A Lawyer’s Guide to Virtual Legal Assistants
As a lawyer, your time is valuable. The American Bar Association’s 2023 Legal Technology Survey Report found that lawyers spend only 2.5 hours per day on average on billable work.
AI-powered legal assistants are rapidly transforming the legal sector, acting as virtual colleagues that empower lawyers to focus on more complex and strategic aspects of their work, permitting enhanced productivity as well as additional efficiency and accuracy in their work.
AI Legal tools leverage machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) to assist lawyers with a range of tasks from legal research to document review and contract analysis.
AI and legal tech tools for virtual legal assistance have seen significant advancements in recent years, offering lawyers powerful solutions to streamline administrative tasks and enhance productivity.
What is a Virtual Legal Assistant?
A virtual legal assistant is a remote professional who handles administrative tasks for your law firm (any firm or even household, actually). But for lawyers, the benefits can be exponentially greater in terms of productivity and profitability.
The virtual legal assistant is an ‘app’ that is continuously evolving, with improvements in accuracy, context understanding, and integration capabilities their capabilities continually develop.
As technology advances, we can expect to see more sophisticated tools that can handle increasingly complex legal tasks.
Intelligent virtual assistants (IVAs) use AI software to automate things like client care but intelligently using and learning from past inquiries and using the relevant apps to resolve issues or answer questions.
Machine learning is used by IVA to improve its procedures, making the platform more intelligent over time.
Currently virtual assistants are able to handle everything from client communications – email, live chat, calls – to legal research and writing, document management and accounting and billing.
The Benefits of Hiring a Virtual Legal Assistant
The benefits of using a virtual assistant are obvious. Designed to make lawyers’ lives easier by taking out the routine, time-consuming routine, but now doing a great deal more than just the routine too. Effectively they can act as another fee-earner in terms of handling the more routine side of law and – in an increasing number of cases – handle large volume data and text compilation and assessment.
- Cost-effective: Less expensive than hiring full-time, in-house staff
- Flexibility: Scale services up or down based on your needs
- Increased efficiency: Focus on billable work while delegating administrative tasks
- Improved client service: Prompt responses and better organization
How to Choose a Virtual Legal Assistant
It’s important to know what you want your legal AI virtual assistant to do for you.
Law firms should evaluate factors such as data security, integration with existing systems, and the specific needs of their practice. The needs definition and the expectations you have of your virtual assistant should be clear.
Working Successfully with a Virtual Legal Assistant
- Provide thorough onboarding: Introduce them to your firm’s processes and technology
- Communicate clearly: Set regular check-ins and use project management tools
- Give detailed instructions: Be specific about task requirements
- Use collaborative software: Implement legal practice management software like Clio for efficient collaboration
Virtual Legal Assistant Services
Several companies offer virtual legal assistant services:
Several AI-powered legal assistant tools are gaining popularity among lawyers:
- CoCounsel: This GPT-4 chatbot assists with document review, summarization, deposition preparation, legal research, memo generation, and contract analysis.
- Lexis+ AI: A comprehensive tool offering conversational search, document summarization, and intelligent legal drafting capabilities.
- Smith AI: A virtual receptionist service that helps lawyers and law firms manage phone calls and client inquiries, the tool uses natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning algorithms to assist clients.
- Midpage.ai: Designed specifically for immigration lawyers, this tool assists with legal research and document drafting.
- Dodan.ai: A GPT-powered tool that helps with deposition and document summarization
Where Virtual Assistants Are Taking Us
Virtual legal assistants can significantly improve your law firm’s efficiency and profitability and will play an increasing role in any and every law practice. By delegating administrative tasks, you can focus on billable work and providing excellent client service.
Products from companies like Apple and Google work as as voice assistants and include Siri and Google Assistant while AI avatars provide lifelike 3D representations to enhance the ‘chatbox’effect.
But the intelligent virtual assistant will also be doing much more than merely the client interface and routine work and as 2024 progresses we will be seeing a lot more about just how these powerful tools can be used as part of your law firm’s daily work.
Mustafa Suleyman, (pictured) the entrepreneur and cofounder of DeepMind and now the CEO of Inflection AI, Google’s AI division, and an obvious world expert in this area, artificial intelligence will allow everyone to have their own personal assistant — whether you are a lawyer or house husband. And it will be coming fast, according to Suleyman.
“It will be able to reason over your day, help you prioritize your time, help you invent, be much more creative,” Suleyman, told CNBC when describing AI. “It will be a research assistant, but it will also be a coach and companion.”
So that is something to be aware of as your law firm moves ahead in the next months and years. Be prepared. The Virtual Assistant will be with you all the way – very soon.
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