies not only in the sheer volume of information, but also in the variety of sources, formats and manual processing, which often leads to delays and errors. This problem is exacerbated, specifically in Germany, by the use of different, often not integrated technologies and the frequent use of physical paper mail. Companies are faced with the task of optimizing their processes for the present and preparing for a seamless digital future.

Current situation

The processing of legal data and information is currently not digitally standardized. Manual processing steps still dominate across the industry, while automated data processing is still rare. The main reason is that data required for processing is usually stored in multiple systems and databases and often still needs to be compiled manually. In addition, a lot of legal information is still sent in physical paper form via post or the beloved fax machine, which further increases the difficulties in processing it.

A bright future for the beA?

For a bright digital future in processing legal data in Germany, the special electronic lawyers’ mailbox (“beA”) will play an important role. Whether legal professionals are enthusiastic about this news or not, integrating beA seamlessly into digital processes will be vital to achieve end-to-end processing of legal data in Germany. The beA has yet to become popular among legal professionals and legal software companies, which already integrate the beA into their digital legal solutions to enable their users to access beA data and messages, use them in their legal workflows and to seamlessly use the beA, when required as an official communication channel.

In general, the aim in processing legal data is to always keep legal data in a digital state across its lifetime from creation, to editing, sharing, signing and analyzing, to monitoring and archiving, without any printing e.g., of beA messages in between. For some, it might sound absurd to even mention, or antiquated, but the reality in Germany shows that a lot of legal data is still not in a digi­tally standardized state at all times, causing inefficiencies, unnecessary costs and delays.

Starting with digital legal homes

In an ideal world of us authors, using the example of legal in-house teams, legal data should be stored and organized in a holistic digital legal home, such as legal matter, document and contract management systems, to ensure a comprehensive digital lifetime of legal data.

Looking at legal documents, they should not just be stored for the sake of it, but should be embedded in a digital legal home. This digital legal home will enable contextual data and information to be stored with documents, whether it is document meta data, vital information like deadlines, or legal terms and conditions within the documents that after automated extraction can be stored in structured, and more importantly analyzable, data fields, or data rela­ted to cases, matters, fields of law or projects.

Beyond that, it is vital that these digital legal homes enable different sets of legal data to be put in relation to each ­other or to the stakeholders involved, to be grouped and to be analyzed in multiple ways. Finally, it is important that the accessibility of legal data sets can be managed in a ­detailed way. On the one hand, enabling confidential docu­ments or legal data sets to be shared only with particular stakeholders, or on the other hand, enabling any legal data set to be seamlessly shared with a multitude of different internal or external stakeholders.

Born digitally

Returning to the beA in a world of digital legal homes, we can imagine an ideal digital lifetime of legal data. In this ideal world, the legal data already arrives digitally, via email or beA. This input of legal data to the digital legal home should be as seamless as possible with few to no manual steps involving the user. For this, a number of automations and integrations among the different systems are required, including with the help of AI where possible and practical. In practical terms the result could be described as a digital legal input assistant. This could also carry out an OCR analysis behind the scenes, if documents are not yet machine readable (e.g., if they had to be scanned as an exception, just one last time, the truly final time), to ensure optimal data processing.

Quick tech excursion
For those only used to using such automations, rather than building them, it may be interesting to point out that connecting different systems seamlessly with each other can sometimes be a challenge, as the integrations can ­always only be as good as the relevant technologies used by the systems being integrated. Standardized protocols, APIs (application programming interfaces), as well as RPA (robotic process automation) play a decisive role here. Further, once integrated, it must be ensured that data from different sources is consistent and up-to-date, and carefully linked and harmonized to enable efficient processing and interpretation of the data.

Ready for a digital life

Coming back to our ideal digital lifetime, the legal data that has arrived through automations in our digital legal home will have already been processed in such ways that it is already stored in the right matter, potential meta data have been stored, vital information has been extracted and stored in respective data fields, and that potential remin­ders and deadlines have been registered. This automated processing of the legal data could also be quality checked, of course, just to be sure, really sure.

Automatically processing legal data can potentially be much faster and more precise, and as such may minimize the risk of errors, than if done manually. Because, if we are honest, not many of us enjoy the repetitive and administrative activities of storing documents manually and filling in data fields. This is because done manually, some might be incorrect or missing. Errare humanum est.

In our automatically updated digital legal home, we can now use our legal data in any way we like: editing it, using generative AI in a data protection compliant way to improve or work with it, signing it electronically (of course), analyzing it (to explore future possibilities here we would need an additional article on the subject), and monitoring or archiving it. But most interestingly when talking about the ideal digital lifetime of legal data and the most common thing that happens with it, is sharing it.

Having successfully input and processed legal data in an automated way, wouldn’t it be just wonderful, if the current version of our legal data could just be seamlessly shared with other stakeholders in the same way? After ­selecting the extent of the legal data we want to share, with whom we want to share it, and possibly what we would like the message to say (AI could provide great suggestions for those extremely exciting emails), the original integrations of our communication channels such as email or the beloved beA would be automatically accessed and our sharing workflow seamlessly executed. In our ideal world, the receiving stakeholders would obviously use the same level of automated legal data processing and look after their legal data in equally sophisticated digital legal homes.

No dream: the end-to-end digital lifetime of legal data

The ideal digital lifetime, and the intelligent, automated processing of legal data we have described is not science fiction. All the required technologies exist today, and ­existing legal solutions are continuously being adapted, and more importantly integrated with each other for ­exactly these workflows of seamless legal data exchange. This may lead not only to greater efficiency, optimized processes and workflows, and more precise and faster processing of legal data. It may also represent a fundamental shift in how legal data is worked with in Germany: finally purely digitally (bye, bye paper). It would create a foundation for the legal industry that not only meets today’s ­requirements, but would also be flexible enough to ­respond to future technological, regulatory, legislative and behavioral developments.

Taking care of legal data

As Lecare we have been developing digital legal homes for the legal industry for almost 40 years, and will strive to continue doing so for the next 40 years at least. We have always cared about continuously questioning the status quo, daring to incorporate new technologies when everyone else thought they would not persist. We have incorporated official, which are sometimes not quite yet such modern technologies, but that are necessary for legal professionals, always in order to provide the best and most secure digital legal homes for German legal professionals.

We believe automation, generative AI and other forms of artificial intelligence will leverage the value of digital legal homes like matter, document and contract management systems. This will transform them from mere legal data platforms into intelligent legal steering hubs, enabling ­legal operations, legal data processing, analysis and ­insights that empower businesses.

We believe legal professionals should have the chance and time to unleash their legal superpowers to work on ­bespoke legal challenges, to protect and more importantly steer their companies through proactive risk management as business enablers, and to incorporate human-centered leadership at the core of it all. We will strive to take care of the rest, so they can focus on what they do best: being legal superheroes.