There’s no question that legal document review, processing, and management is challenging for attorneys. The challenges seem to grow in complexity every year. But if there’s one thing Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) know how to do, it’s find ways to make it easier for their clients to do their jobs.
In our experience helping ISVs better serve law firms, we’ve identified four key challenges that legal teams encounter. These challenges must be the focal point of every Legal Tech ISV’s roadmap as they strive to provide effective solutions and support to the legal industry. Below are explanations of each challenge, as well as actionable insights ISVs can take to support their clients.
4 Legal Document Challenges Law Firms Face Everyday
#1: Information Volume is Significantly Higher Than the Past
Do you know how much data is in an exabyte? One exabyte is equal to one billion gigabytes. By 2026, it’s estimated that global data volume will exceed 221,000 exabytes. The staggering growth of digital data has led to a massive increase in information volume for legal professionals. Unsurprisingly, managing vast amounts of documents, emails, and digital records has become a daunting task. This volume of data can lead to inefficiencies, delays, and increased risk of errors in document management processes.
Risks of high information volume in legal document management
Specifically, legal teams may struggle with inefficient and costly search and retrieval processes during case preparation. With the increasing volume of data and potential duplicate data, case preparation has become expensive for law firms. Additionally, when firms have to work through a multitude of documents, extended processing times become the norm.
Additionally, compliance issues can arise due to the difficulty in managing and securing large volumes of sensitive legal data. Legal documents that contain confidential client information or those that are subject to regulatory requirements must be handled with utmost care and compliance with data privacy laws such as GDPR, HIPAA, or industry-specific regulations. Failure to manage data securely and comply with regulations can lead to legal repercussions, fines, and damage to the reputation of law firms.
Action items to help law firms address this legal document management challenge
- Offer scalable document storage solutions that can handle large volumes of data. Consider incorporating tiered storage, data compression, and intelligent data archiving to optimize storage space and performance.
- Enhance search capabilities within your legal document management system. Implement advanced search algorithms, full-text search functionalities, and metadata-based filtering. Consider partnering with companies specializing in integrations for robust document search tools.
- Harness the power of AI by developing ways to automate data categorization, content extraction, and sentiment analysis. Keep in mind that creating AI-based offerings is a smart business move, as 90% of large firms expect their investment in AI to rise within the next five years.
#2: Wide Variety of Data Sources Requires Legal Tech Software that Can Keep Up
The proliferation of communication platforms has skyrocketed, especially with the widespread adoption of remote work accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic. Platforms like Slack, WhatsApp, and MS Teams have seen unprecedented usage, resulting in a surge of data exchanged daily. This data deluge presents a significant challenge for legal professionals tasked with gathering evidence and building cases. In fact, increasing data types is a top concern for ISVs, according to a recent survey by ComplexDiscovery.
Adding urgency to this legal document management challenge is the fact that unstructured data is growing at an estimated rate of 55-65% annually. Unstructured data refers to text, multimedia, emails, and web pages that are not easily searchable or analyzable using traditional data processing methods. Given the staggering rate at which unstructured data is growing, it’s imperative that ISVs find and implement ways for their clients to review it thoroughly.
Action items to help law firms manage the diversity of data sources
- Consider integrating PrizmDoc into your solution, which can assist with providing a common viewing experience for a wide variety of file types. This is done within the application itself so that documents are protected.
- Offer unified data management platforms that centralize and standardize data from multiple sources. Provide tools for data cleansing, normalization, and transformation to ensure data consistency and accuracy across different formats and sources.
- Enhance data security and compliance features within your document management solutions to address regulatory requirements for different data types. Consider encryption, access controls, data masking, and auditing functionalities.
#3: AI Can Assist Legal Teams in Protecting PII
AI has revolutionized many aspects of Legal Tech. In fact, more than half of American law 200 firms have purchased legal AI solutions and 45% are already using them to do legal work. AI is particularly useful in assisting legal teams with expediting the document review process while ensuring the redaction of Personally Identifiable Information (PII).
With increased data privacy regulations and cybersecurity threats, protecting PII in legal documents continues to be a top priority. What’s the most common way that PII and other sensitive data gets exposed? Human error. ISVs must leverage AI capabilities to streamline the identification, review, and redaction of sensitive information within documents, making the entire process more efficient and secure.
Action items to support legal teams in protecting PII
- Develop and integrate AI-powered redaction tools into your document management solutions. Accusoft’s PrizmDoc, with its AI-driven search and redaction capabilities, can significantly enhance the efficiency and accuracy of redacting PII and other sensitive information.
- Offer customizable redaction workflows that allow law firms to define specific criteria for identifying and redacting sensitive information according to their compliance and regulatory requirements.
- Ensure that your solution maintains compliance with data privacy regulations and provides robust audit trail capabilities to track all redaction activities and document access.
#4: Document Integrity can Make or Break Success in Trial
Any compromise in document integrity can have serious legal consequences. Document integrity refers to the assurance that documents have not been altered or tampered in a way that could compromise their accuracy, reliability, or legal validity. It directly impacts the course of legal proceedings and the attainment of justice. This is where metadata becomes supremely important.
Metadata provides essential information about the origin, context, and characteristics of documents, which is vital in assessing their reliability and authenticity. We know that legal teams review many documents from a variety of sources. As they review, annotate, and share documents in Word, for example, it’s to alter the content inadvertently. Edits, even minor ones, change the associate metadata. And, if the metadata is altered, the document is compromised and could be thrown out as inadmissible in court.
To preserve document integrity and protect the corresponding metadata, legal teams need to view and annotate documents within one secure platform.
Action items for preserving document metadata
- Develop or integrate software solutions that prioritize metadata preservation during document handling. This includes ensuring that any actions taken on the documents, such as annotations or edits, do not compromise the underlying metadata.
- Ensure your legal tech platform enables legal teams to view, annotate, and collaborate on documents without altering their metadata. This could involve developing document viewing and annotation functionalities within your legal tech solution that restricts changes to content that could affect metadata and compromise your case.
- Explore Accusoft’s PrizmDoc. PrizmDoc offers advanced document viewing, redaction, and annotation capabilities while ensuring metadata integrity. It can streamline document workflows and enhance document security, providing law firms with a comprehensive solution for protecting document integrity and metadata.
A Solution Built to Resolve Legal Document Management Challenges
Addressing legal document management challenges requires a proactive approach. That’s where Accusoft’s PrizmDoc tool can help. PrizmDoc offers a range of capabilities that can empower ISVs to build robust and scalable document management solutions tailored to the needs of legal professionals.
For more insights on how Accusoft can take your applications to the next level, check out our Legal Tech Fact Sheet.
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