On Wednesday, October 28th ABC Legal Services held a webinar on the topic of legal technology and its impact on access to the legal system. The webinar was hosted by ABC Legal’s own Training and Communication Specialist, Tomas Campomanes. The panelists included Radley Angelo, Head of Customer Success at ABC Legal, Brandon Fuller, Chief Technology Officer at ABC Legal & President of Docketly and Sascha Mehlhase, VP of Products at ABC Legal.
I’ve broken down highlights from the webinar, but you’ll want to follow the link at the end of this recap to sign up for the full recording. If you were unable to join the live broadcast, be sure to sign up for the recording that includes the informative Q&A portion of the webinar as well as full insight into valuable legal technologies you can integrate into your business.
- Radley Angelo discussed natural language processing (NLP). Natural language processing basically allows computers to better communicate with humans in a specific language, scaling other language-related tasks. Radley made the point that NLP provides valuable insight and analytics. An interesting point by Radley, scalable deployments of NLP are capable of predicting many things, in turn making them applicable to many industries including legal.
- Brandon Fuller went into discussion on the wide uses of machine learning (ML) technology inside artificial intelligence (AI). Brandon discussed how machine learning isn’t really about machines, but how humans can better do their jobs with the aid of machines. Brandon stated, “Basically you can have a human do it, a machine ‘watches’ and then the machine repeats the pattern and detects things at a larger scale by remembering what you did. If you aren't quite sure what causes something, you can feed a machine tons of data and it will find the correlations for you.”
- Sascha Mehlhase rounded out the conversation on trending technology by providing some easy to adopt solutions. While these technologies aren’t new, the pandemic has created a greater need for them as courts quickly look to adapt. Sascha discussed technologies such as deep skip and e-filing, service provided by ABC Legal. He explains that while some courts are stuck in paper and behind in their caseloads, courts that have adopted e-filing are avoiding the massive backlog.
- As habits (and courts) are changing, there are many tools that help us stay organized. Brandon touched on robotic process automation (RPA). “It’s not about robots—it’s about helping people become more like robots, it’s tools on desktops, to record actions and activities they are doing, moving data from one system to another. RPA tools are allowing people to point and click on their desktop and repeat at a very quick speed without doing a lot of work—computers doing work, increases productivity.”
- Moving onto court access and taking courts from a place to a service, Sascha opened up on this topic by addressing how the pandemic initially shut down most courts operations on a global level. Now courts are open again and looking to adopt different technologies such as telephone based systems and video conferencing.
- Brandon added to the conversation that similar to schools and churches courts are looking to video conferencing technologies and audio technologies to conduct business. Brandon goes on to note that interesting things are happening in the legal industry—technology has allowed for proliferation, allowing the US and others to gain wider reach and systems.
- Radley pointed out that courts are learning—they need to learn, as they can’t have chaos, and privacy is a key concern. Courts are learning how to set up a framework for a judicial procedure—and for some it’s a struggle. Some tools such as Court Call had this figured out beforehand and are helping judicial systems to adapt and learn how to utilize technology in the court.
- From here the panel discussed digital document management. The overall theme here was that some in the legal industry can be slow to adapt to new technologies, but as more and more legal firms invest in tech, such as digital document management, they’ll see their customer service rates go higher.
- Radley highlighted that in legal tech—the tools we are seeing are trying to make life easier. Radley explains, “Adaption is critical. The more transparency we provide by looking at things holistically the more in-line legal services become with other products we interact with in our day-to-day lives.”
- Sascha pointed out that adopting technology should be driven by the clients expectations. A good lawyer is also a lawyer who adopts tech to communicate, update and help their clients to set realistic expectations for outcomes.
- Brandon finished off by expanding on the important relationship technology has with customer satisfaction, as it directly impacts the attorney/client relationships. “Law firms should be treating customers with the same level of service clients are accustomed to from other aspects of their lives.”
- Finally, Radley makes a very important point to end this informative and insightful webinar— “If technology can remove a multitude of friction points for customers, some easy to use, some even free, you’re more likely to have a customer for life.”
To hear this webinar in full including the ending Q&A session with more details on easy to adopt legal technologies for legal professionals, please register here for the link to the full recording. If you find this information insightful, sign up for our newsletter here so you can stay up to date on legal industry news, insight and technology.
About ABC Legal Services
ABC Legal is the nation’s leading service of process and court filing company and is the official process server to the U.S. Department of Justice. Docketly is a subsidiary of ABC Legal, providing appearance counsel on a digital, custom-built platform that smoothly integrates with our applications and services. ABC Legal’s applications are cloud-based and compatible for use on desktop, browser and smartphones. Our solutions and digital approach ensure process server partners, law firm customers and their clients save valuable time and resources when serving legal notices safely and with maximum compliance, control and transparency. ABC Legal is based in Seattle, WA, with more than 2,000 process servers throughout the U.S., as well as internationally in more than 75 countries. To learn more about ABC Legal, our solutions and subsidiary company Docketly visit www.abclegal.com.