An increasing number of law firms and legal providers are turning to low-code platforms to automate tasks and build digital workflows. These intuitive technology solutions use visual interfaces with basic logic and drag-and-drop functionality to enable lawyers and staff to quickly and easily build workflows, without any need for coding. By embracing low-code solutions, law firms eliminate the need for costly software purchases and overcome the coding challenges that previously plagued custom legal technology. 

In the past, legal professionals have had to master the intricacies of custom-built technology and learn how to finesse the system to work in the most optimal way for them. Lawyers and staff were limited by clunky systems that required the assistance of IT professionals to change and adapt to new ways of working. 

However, the arrival of low-code technology has made it possible for lawyers and staff with absolutely no knowledge of coding to create automated processes to meet their unique and ever-evolving needs. As a simple example, a low-code platform would enable a lawyer to quickly create a custom web-based form to capture specific information from a client to be used as part of a workflow. By empowering lawyers to quickly and easily build custom workflows on the fly, low-code platforms deliver greater agility, productivity, and client service. 

The Need for Low-Code Solutions in Legal 

The adoption of low-code software has skyrocketed in recent years. As law firms and legal providers strive to become technology-driven market leaders and attract tech-savvy clients, low-code solutions allow them to overcome two main challenges simultaneously: the need for greater agility and a growing digital skills shortage. 

Today’s organisational leaders face greater pressure to accelerate digital transformation and increase value and delivery speed to clients. So, it’s no surprise that the demand for low-code solutions is on the rise, with Gartner predicting that low-code application development will account for more than 65% of application development activity across all sizes of companies by 2023. 

Low-code solutions enable non-technical users to create applications quickly by leveraging visual design tools and a drag-and-drop interface. With these features, lawyers can easily create workflows by mapping out a flowchart, rather than writing line after line of code. 

Types of Low-Code Workflows For Improved Legal Operations

While there’s no doubt that low-code platforms can power greater efficiency and flexibility, not all low-code platforms are the same. Depending on the intended purpose, there are a variety of ways you can use low-code platforms to create custom workflows. Here is a look at some of the main types of low-code workflows for law firms and legal teams. 

Form Designers

Low-code form builders provide a convenient, easy-to-use way to capture critical client information for use in a variety of workflows. Using a low-code forms designer like Sysero’s Digital Forms Designer, lawyers and non-technical staff can quickly build custom online questionnaires to collect information to be used in client intake, document production, contract negotiations, and more. 

Using Digital Forms Designer, lawyers can create branded dashboard-type interfaces for their clients, which guide them through an online questionnaire to capture information to start a new transaction, collect compliance information or provide access to legal documents. 

Document Production

Low-code platforms can also be used to automate the document production process and quickly build document bundles or packs on a regular basis. Using a visual designer, users can create a flowchart to map out a document production workflow to easily generate documents (or sets of documents) using information captured via an online form. Decisions and actions within the workflow can be dragged and dropped onto the design canvas using a Visual Workflow Builder, simplifying the end-to-end automation process. 

Client Intake & Acceptance

Another use case for low-code workflows in the legal space is client intake and acceptance. Low-code tools like Sysero can be used to build innovative digital onboarding solutions, which use online forms to capture client information and automatically check it against various public registers and information databases. 

By streamlining the client intake and acceptance process and making it digital, law firms can improve quality by automating once-manual activities and approvals, ensure compliance, and get to work faster for their clients. 

Business Process

Nearly any process that’s central to legal operations can be automated and streamlined using low-code solutions. From knowledge management and compliance to contract negotiations and client portals, a low-code platform like Sysero can provide an easy, intuitive, and visual way to quickly build custom applications. By combining forms, workflows, and integrations with other systems, such as iManage, Sysero’s low-code business process management tools are ideal for speeding up processes, driving productivity, and ensuring alignment and compliance across the entire process. 

Why Use Sysero for Low-Code Development?

When it comes to low-code solutions for Legal, Sysero offers a comprehensive, completely customisable solution that can accommodate a wide-range of business use cases. Sysero’s Visual Workflow Designer makes it easier for non-technical users to build on-demand applications that make use of automated workflows and optimise processes to boost productivity and client service. 

Sysero’s unique low-code solution also enables firms to bring their business-critical workflows to the hybrid cloud. With Sysero’s Hybrid Cloud Workflows, firms can start their workflows by capturing critical data via the public cloud, and then transfer sensitive data to the firm’s private cloud for storage. 

To learn more about how Sysero’s low-code solutions can benefit your firm, please get in touch with our team. 

Today’s firms have access to an array of different technologies that can help improve efficiency, productivity, and resiliency. However, selecting the right solution and driving adoption with your firm can be tricky. 

Whether it’s a new knowledge management system, improved contract management, or a workflow automation system, technology investments have the potential to completely transform a legal practice and create a stronger foundation for future-proofing. Yet, the power of technology ultimately lies in its rapid use and adoption. 

Despite the obvious benefits of technology, many firms still struggle to make the right strategic investment decision and successfully drive adoption across the firm. This comes down to a number of factors, including the failure to properly assess the firm’s needs, the reluctance of lawyers to adopt new technologies, and overly complex solutions that make broad adoption nearly impossible. 

So, as law firms focus on digital transformation efforts, how can they be sure they’re making the right choice in their technology investments? While every situation and solution are different, there are a few things that the best solutions have common. With the right approach and evaluation, your firm can optimise its technology investments. 

Evaluate your Options

The first step in any major investment is to understand the needs of the organisation. Spend some time with key stakeholders within the firm to better understand the specific goals of the firm and the core challenges that need to be addressed. From there, you’ll be better prepared to select the technology that optimally aligns with business objectives. 

Before starting your search for the right solution, it’s critical to understand the problem you want the technology to solve. There is no one magic solution - you’ll need to prioritise your requirements and be open to the fact that the best solution might not be the one you anticipated. Law firms often focus on solutions that solve immediate needs or focus on one practice area, without considering the firm’s overall or future needs. 

A great place to start your search is with your IT team. Oftentimes, firms have an arsenal of technology that’s underutilised, so it’s worth understanding what technology currently exists within the firm and is at your disposal. 

Opt for Cloud-Based

As remote and hybrid working practices become more widespread, law firms are quickly moving towards the cloud. During the pandemic, many firms realised the benefits of a cloud-first strategy, including greater accessibility, flexibility and scalability. 

By opting for a cloud-based solution, you’ll enable lawyers and staff to work from nearly anywhere. For example, using Sysero’s cloud-based contract management solution, lawyers can quickly generate new contracts via an online questionnaire and route to parties for e-signing. On the other hand, cloud-based portals can also be used to make on-demand firm-managed documents available to clients 24/7. 

There is a reason why many, if not most, of the newest legal technology solutions are cloud-based. With easy to use interfaces, on-demand accessibility, and the ability to integrate with on-premise solutions, cloud is the way forward for modern firms. 

Easy-to-Use Features

Ultimately, the success of your technology investment comes down to adoption. An overly complex technology solution that requires hours of training to use ruins the user experience and stymies broad adoption. The best technology solutions are intuitive, easy-to-use, and designed with the end user in mind. 

One area where overcomplication often deters adoption is document automation. While document automation can solve many different and complex problems for legal professionals, badly designed user interfaces, complex software and non-existent support can quickly lead to a failed document automation initiative.  

Alternatively, solutions like Sysero’s document automation enables lawyers and staff to easily create templates within Microsoft Word using a simple markup tool. It’s just one of the reasons why Vinge, one of Sweden’s premier law firms, selected Sysero for it’s document automation project. In the words of Carolina Landys, Knowledge Manager at Vinge: “The best feature of Sysero is that it’s accessible from within Word. Lawyers love Word, and the closer you can bring the materials to them, the better.”

Built-In Security and Compliance

The move to more flexible working, combined with increasingly complex regulations, has unsurfaced some serious cybersecurity and compliance concerns for law firms. With troves of highly confidential business information, and often less than tech-savvy lawyers, law firms need to ensure their technology solutions are doing their part to keep data protected and secure. 

When evaluating solutions, look for those with built-in enterprise grade security protocols to protect your firm and client data. Some modern technology tools, like Sysero, also have built-in features to make it easier to embed compliance into everyday business processes. 

For example, Sysero enables firms to embed data protection best practices into standardised workflow templates. As one lawyer makes a nuanced decision based on the data at hand, that expertise can be modeled into workflows and processes, enabling subtle judgements to be made en masse. The result is compliance that’s streamlined across the firm. 

Make the Strategic Choice for your Firm

If you’re in the process of evaluating potential technology solutions for your firm, get in touch with us to learn how Sysero’s technology solutions can be customised to solve your unique challenges. 

Posted by Phil Ayton
27 October 2017

The decision to host technology solutions on premise or within the cloud can be daunting for today’s law firms. While on-premise servers offer increased security and integration, cloud solutions also have their advantages. If your firm is starting from scratch, you’ll most likely choose to put all of your systems on the cloud. However, most firms already have a set of systems in place within their organisations, which makes the decision to go with cloud-based or on-premise software much trickier.

When evaluating and implementing new technology solutions, it’s important to weigh the pros and cons of hosting it on-site or in the cloud. So, how do you decide which option is best for your firm?

Benefits of On-Premise

Running software on-site means there’s also a cost for running a server internally. However, most organisations use virtualised shared servers, so the hardware cost is minimal. Any significant costs would most likely come from the licences for the server that you use to operate software, client access and database licences. Nonetheless, most firms and organisations already have enterprise licences in place that may eliminate the need for additional licensing. Finally, if the software makes use of a shared database server, no additional cost is incurred.

Some additional advantages of running software on a manage network include:

· Single Sign-On: Since the software lives on the same network as your users, there shouldn’t be any need for users to have multiple log-ins. On the other hand, cloud-based software will require users to log-on at least once.

· User & Role Integration: Nearly all firms use network directories to manage lists and access rights of new and departing staff. Many also use the directories to hold details of the roles and departments for each user. An on-premise solution will allow you to tightly integrate user roles into the software to provide customised workflows and interfaces, with minimal effort on behalf of the firm. 

· Integration with Third Party Systems: If your organisation also wants to integrate account systems for client and matter data and document management systems for importing and exporting documents, you’ll need to host the system on-premise.

· Security and Resilience: Internal systems are held behind firewalls and backed up as part of a standard set of procedures. Since they are not on the internet, they are inherently more secure against external hackers. Furthermore, the data – and the backups – are held on your own premises, making them available even if there are internet connectivity or hosting issues.

· Compliance: The recent introduction of the GDPR means that clients are responsible for policing the systems that are run on their behalf.  This adds legal and auditing tasks to companies using outsourced suppliers.  Keeping systems internal simplifies compliance.

Benefits of Cloud

A cloud server is simply a server managed by someone else. There are certain applications, such as email, perimeter security and data analytics, that require a skilled set of support staff due to the sheer volume of transactions and support requests from end users.  However, there are other systems that are relatively passive and require minimal maintenance.

Some core benefits of using cloud servers include:

· Data Segregation: Data that needs internal and external users to cooperate is best kept separate from internal data.  If the external data is compromised, it does not affect the internal systems.

· Prototyping: Hosting software on the cloud makes it easier to build and test concepts before deploying them.

The Best of Both Worlds: Hybrid

Essentially, on premise is a great option if you need to share data in-house, and cloud offers an ideal solution for sharing data outside your organisation. However, most firms need to share data both internally and externally. A hybrid hosting option allows you to keep client-based processes separate from in-house systems. Processes developed internally can be published to the cloud, and client portals can be developed without the involvement of your internal IT team.

To circumvent the issue of requiring users to log into a cloud server, some systems, such as Sysero, enable you to add a link on the internal server that automatically validates the user on the cloud, using a combination of encryption and location-based security.

For example, when a lawyer takes on a new client, they can enter in the matter details via an online web form that can be accessed by a link on the firm’s intranet. The web form, which is hosted on the cloud, can then be shared with the client who can check the details before sending the form back to the lawyer. From the lawyer’s perspective, the process is seamless, even though it makes use of both on-site and cloud hosting.

In the end, the decision to host software in-house or in the cloud depends on the unique circumstances of each firm. However, a good rule of thumb is that if data is being used internally, it’s typically best to host it internally. If data is being shared externally, it’s typically best to host it externally. And if data is being used in-house and with clients, as is typical with most organisations, it’s best to find a hybrid hosting solution to offer maximum security and collaboration.