Express delivery
Baker McKenzie chief knowledge officer, Mark Ford, and director of global knowledge operations, Sarah Pullin, outline how Contract Express from Thomson Reuters has made managing document drafting a significantly more efficient process right around the world.
As hugely challenging economic times seem an inevitable outcome of the pandemic that has swept the world in the space of a few months, it’s just as likely that legal will have the landscape that emerged from the last downturn on its mind in the months ahead. The available apparatus for ‘agile’ working has of course come on leaps and bounds since the dark days of 2008 – but firms will almost certainly also double down on their work to embed scalable efficiencies in many of their resourcing patterns and business processes.
And no doubt the approach already taken to drive certain IT projects to value in recent years will be a factor to consider as the work continues. Take, for example, the document automation journey at Baker McKenzie. Chief knowledge officer Mark Ford says the firm had been using Thomson Reuters’ Contract Express solution for several years before he arrived in 2015, but it was a piece of technology in need of a strategy.
“The drivers were reducing cost, and improving efficiency and client service, but the real key is to look closely at where it can make the biggest impact and you can see the biggest return on investment,” says Ford. It wouldn’t be efficient to attempt to automate everything automatable; certainly not all at once (although Contract Express is in fact now used widely across practices, countries and languages).
“We’ve done several pieces of analysis of the best opportunities, and in short they tend to be documents that are used most often, or the ones with the most moving parts,” says Ford. “Focusing there can help you to save significant time quickly and easily.”
Sarah Pullin, director of global knowledge operations, adds: “The degree to which any document is automated is also very deliberate. The way we tend to describe Contract Express is that it’s producing a best first draft of the document. It can do more of course, but in our more complex legal scenarios the goal is to use lawyers’ time better rather than trying to replace them.”
The firm wants to free lawyers from tasks that are time-consuming, but aren’t adding much value to the outcome for the client, explains Ford. “A classic example would be changes between singulars and plurals, which can be needed hundreds of times throughout a document. It can’t be done with a simple search/replace, and by automating responses to 15 or 20 questions you can produce a good, advanced first draft of quite a complex document in a couple of minutes.”
Clearly, automatically changing terms or phrases hundreds of times throughout a document is also less risky than doing so manually – there is simply less room for human error in the process. Efficiency, however, is very much the name of the game.
Pullin says: “We compare pre- and post-automation production times to calculate savings, and also track those completion times over time.” Savings can be as high as 60-80%, she says.
“We also track the number of documents being automated in different parts of the business, and their usage – and qualitative feedback is that automation has also provided greater consistency across products.” Data on many of these points is open to view through dashboards, driving awareness of the depth of return on investment that can be achieved.
Read the full case study in Briefing May – It’s the screen team, here.
