December 07, 2020

by

0   Comments

Finding the right sample document stinks!

As lawyers we are inundated with reams of paper. But nothing is worse than not having the right starting document. Countless friends have spun yarns of woe when they had to go searching in their firm’s knowledge management system just to find the right starting document. Often after hours of searching my friends give up only to ask another associate to help them find the right starting document. Finding the right document should not be this hard.

This problem is even worse for the small or solo practitioners. Recently, I was speaking with attorney who did not have the luxury of large firm’s knowledge management system. He bemoaned that he had to turn away business because he just didn’t have the right documents to do the job efficiently. Since he charges a flat-fee, the time he spends document drafting eats into his profitability and hinders his ability to ethically service more clients.

This Problem is Not Just Anecdotal

In 2012, IDC conducted a report to “uncover significant time wasters and opportunities to address workforce productivity.” The report found that lawyers among other professionals spend 11.2 hours a week navigating challenges related to document creation and management. Lawyers and paralegals specifically lose up to “2.3 hours a week searching, but not finding the right documents and another 2 hours recreating documents that could not be found.” Though some years old, the reports’ findings are still relevant as they underscore the consequential problem of template mismanagement.

This problem, however, more than being an inconvenience, it has real costs. Literally, time wasted on template creation and management activities can “cost firms $9,071 per lawyer a year or a 9.8% loss in the firm’s total productivity.” For litigators, this is a significant lost. Evidently, the seeming impossibility of template management can interfere with some of the most important aspect of litigation practice—namely, with time, ethical responsibility, and productivity. Ideally, litigators would like to have more cases, more time to ensure the successful handling of these cases, and ultimately the time to accomplish these goals. Unfortunately, the current system is neither practical nor conducive.

Why are lawyers wasting so much time trying to find documents?

Isn’t there a better way that a lawyer can access sample documents and templates?

What if there was an online database that managed these templates and made them readily accessible for each type litigation organized by jurisdiction and type of document?

What if the document I needed could be found with just a few mouse clicks?In this age of technology, in which firms are incorporating more technological solutions, such an idea is feasible. According to the results of the ABA Legal Technology Survey, technology spending is on the rise. The results showed, as of 2020, that nearly half of law firms, 48%, had increased their budgets for technology from the previous year. Yet even with the promise of new systems, to reduce time and increase efficiency lawyers are still wasting 11.2 hours a week looking for documents.

AiLanthus: A Better Solution

AiLanthus is building a template management system. The platform is a brief bank that automatically sorts uploaded legal documents using AI by practice area, jurisdiction, motion type, judge and lawyer name. Unlike any other system, we make it easy for the user to find right legal document by allowing the user to quickly search by document tags to find the right starting document. As part of our initial trial, users will get to pick key documents already pre-loaded into their system.

When the user wants to add a new legal document after doing research, the user can automatically upload the document and the AI will correctly tag it for later search. The user can then share these documents across the firm.