Canadian Lawyer

August 2019

The most widely read magazine for Canadian lawyers

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LEGAL INNOVATION NOW FEATURE 18 www.canadianlawyermag.com rethinking why it is done in the first place, who really needs to be involved and notified and what the approval and escalation process should be. For the practice of law, we are seeing early innovation efforts being driven largely by external vendors. They are bringing about digital transformation of the industry by automating the highly administrative and repeatable legal processes. Think of the typical closing process with its multiple documents, multiple versions and multiple signatories flying in, out and around a firm. Searching for the latest version ready for review and tracking signature pages within bloated email threads of inconsistent recipients and senders creates intense frustration and valuable time being wasted at "Many say change is slow in law firms. They may be right, but simply paving over some of these meandering cow paths can't or won't work." critical times in complex deals. One of the challenges of process automation is that there is often no mutually agreed manual process in the first place or, indeed, believing that the "flying by the seat of one's pants" way of doing things is due to each file being different and that surely there can't be any standard process to it all. Lawyers might agree at the highest levels that there is a process to all closings, but how they play out on the ground and in different teams can be wildly different. But process automation requires every user to adopt the same process for the automated tasks to work among teams and for the efficiencies to be eventually realized. This puts new lawyers entering the workforce at a distinct disadvantage; they are not only learning the traditional (i.e., manual) closing mechanics process but are also at the forefront of bringing about full digital transformation of these deals using the firm's new process automation tools. The processes are unlikely to match what they are seeing on the ground. These new lawyers are our true change agents. Many say change is slow in law firms. They may be right, but simply paving over some of these meandering cow paths can't or won't work. So, we're amid this full digital transformation but without the pre-agreed manual procedures. It feels like we missed that business processes reengineering wave of the '90s, where business and legal processes might have been first analyzed and reengineered without access to the deep technology. Law firms today are dealing with both the initial creation of standard operating procedures at the same time as turning into truly tech-enabled firms, with the process automation bots as icing on the cake. No wonder the journey is slow." Kate Simpson is national director of knowledge management at Bennett Jones LLP. Opinions expressed are her own.

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