Digital transformation sales for Legal

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hello and thank you for joining us for the first episode of the digital transformation of the legal industry webinar series this episode will examine the question what is digital transformation for law practices this is the first episode in an eight part series a recording of the webinar and the slides will be made available to all registrants feel free to enter any questions using the q and a feature in the zoom menu we invite you to follow us on linkedin to see news about other upcoming webinars and with that i'll turn things over to our moderator hey thank you michelle and welcome everybody to our webinar series on digital transformation um we're lucky today to have another great lineup of digital transformation experts and i really mean that that everyone in this panel has a lot of experience with the digital transformation either in general or is specifically in the legal field so back with us again is uh manjit reggae who is phd and director of the of the center of implied artificial intelligence um at the university of saint thomas manjeet uh also is a thought leader in his field and a frequent public speaker on big data machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies he also is a co-host of the all things data podcast that brings together leading data scientists technologists business model experts and futurists to discuss uh you know forward thinking strategies to utilize harness and deploy data science data driven strategies and enable digital transformation and also dan yarmuluk is with us today dan is also appears frequently on the all things data podcast dan is also with the university of st thomas he's an adjunct professor dan also is in the industrial sector doing uh internet of things digital transformation um and is an entrepreneur himself and is familiar with the nitty-gritty of how to get companies to do digital transformation we're lucky uh today to have ann mccracken with us who's the black hills ip president and ann uh was who was formerly of the schweikman firm and has been in the ip field for a number of years and now is uh essentially specializing in what you might say is digital transformation through black hills ip which specializes in automation technologies and uh joining her is mary o'malley also from black hills ip we're very lucky to have mary today mary's formerly was director of patent operations at ebay corporation and now she actually is working with black hills ip as an ip operations subject matter expert mary uh is very familiar with back office of ip practices and also with the various digital transformation efforts that ebay did and automation efforts that they undertook over the years and also from black hills ip thomas marlow who's former chief patent council fair child semiconductor tom's the president of the renewals of black hills ip and works uh also running all the technology groups at that company and also very familiar with with the digital transformation types of things so let me just kind of give a big picture well welcome to all the speakers uh first um and thank them in advance for for their presentations today but let me kind of just give a little bit of a big picture broad brush um view of kind of what we're going to try to achieve with this webinar series um you know digital transformation is the current you know sort of rubric buzzwords you know used for the next phase i guess i call of law firm automation and and thinking about this for today you know we often are trying to orient ourselves in the big picture the long view a long history of the iep practice evolution or just law practice evolution period and you know i started thinking about it and i think about it in this way which is really up to this point in time most of the innovation in law practice has got to do with improving tools that are communication tools data storage tools mainly tools that didn't inherently have their own intelligence um they were you know you went from you know uh mail to maybe the telegraph and you went from you know the telegraph to the fax machine and you go from the fax machine to email those are all just different ways to send messages they don't really imbue any knowledge into the process and in the same way we went from typewriters to word processing machines to you know some of the original transition there was to 40 000 dollar word processing machines and of course now they're ubiquitous but again it's a tool improvement you're really not getting smarter word processing machines they just do more things easier faster and now we're kind of into you know the next phase i would say of a digital transformation where we actually are having the tools replace the thinking that humans are accustomed to having a monopoly over in in the eye in the iep practice and generally in the legal practice and making you know this really truly different qualitatively different period of time that we're entering and you know and i would just we're going to go through this in detail with future webinars just in terms of practical what it really means but i would just say this is that we're now at a point in time where we've got so many tools that lawyers can use to amplify to magnify and paralegals to you know to use to to be basically generate way more output um that it's become almost overwhelming and i see the practice of the future really being one of mastering the various different tools as much as it is you know doing the adding the the legal knowledge that needs to be added but nothing will ever replace creative thinking and analytical thinking um you know for some time to come anyways i think we all are gonna not have to worry about that anytime soon but certainly uh it's gonna be important to know how to use all these uh tools that we can use so with that let me just turn it over and let manjeet go and that just kind of sets the stage for the whole webinar series in general manjeet you want to take it from there please sure thanks a lot steve um so i want to begin talking about uh you know kind of just take that part further that steve was talking about about uh you know we have heard about this quite a lot in the media in the news that in the in the next few decades half of the work performed by humans today will be executed by robotics ai machine learning and recognizing that machines match or outperform human performance in a range of work activities including ones that require some kind of cognitive capabilities so there have been studies by mckenzie um and other research firms out there as well now digital transformation is about customers about consumers by finding new ways of gaining access ensuring customer satisfaction and not about the latest and the greatest technology technology yes is a key part of this it's a major enabler but not the only part and again you know findings from mckenzie and others have shown that by organizations that have performed a digital transformation are 23 times more likely to acquire customers six percent more likely to retain customers and 19 times more likely to be making profit now direct digital transformation investment spending is supposed to approach around 7.4 trillion dollars between 2020 and 2023. now a recent study um highlights that the top five performance oriented benefits of digital transformation are as follows there is a 75 percent lift in customer engagement 63 improvement in customer satisfaction uh there is a higher digital uh traffic of 53 increased lead generation and greater conversions of those leads as well so all this shows how digital transformation increases productivity and helps companies to enhance overall customer experience now what is legal digital transformation the covet 19 pandemic has impacted multiple industries including healthcare travel financial welfare and political stability of nations across the globe as well restrictions on movement have also affected the legal industry and highlighted the significance of digital transformation in the legal industry so digital transformation in the legal industry means digitizing every aspect of the legal experience including service delivery workflow processes team collaboration and client engagement by 2030 we will see significant legal work being done by machines now by that we don't mean complete elimination of humans but you know legal services will be fundamentally different than today in terms of both job function and the way legal services are provided although a human side of the legal industry remains an important part digital transformation can effectively improve delivery of legal services in practical and more innovative ways therefore just like other industries the legal sector is also poised to experience a lot of transformation now however the pace and flow of work in a traditional law firm may sometimes seem glacial in comparison to the speed that consumers have have come to expect from the ever present digital tools in their daily lives also the legal industry tends to lag in technology adoption compared to other industries recently though legal practitioners are taking a note of the many digital tools now available to deliver an always-on always connected experience to both clients and employees historically digital transformation has been under discussion in other industries for years and now the legal industry is catching up for the legal industry what is beyond question is the growing trend of law firms investing significant resources to advance the integration of innovative technologies and methods across their practice groups just like most of the world law firms have also made the transition depending more than ever on technology to drive efficiency the transition to digital environment has been easier for organizations that had already invested in technology solutions and tools over the last few years few years the legal industry was marked by a time of automation from 1960 to today while that still continues the pivot now will be from automation to transformation in the future uh gartner recently surveyed 340 corporate in-house legal departments and 33 percent reported that the biggest concern for executive leaders is increasing the speed of legal work garter's research also revealed that one quarter of respondents experience speed improvements over 50 percent will with the legal transfer automation some reported similar improvements up to 90 percent and beyond that 89 reported that their organizations had met or exceeded their expected roi after legal automation implementation so why the hesitation from the legal industry to embrace technology gartner says that its data suggests that many organizations are just too cautious when investing in legal department automation on average the time to recoup financial investment in automation is around 2.4 years a clear example of this is the is the use of contract management technology or lack thereof another significant evolutionary time for corporate legal teams is the present covet 19 pandemic era in the midst of it it was found that almost 80 percent of organizations are suffering moderate to severe impacts to their contracts and trading relationships as a direct result about 62 percent of mid-large organizations with over 500 million in annual revenue continue to use manual methods for their contract management processes and do not have any meaningful automation that supports contract management so business leaders are now remarkably open for investment in legal services let me now talk about how do you achieve that in terms of tools first one a cloud-based uh enterprise resource planning so today's cloud-based erp platform can provide a valuable starting point to harness the power of centralization to increase information transparency and decrease administrative costs an erp system centralizes key elements of a case in one system including the initial client engagement invoicing and billing time tracking talent management so a lawyer or a paralegal accesses the erp and retrieves relevant data for a case powered by analytics the system could be configured to automatically analyze a new matter and designate the best lawyer for the task this kind of a data driven decision making frees up legal staff to tackle more strategic work it also provides an excellent platform for collaboration as a system will automatically tag the appropriate person to handle the workload machine learning and predictive analytics industries you know are becoming more and more impacted by digital transformation and law is just one of them new technologies like ai automation and big data are changing the way businesses work and streamline operations over the past few years ai has been proving extremely useful in the legal industry by making legal research more efficient more and more legal teams are willing to adopt and implement end-to-end legal technology that can be deployed out of the box and with ai embedded into latest technological solutions legal teams now have the potential to digitally transform themselves completely becoming more far more efficient and effective than ever before so when it comes to big data the legal industry is able to benefit from predictive analytics for the legal sector you know however you know if the data data is a big challenge right so inflated data volumes present a different challenge altogether so legal advice is only as good as uh the information upon which it is based so in order for information to be useful it must be accurate up to date and complete and the present day lawyer must wrestle with this challenge and strike the appropriate balance between speed and thoroughness and that is where machine learning can help out with that robotic process automation um so the use of rpa also helps streamline law operations by automating repetitive time consuming tasks such as drafting contracts and preparing documents it helps lawyers and legal experts organize all the legal documents into a single system allowing them to maintain multiple versions and generate customized documents quickly so with document automation you can automate the processing of complex contracts and agreements by generating sophisticated document templates that can be easily modified with details related to the deal for example contracts are the lifeblood of a modern business so it stands to reason that organizations functions far better when contract generation and management are fully optimized legal technology in the form of contract life cycle management systems allow lawyers to serve clients quicker and even expand services to whole new markets that is because they can access contracts and related documents wherever and whenever they want so you know think about a centralized smart repository ai analytics and so forth legal professionals have to carry out exhausting exhaustive background checks and read documents deeply to reveal information regarding their cases the data collected by legal experts can be you know used to facilitate better decision making and providing sound counsel to clients now ai uses algorithms to analyze data and extrapolate patterns and insights from the data for example an associate typically spends hours combing through research to find a particular document or a case relevant to an argument so the with the help of ai powered software the associate could begin the search process by flagging only relevant documents and the technology would automatically search for such relevant documents and case files ai enable chat bots right we all have been exposed to chat bots in the different web services that we use so clients accustomed to performing most transactions via smartphones may expect the same level of access from their legal counsel if you end up using a chat bot and many law firms and corporate departments are adding a chart are adding a chat bot to their websites so a potential client may log on and you know type in a question like what are my rights in something or how do i set up a will and a chatbot can easily guide them to an appropriate resource within the website or instructions on scheduling a consultation with an appropriate lawyer so people can initiate an online chat with a virtual legal assistant or a chatbot to get a quick help if they require now key considerations uh for legal digital transformation first is measuring roi although traditional digital initiatives are aimed at saving money and you know ramping up productivity the benefits of digital transformation may be more difficult to measure with the usual metrics for example you know deploying an app that allows stakeholders to instantly connect with lawyers will increase transparency and responsiveness but might not necessarily deliver and easily quantifiable roi so what's the right measure for customer satisfaction or customer experience how would these metrics lead to an expanded client base and lower client attrition so that is something that one has to always look at not use the traditional metrics second is technology augments not displaces the practicing lawyer so one of the natural you know obstacles to innovation is the fear that technology will replace humans and leave large number of lawyers unemployed although those suspicions of technology developments might fear that machine learning would replace the need for humans in most cases this technology only frees up time spent on some of the more labor intensive and time consuming tasks data driven decision making adds more value in the form of solving complex queries or automating transparency through timely reporting finally digital transformation is here to stay and will revolutionize the law industry upskill is a very important uh upscaling is extremely important at the rapid rate at which technology is advancing so upskilling and reskilling lawyers and legal professionals in this new technologies are essential for law firms and businesses to thrive in an era of digital transformation law firms and legal departments that leverage digital tools can successfully distinguish themselves from the increasingly competitive legal landscape when used as a uh as a complement to the human factor right we're not eliminating humans completely digital innovations can enhance productivity cut workflow friction and allow legal practitioners to deliver more skilled efficient service to their stakeholders with that i'll hand it over to our next speaker dan yarmuluk thank you manjeet um coming from the industrial world it's a little bit different than professional services or legal and we're talking about legal automation but i'd like to level set what's happening in this world today and this chart comes from an article an analysis at inc digital and forbes about avuca world a vuca and that stands for volatility uncertainty complexity and ambiguity and it rains uh in the digitally transforming world because change is now constant and this was developed this vuca world was used by the u.s army war college to depict these uncertain conditions after the cold war that didn't traditionally meet war game scenarios and it's an apt description today for the upheaval across society politics business etc so while we know that change is constant less than one in three organizations believe that to be the case and as you can see on the professional services line only 32 percent are leveraging that idea and of those that are they're thriving and crushing their digital transformation goal if they're leveraging it and leaning in so another interesting chart that i'd like to present comes from a book from tom friedman thank you for being late like optimus guides to thriving in the age of accelerations uh in which he was speaking to the google moonshot lab director astro teller and historically technology the technology curve and the human adaptability curve were trending in the same direction and this is the first time in human history that we've seen that curve accelerate past our ability to adapt you know these are these deceptive technologies that are esoteric in the background we thought twitter was cute way back when only to become extremely relevant in our politics in the last two elections so if you lean in you can see that tremendous opportunity in the green shaded area for you to increase market share and not be digitally disrupted because we know the first you know the fortune 100 of 20 30 years ago was drastically different than it is today now i might interject uh the steve lumberg a little color commentary on this slide the that green shaded area to me in part represents all of the tools that you can currently take advantage of in the legal practice that are you know that most people don't use and every it's like there's about 50 new ones every year now and just keeping up with the rate of release of those new tools is just overwhelming and if you go back to the left side of that curve um you know i mean it was like hey well they have a fax machine now that was the big deal i mean that that was like five years worth of technology development for the legal practice was the fax machine and then another five years to go by and oh they've got this electric typewriter so i mean it the rate of change and tools available was so slow and now it's just incredibly uh different time that we live in and i just want to put some practical uh meaning to that graph because it is absolutely dead-on thanks go ahead you know that that's a great point i yeah banjeet mentioned cloud-based erp these are enabling layers of technology cloud you know setting up a data pipeline a data lake a data mart machine learning these things are available horizontally across all organizations as steve is mentioning so i encourage people to not be so intimidated by them harness them because they're available for all through cloud-based services like we know amazon web services in microsoft azure so in the industrial well it's not different than uh if other traditional industries uh we have quality controls for manufacturing certain process type elements and what we have to do is look at various scenario chain value mapping process flow mapping and we can look at drivers or strategic options and scenarios to map to key benefits a lot of them in in manufacturing is about production you know overall equipment effectiveness what is your yield improving your productivity and efficiency but those those those process flows to reduce costs or streamline or speed up is not not too much different in the professional sphere so if you break it up and look at your constituent or your your particular workflows in unison you can you can make sense of this and start seeing this world of centralized cloud data data pipeline machine learning and opportunities so we encourage people to look at these or harness partners that can do those type of analyses or process improvements and with that i'm going to pass it to our next speaker uh mr tom marble yeah thanks dan um i i really like this slide and what i'm going to do as this next slide comes up is overlay of this analysis on operations optimization from a high-level view in the ip legal perspective so the column on the left this is a little bit different uh for the ip legal industry but i i think nonetheless impactful what's interesting is that there is these days not necessarily a shortage of talent well i should say there's really no shortage of experienced talent in fact we're we're seeing more seasoned attorneys in the marketplace than in the past like you you can take a look even at just like the the curve of uh uh pto reg numbers for example um and these types of trends can kind of make the traditional partner associate arrangement uh trickier right and also impact kind of how things work on the marketplace um there's you know you pair that with also this uh continued demand and in many cases growing demand as patent filings continue and increase um along with a pressure uh a lot of times from clients towards reduced pricing uh it's kind of an interesting setup and all of this though ends up equating to uh doing more for less while uh leveraging experienced talent um in you know experienced talent typically meaning higher billing rates um so you you really have to do more with less time it's all really interesting scenario but one which um lends itself to that really that efficient use of attorney time being the the critical component um you know and from a from a business perspective this should be your higher margin uh type billing and invoicing uh as well so um optimizing that is frankly good business um you know along with uh being able to um improve quality and keep keep clients happy at the same time you it all kind of points you in the right direction so you'll notice that the the middle columns here largely still continue to apply uh in the uh operational optimization you you get the benefits on the right by kind of applying those those middle steps to the drivers that we're seeing in our industry even though the drivers are a little bit different from say like the industrial space reducing costs reducing risks getting efficient workflows making the most out of the time that attorneys are going to spend making sure that they aren't spending time frivolously um all of these things add up to um you know the benefits that you look to get out of these optimizations okay so then uh if we take a look then at what are what are some of these opportunities for optimization practice innovation digital transformation like we're talking about you know a lot of these can be obtained by leveraging innovative workflows uh tools service providers outsourcing with a focus on the categories here at the top typically they're going to break down into attorney tasks paralegal type tasks and administrative type tasks and you can you can kind of picture how those flow across some of these example categories that are listed um so for example if we just kind of dive into a couple of these real quick on the invention disclosure side these could be tools that take technical documentation and help identify potential areas for invention disclosure creation in addition it could be tools that leverage search for invention disclosure submissions to help patent committees make informed decisions of course search then also finds its way into the the drafting side of things uh as far as getting prior art so you know optimizing what you can get on the front end there and then of course drafting we've seen tools that exist now that help automate the drafting process or at least get you most of the way there so that the attorney focuses on the places where he or she can add the most value and we could go down through this list and uh add uh additional examples because uh given as what's been mentioned already given the speed of technological and i would say and process advancement in this industry uh it's easy to find multiple examples of ways to optimize you know each and every one of the items on this list either through tools or outside service providers or a lot of times even just kind of looking inwardly at the process that you have and identifying areas for automating automating pieces of it and tom i might steve lemberg might just sort of like add a little bit here that the opportunities for especially for what we'd call the more advanced digital transformation um are probably stronger and more ripe when it comes to decision making that is more cut and dried or rule driven and includes or requires less creative input you know so drafting the patent application the core elements of that involve a lot of creativity in taking an invention disclosure and maximizing its patentability and maximizing the coverage you get for it those types of activities are difficult to automate but um helping someone with the more mundane robotic tasks of converting you know method claims to apparatus claims and things a lot of time can be saved on that it's not as much advanced you know what i call ai type of work but there's still a lot of stuff going on there but many of these other areas are things that are really done with a cut and dried set of rules for the most part and i think there are a lot of those jobs that req that just do that repetitively are gonna have opportunities to get automation to help speed up the productivity of that type of work yeah yeah that that makes a lot of sense and basically any time that you're faced with this situation where as a professional you're saying am i leveraging my years of expertise or this you know the skills that i've gained for this particular task and if the answer is that i could just as easily teach someone or a computer to do it in a short amount of time then you're probably not and you're probably not getting the value out of that task by you know doing it yourself and and i might add one more before we move on to this i might add one more comment that's sort of a big picture comment which is you know if you and i guess by sort of crude analogy you go back to the day of the horse and the buggy and the horse and the buggy were very well adapted for moving over rutted roads and muddy terrain and so on and so forth and along came the automobile which was obviously not as good going over unfinished roads or improved roads and so the automobile comes along everybody can see the potential but really didn't reach its maximum potential until there were roadways built and i think what's happening now in the in the world of law is that the connection of all these data sources is getting stronger and stronger it's like the highway system the data is moving around a lot faster a lot with a lot less friction allowing the automobiles if you will to do a lot more than they used to do so ai is like a car it really runs on information which is the roadways and now the roadways are getting extremely well built out so you're going to see that car if you will become much more prevalent in you know in the near future in terms of what it can do you want to tom are you done or you got one last yeah that covers my slide yep so we're gonna go go to uh mary o'malley and ann mccracken to uh talk about sort of the corporate perspective on this and how to actually kind of think about doing projects in the digital transformation sphere thanks so let's talk a bit about now about implementing automation in corporate legal departments thinking about everything we've covered so far in this presentation and how you can actually get started with digital transformation it can be a little bit overwhelming often the people that are tasked with these projects don't have technical backgrounds you can start by simplifying just think about where your team spends their time look for ways and workflows that you can make simpler more effective and focus on ways that you can and focus on things you can automate whenever possible by automating your repetitive and predictable tasks you'll find time for more substantive work and reduce your your costs so let's talk about getting started where do you start again start by reviewing your workflows identify pain points look for ways to simplify or eliminate them ask why you do things are there better ways to do things are there areas you might automate or even outsource does your software support automation does your software integrate with other software for example can your docketing system share information with your billing software this would eliminate the need to enter manually data into two separate systems get input from your team members get the team invested in the process of automation and in the outcome mary i want to jump in here for a second that was a great list and i just have a comment on workflows there's a quote that i love from the former ceo of ibm ginny rometty and she said this a few years ago it was in the context of ai but it could be applied to any type of automation she said one of the reasons why some people say they haven't gotten as much value from ai is that the workflow didn't change and in this process of uh taking on a project and examining your workflows encourage people not just to look at the the step or combination of steps that you're wanting to automate but look both upstream and downstream in your workflows because for the piece that you're automating to be successful you can't just drop an automated uh part or set of steps into an otherwise manual workflow and expect everything to work as is you usually have to think about what's coming in from the upstream side and then what it's feeding to in terms of system and people and processes downstream so just encourage you not only to look at the workflow that uh parts that you're going to automate but the whole workflow to have a successful project so mary how do you go ahead and start a project so the first thing you need to do is make a plan meet with your team have them compare their pain points their wish lists or their tasks they would like to stop doing completely get input from everyone this is critical prioritize the list of areas for improvement and i would suggest that you start with the low-hanging fruit the things that you can easily just automate for example if you're manually generating the same reports over and over again set up templates and program them to run an email automatically better yet set up dashboards where those reports can be easily accessed by other team members and run on demand determine your next steps based on the list of priorities and document them make someone responsible for the follow-ups and make sure most importantly everyone understands and supports the time commitment that will be involved once all of this is done you can schedule a follow-up meeting that will include all decision makers so now you have your list of follow-ups what's next you investigate everything take your time take a fresh look at best practices talk with your peers in other legal departments what are they doing you can get great ideas in user groups and conferences schedule demos with potential new vendors can you automate can you outsource look at tools that will allow people to be more self-sufficient for example if you're looking at new docketing systems do they have dashboards that can be configured to display commonly used metrics in your company can they be accessed or exported by anyone that needs access can you post links to commonly used reports so that people can run them whenever they need them meet with your internal business partners are you duplicating efforts can your systems your data this is a critical one for me this is one that i found most important meet with your i.t support team often it support is the biggest stun ruling block in corporations how will their budget and their roadmap affect your projects and progress looking at all of the things you've just you've just gone through if it's not possible that any of these things will work out for you can you build internal tools that centralize information from multiple databases next it's time to present your findings to the team you've done your work be sure to include any time savings cost savings setup costs etc demonstrate how automation is going to benefit individuals the team and the company give examples of how automation can raise your team's in my prior job using data from our docketing system and automatically sending it to our corporate communication system we were able to implement dad badges on our internal website that displayed the number of patent applications and patents issued for our inventors employees could click on those badges for more detail on their inventions this resulted in recognition for inventors recognition for the patent team and it celebrated our company innovation finally discuss time commitments and there will be time commitments what will the time commitments be initially and what will the time commitments be over the long term last steps you've done all your due diligence now it's time to implement establish the team responsible for implementing your transformation make sure to include members from all necessary departments remember to include your i.t your finance and your communications people establish definitive project deadlines establish a budget meet regularly to give progress reports and set up training once you've implemented new processes finally highlight and share your successes um okay so mary that was a great set of steps to get people started so with that i want to challenge everybody listening to this webinar to automate one of at least one of your operations tasks or processes over the next three to six months depending on how big of a test that you take on if you're just beginning your digital transformation journey then start with a simple task the low-hanging fruit things like implementing a tool such as to automate the process of getting documents signed can make a big difference especially if you use it for something like uh sending the paralegal sending documents to the attorneys to sign for filing or maybe externally sending engagement letters to new clients to sign or even in the corporate environment you know if you have documents like powers of attorney or contracts that vp or other management level people have to sign and they have no admins to help them out now that they're working at home or a similar tool will make a huge difference another thing that is a great starting point if you haven't done this yet is to create document templates for common documents like office action responses or client report outlets another approach that you could take for this challenge is make sure you're taking advantage of the legal tech that you already have but you might not be using for example are you using all the functions in your docketing system do you have reports that somebody's logging in to run on a daily weekly or monthly basis that can be scheduled many systems have the ability to schedule a report and automatically run and send it out to a list of users or reference management this is a huge time sync people do this in very cumbersome ways keeping track of references for ids purposes on really clunky spreadsheets but many docketing systems foundation ips just one of them that i can think of have good modules to keep track of the references that have been cited in the or that need to be cited so you're not using the tech that you already have start using that now if using technology is not new to your firm or your department then go for something bigger automate something that your team spends a lot of time on there are many studies that show and i've seen this in my own experience that 25 or even as much as a third of the staff time in law departments and law firms is spent on repetitive administrative tasks that can be automated so consider for example your docketing process break that process down into the individual steps how much time ask yourself or ask your team how much time does your team spend on things like this that are most likely manual tasks so is your current process right now done by people and if so how much time do they spend downloading documents from the patent or trademark office do they have to by ocr any of those documents are they creating pdfs of emails or things that aren't in pdf format are they tediously renaming those pdfs to have a standardized naming convention for the individual file how much time do they spend reading through a lengthy emails and and communications to determine what the heck this thing is to know what to dock it um how much time they spend selecting and determining what actually needs to be updated in your docketing system or the manual process of keying in the activity the dates the bibliographic information into your database or one that really takes a lot of time is the uploading of those documents into a docketing system or a dms and then are you even having enough time and resources to do second eye review or some kind of quality control are you just skipping that because you don't have enough time and then the process to report out those communications to your internal attorneys and staff or even to your clients and then just the weekly and monthly reports most organizations do many or all of those steps with their team manually but all of that can be automated and that's the kind of stuff that it black hills we spend a lot of time we specialize in using technology to take these processes that have historically been done by people and turning those into automated processes so that we can help organizations free up staff time so that they can use the staff or maybe things that could be billed if you're a law firm to your clients or just to increase the speed of their processes so if you accept my challenge and i hope you do let me know how it goes i'd love to hear from you i love talking about processes i love legal operations and i'd love to hear what you do and how it goes so uh over the next three to six months take on the the challenge of automating at least one process no matter how big or small start there start with something and let's hear how it goes and hey thank you there was a question i wanted to um i wanted that was addressed to you that i wanted to make sure you had time to answer so the question is is what do you think about for inventor oath declarations or for inventor assignments and uh what if an inventor becomes adverse to the company at a later time could the be challenged you know i i actually if i we've done a lot of research on that so maybe it would be easier for me to yeah why don't you why don't you take that steve yeah so um to the uh question or the person answering asking the question uh we have looked into this pretty extensively at schweigman um and i think what the simple answer is if your assignments uh or oaths or declarations if you will are only to be enforced inside the united states uh there's a a a good deal of comfort that uh you know is going to be uh recognized as you know as valid as a wet signature if you will um so i we have 100 percent uh confidence in that and and schweigman does use for you know many documents of that type however when you get outside the united states it gets a lot more comp complicated and there are multiple layers of um laws and regulations that apply to electronic signatures in in different jurisdictions and the ep you know has a a couple different you know somewhat conflicting regulations on electronic signatures so if you do have to have get an assignment for outside the us we always recommend you get a wet signature um just to be safe but definitely for if you just have to get something that's enforceable in the u.s itself then certainly works great and they do purport to have um provide you all of the documentation that they have research they've done to validate that but we found that while they do have some research it's pretty sketchy outside the u.s so then there's another question here non-standard data makes automation harder how bad is a standardization problem in law firms and and actually i i'll take this one too all of our other speakers want to chime in i'd be happy to have them but what the biggest driver currently of automation possibilities is um better standardization of data that you need for some stuff at least in ip i you know i can't speak to outside the ip space but because all the uh we now have direct access to u.s patent office pair records we have direct access to ep you know their equivalent pair system ep register system we have direct access to various other databases the ip5 databases and there's there's a lot more uniformity of data but more importantly you need to have instantaneous access to a lot of that data to drive ip processes because you can't drive a process like to report out something internally that the client expects to get the day after you receive it when the database that you'd like to automate from updates a week later so there's timing issues involved that you know kind of slow down automation but even there we're seeing a lot better real-time updates to pair systems around the world i'm just giving one example for para's patent application information retrieval system essentially online patent application data so i do think non-standard data is an issue because we run into that still with a lot of people in their docketing systems and i know different clients will store data in different formats especially serial numbers and that causes a lot of problems because we can't match up the serial numbers directly when we're trying to automate some data upload and so that can cause issues so there is there are issues around that and another question is basic pdf allows for electronic signature is there a concern using basic pdf e signature i'd add the same answer i don't think it makes any difference no but i'd like to add to that steve there is an advantage to using a tool like or any number of them from a workflow standpoint because how much time do your does your staff spend following up after they've sent a document to somebody for signature and waiting to see have they signed it did they get the email back sending reminders hey i need you to sign that if that's your situation you can save a lot of time by using a tool like because it can have programmed reminders so you can send that document out to the other party to sign and configure it to send reminders daily weekly monthly whatever you want and then when the other party does sign it will notify you so you don't have to have somebody wasting time babysitting that process and that can help let me add to that and that's an excellent point that probably have better paper trail features on maybe than just sending somebody a pdf and saying here he signed this because knows what you know ip address it sent the email to and knows what it's coming back from so it i think it tracks some additional information that might become more important um yeah get into a dispute but if you're just talking about signing it yourself and you're just using basic pdf to apply your signature on your own nothing wrong with that but thinking about it from the workflow standpoint and saving administrative time is where i'm i'm coming from with that recommendation yeah i'll second that 100 um even just thinking about okay well it's not too difficult to sign a a pdf when when you're doing that you receive the pdf in an email hopefully you see it as it comes in and don't lose it underneath the email that we're all getting buried under these days then you download it and then you open it up ideally in the the preferred uh editor is adobe but if you're on a mac maybe it's preview and you have to tell it to open it up in adobe and then you have to go and sign it and then you save it then you go back to the email and then you send it out and receive a confirmation hopefully that it was received by the other party or if there's a counter signature that's needed there might be follow-up that's necessary versus with or adobe echo sign or one of these others um it's a button click it's and i mean the time adds up um especially when you think about if something like that just happens to get missed in an inbox and then weeks go by from a process perspective like ann was saying the benefits can really add up and did you want to take the question from uh mr lucas are you on mute anne sorry yes um okay so i see a couple in here okay so here's one um we are all solving the same problems ultimately these processes are going to become commoditized would it not be better to outsource this to experts like you thank you if we do can you return the cost savings to clients of back black hills so that's a great question and absolutely when you really think about what your costs are for some of these kinds of tasks you have to include not just your immediate labor costs for the time spent to do a particular task for the things i've mentioned but also look at the training time benefits vacation time all the the costs that go into it and when you can take a process that's very human like the one i had on my last slide and convert that over to an automated process ultimately you do wind up saving saving time and saving costs so working with somebody like us you would absolutely save costs did you see the comment also about using smart contract on blockchain which seems very fascinating um for future innovation i'm not qualified to comment on that but it sure seems like a great idea i'm not either but tom you've done a little bit of investigating into blockchain can you comment on that that yeah i think yeah and honestly i think as far as you know if you're predicting what's the future of how contracts are going to work right and you take a look at kind of the the track record paper being the only way to do it with you know blue ink going to pdfs being acceptable going to services like it's clear that a blockchain type backend for storing contracts is the next step now i would expect to see that being implemented by a one of the providers that exists like a or an adobe um because it's the the front end of actually doing the signing confirming identity um is still going to be necessary so it's just about be feeling more and more comfortable with the audit trail with the authentic authenticity of the signature that uh that blockchain piece is going to get you so that you can you know essentially have that same level of comfort that you might have with a hard copy signed in blue ink so it that's definitely on the forefront no doubt about it but it it'll likely be the providers that you're going to be working with anyway so i think with that we should probably wrap it up where we've run over five minutes and i want to be respectful of everybody's time although everybody's free to to log off if they need to but anyways i want to thank all the speakers did a terrific job um i hope we delivered some some good insight and the rest of this series is really going to be now kind of going into the nuts and bolts to really learn more about how sort of in a case study basis how schweitman is using you know uh digital transformation uh approaches to its practice and there's it sounds very simple at the top level but when you get into these things um the working out of the details of replacing humans in a value chain or doing legal work is really complex because people are amazingly uh smart and versatile and they can do things and so many different things um with very little instruction in many cases and uh so they're mar they're they're a marvel when you try to compare them to uh what it's like to get machines to do certain things so we're gonna learn about over the next few episodes of this webinar series about how damn hard it is to replace humans but how you can do it um but not entirely ever so that with that i'll just i'll uh turn it back to michelle to wrap this up thanks steve and um thank you again everyone for joining us and thank you to our speakers and we invite you to come back for the next episode on march 11th when we examine um just like steve said it's an slw digital transformation case study when we give an overview of slw systems tools data lake processes teams and personnel and you can find the registration page on the slw institute on the slw website and please do keep an eye out for the email invitation as well um thank you again for joining us and be well