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In the legal industry, innovation and technology are playing a bigger role than ever before. From document automation to virtual closing lists, technology is changing the way firms work and operate. In this interview, Karen Tuschak and Karen Anderson, both experts in the field, share their insights on the practice areas where innovation is having the greatest impact within firms right now.

• Corporate practice areas are leading the way in innovation and technology adoption
• Cloud-based technology is replacing traditional software licenses
• Transactional practice areas such as banking and finance, real estate, and litigation are also adopting technology for document automation and e-discovery
• Corporate databases can be utilized by other practice areas for increased efficiency

Karen Anderson, who specializes in corporate practice areas, says that innovation is changing everything in her field. “Clients can access their records, it’s about having cloud-based technology rather than licenses for this and that. I think we will continue to see this level of change for a few years. Everybody is in the midst of change right now in corporate groups.”

Karen Tuschak adds that any transactional practice is also starting to adopt technology for document automation and virtual closing lists. “Banking and finance are adopting document automation and virtual closing lists and checklists. It’s unbelievable when they start to wrap their minds around things that we used to do in corporations with automation. Its particularly effective where they have similar large clients, and using templates. Especially in real estate with things like condo closings, real estate transactions, anything that can be automated is changing the game.”

Watch the full interview, Innovations in Transactional Practice Areas: How Technology is Changing the Game

The use of technology in transactional practice areas such as banking and finance and real estate is allowing for increased efficiency and cost savings for clients. Karen T. also notes that litigation has been utilizing e-discovery for some time, but other transactional practice areas are also starting to adopt these tools.

Furthermore, Karen T. highlights the value of using corporate databases in other practice areas. “Banking and finance is doing things for the firm’s corporate clients. The information is already there. So just finding new ways to incorporate their documents.”

In summary, the practice areas that are seeing the most innovation right now are corporate and transactional practices such as banking and finance, real estate, and litigation. Corporate is undergoing major changes with the implementation of cloud-based technology and client access to records, while transactional practices are using document automation and virtual closing lists to streamline their processes.

Overall, it is clear that technology is playing a major role in shaping the future of these practice areas and firms that are able to embrace and leverage these new tools and processes will be well-positioned for success.

Automation is essential for corporations and organizations of all sizes and scales these days. Competition is fierce, and this is perhaps nowhere more apparent than when it comes to hiring qualified talent to join the team.

Many firms want to appear innovative to both their clients and their prospective new hires. Skilled professionals often have experience with innovative technology and they appreciate the ability to streamline day to day tasks. This way, they’re able to devote more time, energy, and resources towards bigger picture solutions that help drive greater growth for the firm.

Why use technology to streamline hiring processes

Let’s say your firm is in expansion mode; you’re actively on the hunt for new professionals who can bolster the capabilities of your organization. For the sake of argument, let’s say you want to hire 10 new prospects who can add their years of experience to your firm as either legal professionals or paralegals. Now, you need to create employment contracts to solidify the offers.

This is where it gets challenging without the right technology. Drafting employment contracts from scratch is a very time consuming process. Even if you were to use a pre-written template to draft most of the document, there may be specific terms and conditions for each individual hire that need to be inserted into the contract.

What if the template isn’t easy to edit? If you add in new details into the agreement, does it disrupt the entire formatting and force you to spend more time correcting those errors?

Simplify the employment contract creation process

Given the average job offer process takes up to 7 days, break down the above scenario in terms of that cost in time. If you have 10 legal professionals you’re trying to hire, and it takes up to 7 days to complete the process for each individual person, that’s a lot of time spent writing and finalizing employment contracts.

All of that time could become a sunk cost if the new hire doesn’t work out for the firm. Companies spent over $92 billion on training new hires between 2020 and 2021, which is further compounded by employee turnover. You don’t want to invest all of those company resources to, first, draft employee contracts and, second, train and develop that new hire if they’re ultimately not the right fit for the firm.

This is why it’s important to have an automated process that allows you to create employment contracts faster and easier. With the right platform, you can have document assembly and creation like you’ve never seen before. This way, you can gain back some of those working hours spent creating documents and reinvest that time and resources back into the business. You can also devote more time towards vetting and qualifying prospects so that you get the best new hire to support your growing business needs.

No code injection increases accuracy and efficiency

Certain platforms provide code-free employment contract assembly solutions that make the process even easier for your teams. You can use these drag and drop solutions to draft advanced legal or employment contracts as fast as you need to get them out the door.

These platforms are intuitive, easy to use, and built with a user-friendly interface. You can create automated documents and legal forms that can be sent off to the right party instantly. Plus, you can even save previously written text blocks within the platform and drop them into new documentation as needed. This makes it easier to reproduce elements of the contract that are ubiquitous across all offers, further reducing time and energy required to draft new employment contracts. It’s a win-win all around!

Are you ready to inject a code-free employment contract creation process into your organization? Join the MinuteBox revolution so that you can earn back more of your own time as you continue to source, vet, qualify, and hire new professionals that will contribute to the future growth of your business.

A career as a legal professional is one of the most sought after and hardest earned professions. As practicing attorneys, trained clerks/paralegals, or in-house corporate counsel representatives, the responsibilities assigned to legal experts are critical to the success of any business entity.

While their roles are of utmost importance, legal professionals also face some of the most recurring challenges in any professional setting. Between pressing deadlines, client expectations, precedent-setting mandates, and other taxing challenges, legal experts always have their work cut out for them.

The stress of managing client expectations

Deadlines, billing pressures, client demands, long hours, changing laws, and other pressures individually cause legal experts to feel stressed out. Collectively, they’re responsible for making the practice of law one of the most stressful professions for all practitioners.

For example, in the UK, a study of over 100 practicing attorneys found that 92 percent of lawyers experienced stress or burnout from their job. Most respondents also admitted to spending up to 10 additional hours of overtime per week, significantly detracting from a healthy work-life balance.

One interesting finding from the study was related to technology. According to the numbers, most lawyers believe entity management technology that automates administrative and clerical work is the most impactful way modern solutions can help reduce stress.

Clients want more value for billable hour rates

When the global economy is firing on all cylinders, companies are willing to spend more on professional legal services. When the economy contracts and approaches recession-level anemic growth, entities are less willing to pay high legal hourly rates.

In 2021, the average billable amount charged by lawyers was $300 per hour. Over the next two years, supply chain management issues and the ongoing political issues triggered economic calamity across the entire globe. Today, economists forecast a very difficult 2023, raising the question of just how many companies are willing to pay high hourly rates.

One option to help legal experts prove their value is through entity management technology. Using these intuitive platforms, the administrative and clerical work can be uploaded into the cloud, where it’s filed, sorted, tagged, and organized in a matter of minutes. With these solutions in place, legal counsel can spend more time consulting with clients and provide demonstrable proof that billed time is for consultation rather than documentation.

Benefits of entity management technology

Entity management technology takes the menial work out of the legal profession and helps experts rediscover the fun in providing their services. Its most valuable benefit is that legal counsel can digitize corporate documents and minute book records.

By uploading all client documentation into the cloud, counsel and their respective clients can view the corporate documents at their own convenience. Instead of arranging time for face-to-face meetings, an entire review can be done electronically, providing a growing number of business leaders the freedom to conduct their legal business from remote locations.

On top of the convenience and flexibility afforded by these platforms, entity management software also provides the following underlying benefits:

• Industry-leading security backed by biometric and hardware key authentication
• Options to quickly generate reports for client reviews and signatory approvals
• Advanced search parameters that make it easy to find and source minute books
• Built-in calendars to track important filing deadlines, transaction dates, shareholder meetings, etc.
• Unlimited seats for the entire legal counsel and chief entity decision makers

Use entity management software to simplify legal workload

Technology helps simplify personal and professional lives. Entity management technology saves legal counsel valuable hours of time, which can minimize the need for overtime.
Since the platforms are intuitive and designed to automate most clerical work, legal experts can allocate their own time towards profitable tasks throughout their days. As more clients demand value from billable hours, your legal team can focus on growing Legal Recurring Revenue with dedicated time and energy towards solving legal challenges that affect clients’ own businesses.

Time is money; isn’t that the old saying? The more time spent on menial, often repetitive tasks, the less time you have for big picture solutions that help grow your business. If limited time and legal paperwork are impacting your ability to deliver results, that’s a problem. Thankfully, there are solutions.

In the legal space, time is a valuable luxury that’s often in very short supply. According to a legal billing trends report, the average law clerk spends up to 48 percent of their workdays on administrative tasks. These tasks include things like office administration, generating bills, documenting minutes, licensing and even continuing education. The report also found that 41 percent of legal professionals would dedicate more time to business development if they had it to spare.

Promote a more collaborative work environment

Disorganization is a bane of legal professionals’ existences. A disorganized office space with files spread out across desktops, in Google Drive, and even in physical binders does not promote a productive or collaborative work environment.

But what if you had the option to centralize all of those files in one convenient and easy-to-access location? The benefit of using secure cloud-based software is that it hosts all of your files so you don’t need to pull your hair out searching for them across many different spaces. Plus, your minutes and all relevant documents are searchable, sortable, and shareable with everyone who has access to the platform, which you’re able to limit with user-based permissions.

In the end, this saves you an abundance of time looking for your paperwork. More importantly, you can easily find and send files to fellow clerks, the lawyers leading the file and even the clients themselves to verify the contents of the information. It’s more collaborative and fosters a more productive working day.

Create the ability to streamline completion of daily tasks

Part of the job requirements of a law clerk are to manage the creation, filing, and oversight of legal paperwork. This includes regular tasks such as drafting documents, chasing people down for signatures on those documents or drafting complex paperwork to formalize legal transactions. In some cases, you need to be familiar with digital coding languages like javascript, CSS, Python, C++, or syntax in order to complete these tasks. Add it all up, and it’s no wonder that nearly half of a paralegal’s workday is tied up in administrative tasks. Rather than continue with the old ways of doing things, you could provide your team with a solution-oriented interface that streamlines all of these processes.

You could use platforms with built-in templates that require no coding to generate documents. They also allow you to easily send e-files to recipients for quick signatures. Ultimately, this streamlines nearly half of a law clerk’s daily tasks, allowing an entire legal team to devote more time and resources towards big picture solutions to help grow the business.

Sharing is caring, so why not make it easier?

Sharing files with both internal and external parties is a delicate task, especially if those files are haphazardly thrown around without proper security. Suppose the files contain sensitive information such as a client’s banking details or their social insurance number.

Instead of risking an unsecure file being passed around online, you could use secure easy-share links created within a cloud-based entity management platform. The sender of these files can dictate what information is relevant to the recipient, and what information should remain confidential. This ensures that all files are shared in a secure and efficient manner that guarantees transparency while still promoting a client’s right to privacy.

All of these suggestions are meant to help you see a path towards more viable solutions. If you find you’re losing more of your own time in repetitive tasks that don’t contribute to revenue or growth, you might be thinking that there has to be a better way. Now, there is one.

Interested in getting back more of your own time to focus on the growth of your firm? Join the MinuteBox revolution so that you can create an environment that is guaranteed to deliver more value to your clients.

Influencing change in law firms can be a challenging task, particularly when it comes to the adoption of new technology. In this blog post, we will explore the role of paraprofessionals and legal professionals in driving change and ensuring successful adoption of new technology. Key points include training, the “train the trainer” approach, and involving key stakeholders in the decision-making process.

• Training is key to successful adoption of new technology
• “Train the trainer” approach involves key people within the firm learning new technology and training others
• Involving key stakeholders, such as partners, in the decision-making process can ensure support for new technology

Influencing change in a law firm can be a challenging task, particularly when it comes to the adoption of new technology. However, the role of paraprofessionals and legal professionals in driving change and ensuring successful adoption of new technology is crucial.

One strategy for influencing change is training. As Karen Anderson, Corporate Services Manager at Blakes, Cassels & Graydon LLP, explains, “the process of getting there was democratic and it mainly involved paralegals from all of our offices because the firm had an understanding that these are the folks that are using this technology going forward.”

Watch the full interview, Influencing Change in Law Firms: The Role of Paraprofessionals and Legal Professionals

Another strategy is the “train the trainer” approach, where key people within the firm learn new technology and train others. Karen explains, “key people in our firm that are learning a lot of the stuff and then training other people within the group. And it really just keeps evolving, but the driver is the paralegal use it, and lawyers can enjoy read-only access to all of these records. As can the clients.”

It is also important to involve key stakeholders, such as partners in the decision-making process. As Karen Tuschak, former National Director at Dentons and now onwner at Spider Silk Solutions, explains, “One of the things that we did at Dentons was the paralegals were definitely the drivers of the new technology and what we wanted. But we did have a partner committee as well, just so there was support at that upper level.” By involving key stakeholders in the decision-making process, it ensures that they are aware of the benefits of new technology and can support its adoption.

Involving paraprofessionals in the process of change is also a great way of getting buy-in and support from the legal team, as they are the ones that will be using the technology on a daily basis. Furthermore, having them involved in the training and the decision making process, they can be the drivers of the new technology and they can provide insight and feedback to the vendor to improve the product and make it more useful for the legal team.

In conclusion, training, the “train the trainer” approach, and involving key stakeholders in the decision-making process are crucial for influencing change and ensuring successful adoption of new technology in law firms. By involving paraprofessionals in the process, legal teams can benefit from the adoption of new technology and can provide feedback to vendors to improve the product.

On the weekend of March 11, 2023, a sense of deja-vu settled over much of North America. It was an unsettling series of financial setbacks that dangerously paralleled the 2008 financial crisis. What was the trigger of these unnerving reminders from the ‘08 global financial disaster? It was the collapse and insolvency of Silicon Valley Bank.

The SVB collapse triggered a wave of panic as investors rushed to pull their assets out of risky portfolios. The biggest loser in this latest bank run was Signature Bank, a massive entity with deep ties to real estate and legal industries. Seized by US regulators mere hours following the collapse of SVB, the Signature Bank collapse marked the third-largest bank failure in US history.

US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen announced on March 12, 2023, that all SVB and Signature Bank customers will be “made whole” in an attempt to calm the brewing storm in the financial sector. Her efforts appear to have done the job, as markets rallied on March 13, 2023, a sign that her reassurances injected much-needed positive energy across the country. The worst damage appears to be limited to the US, as Canadian officials assured residents that the SVB fallout on the northern side of the border would be very low.

How did Silicon Valley Bank collapse?

Mark T. Williams, a former examiner for the US Federal Reserve, describes the SVB collapse as “a colossal failure in asset-liability risk management.” Other venture capitalists laid the blame on decisions by the SVB CEO and CFO to liquidate assets that had lost significant value as a result of rising interest rates.

SVB Financial Group, the parent company of SVB, reported selling $21 billion of bonds on March 8, 2023. The bonds had lost significant value against rising interest rates, and the sale resulted in an after-tax loss for the company of $1.8 billion for the quarter.

This reckless decision followed an earlier maneuver by SVB Financial Group CEO Greg Becker to sell off personal SVB stock valued at $3.6 million. SVB Financial Group CFO Dan Beck also made questionable sales of shares prior to the outright collapse of the bank. Collectively, these actions triggered a wave of panic that forced the institution into insolvency.

SVB had no Chief Risk Officer since April 2022

According to the company’s own records, there has been no Chief Risk Officer overseeing risk management issues at SVB since April 2022. Those same records show that the number of meetings chaired by the company’s risk committee more than doubled in the past year.

As the company divested assets from its stock portfolio in a blatant effort to rebuild capital, SVB customers rushed to withdraw $42 billion of cash in less than 48 hours. All these actions: the losses from the sale of stocks, the client loans devalued by higher interest rates, a lack of diversified banking customers (SVB primarily tailored to Silicon Valley tech startup firms)—created a chain reaction that led to the collapse of the bank.

A Chief Risk Officer and a properly functioning risk committee might have relayed the risk management concerns of poor fiscal decisions to the company’s CEO and CFO. Presumably, those stark warnings would have prevented those decisions from being made, which might have avoided the outright bank collapse.

SVB collapse comes on the heels of the FTX collapse

The SVB collapse is another reminder of the pitfalls of overinvesting in nascent industries. The SVB collapse comes only months following the collapse and disgrace of FTX, a cryptocurrency firm that engaged in a series of alleged cases of fraud.

While the end results are identical, there is a key difference between the two cases. The SVB collapse appears to have been the result of poor risk management policies and extremely short-sighted decisions on disbursing assets and liabilities. The FTX case involves criminal charges that have led FTX founder and former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried into criminal indictments that risk significant jail time.

Use entity management software and don’t be like SVB

Since the lack of a Chief Risk Officer in the SVB executive hierarchy played a major role in the bank’s collapse, the case serves as a sharp reminder for other business entities. It’s important that you have proper managers, established organizational charts, and clear corporate compliance policies in place to avoid making these same mistakes.

Entity management software is one of the best resources to help implement corporate compliance policies. You can build a detailed org. chart within the platform, creating an organizational hierarchy and chain of command to manage all important business decisions.

If there are any decisions with potential legal consequences, your team can review the org. chart and use the platform to create diligent minute book records documenting how those issues are managed. Additionally, you can send any documents that require signatory approval – for items such as the sale of company stock – to the appropriate executive. You can include the transfer, signature, and filing of those documents in your minute book. This will help ensure your entity manages all decisions with appropriate, and logical strategies.