2016 will be the year when document automation becomes as integral a part of the legal IT landscape as case management did a few years ago.
The need to fix costs, increase leverage, reduce risk and improve drafting mean that the case for automation is compelling. Clients’ expectations are changing and they aren’t prepared to pay for drafting standard documents. Automation costs and development time have gone down. Tools are now more intuitive and easier to deploy. The big hitters with big budgets are already starting to invest in Artificial Intelligence and this will become more mainstream, but for everyone building some ‘ intelligence’ into document templates is perfectly possible and allows the document creation tasks to be managed efficiently and, in some cases, shared with clients.
{b}Ann Hemming is an Implementation Consultant at LexisNexis{/b}
