Please enjoy this blog post co-authored by Ignacio Raffa, Technology Director, ZTZ Tech Group, Nicolas Vilela, Co-Founder & CEO, ZTZ Tech Group and Andrew Bryant, Chief Operating Officer, ZTZ Tech Group.

Efficiency and Automation in Legal Tech

Security and efficiency can be seen as an either/or scenario. You can only increase security by sacrificing efficiency, and vice versa. If you want to protect your home by locking the doors, you have to fumble around for your keys each time you want to enter. You also have to search around your home for them each time you want to leave (“where did I put my keys?!”).

The great thing about computers is that using them can increase security and efficiency. You don’t need to trade one for another. The biggest weakness in any security system are the people who use it. We often make poor decisions, especially when we’re tired, hungry, distracted, or emotional. It’s not difficult for a hacker to learn enough social engineering tactics to dupe us into giving away sensitive information. With the weak link removed, ourselves, the system can better protect the data of its stakeholders.

One example of how removing the person from the loop makes us more secure is with our passwords. Everyone hates remembering passwords. To deal with this we pick passwords that are easy to remember. Well, if we can remember them easily, a hacker can guess them easily. Weak passwords represent a big security problem for many organizations. This risk is mitigated by using a password manager. With a password manager you can rely on your computer to store your passwords. This creates the possibility of creating passwords that are stronger than ever, and nearly impossible for a hacker to guess.

Fundamentally, all computers can do is basic mathematical and logical calculations, like adding two numbers together. The thing is, computers can do this much faster than a person ever could. Computers can add a million numbers together in less than a second. No person can hope to match that level of performance.

At ZTZ, we harness the power of computers to increase efficiency in customer service teams. With our help, they can respond to customer complaints faster. Without our software an employee would spend tons of time downloading and sorting complaints. We programmed our software to do that task for them. The customer service team can have the complaints downloaded, sorted, and ready to respond to without any effort on their part.

But how?

Below we will define the 3 main concepts applied to Legal Tech that can multiply the productivity and efficiency for any given process:

1 – Simplify the User Experience

Customer Service and Legal teams are usually conformed by people with excellent soft-skills, able to understand complex situations between a company and their customers. Also, they must have deep knowledge of the law / terms of services just to answer a simple e-mail or complaint. They are experts in the conversational realm, where two or more parties exchange messages (either texts or pictures) and must arrive to a satisfactory conclusion. For any Legal Tech tool to be successful and efficient, we believe that the user experience must be in the same conversational realm. No clicks, no windows, no folders and absolutely no “formulas” should be required for a team member to be able to perform his or her tasks.

2 – Avoid Copy & Paste

The practice of copying and pasting text from one document to another is old and dangerous for legal documents. Not only there is the risk of introducing involuntary errors (IE. partially copying a case number instead of the full number), but also it can create big headaches in the future if the mistake happens to be related to amounts of money. For that reason, we believe that if any piece of information can be read from one source and completed in a target document it must be done automatically by a software, eliminating the chances of copy & paste errors. The time and effort spent building or configuring such a process will be insignificant compared to the harm that a copy & paste error can cause.

 3 – Learn by Doing

Last but not least, there is the matter of training. Every once in a while, a new technology or paradigm appears that revolutionizes how people create documents. From handwritten to typing machines, then computers with word processors and finally online text editors. All of these innovations came with a deep learning curve, and most of them with a generational change of the actual users. Nowadays, we believe that innovation should contemplate the training process from within. Any tool must be always simpler to use than the process it is trying to solve. And how do you achieve that? Not by removing the learning curve (that it is certainly not possible) but embracing it, and teaching the users while performing tasks with the platform itself.

In conclusion…

Business is about relationships. The end result of using technology to increase security and efficiency is that we can better help each other. If a company can deliver a higher quality answer to a customer’s complaint faster, that customer’s relationship with the company is strengthened. If employees can spend more time attending to the customer’s needs instead of doing administrative tasks, they’ll be happier at work. When people have less chances to compromise a company’s data, the company is more secure. It’s a situation in which everybody benefits.