Journal

Why we believe Bots will mean more personal contact not less.

Published 18 October, 2018

Here’s a question for you: “you have a subscription relationship with Kit to provide compliance support and legal advice, what type of work do you actually want to be paying us to do? Repetitive, administrative tasks or high value, complex thinking and advice that utilises our experience and knowledge?”

At Kit Legal we are always looking at ways to innovate and improve processes to maximise efficiency, we certainly aren’t alone in the professional services sector in this purpose. Our motivation is partly selfish, wanting to take pressure and stress off our team members; we are not a business that advocates working 50 hour weeks, endlessly engaged in meaningless or unproductive tasks. We also want our team members to do work that they find interesting, challenging and enjoyable. However, a large part of this drive is to be able to pass efficiencies created in our business onto our clients, both in terms of pricing and service delivery. So, we have been pondering, researching, and trying to determine the best way to introduce a greater level of automation into our business.

We have been very mindful of the chorus of “automation is stripping industries of human contact”, not in a good way. This is the last thing we want for our business, we actually want to drive this efficiency FOR our clients, not to the detriment of them. We want to use this technology to be in closer contact with them, not detach from them. After months of consideration, we now feel confident to put our noise cancelling headphones on when those cries start, and this is why; automation in our business is actually going to result in greater levels of personal contact.

By utilising automation to facilitate internal business processes, such as drafting, amending documents and scheduling quarterly compliance meetings, our lawyers will be released to;

• Respond to complex “help desk” questions faster and in more depth.
• Spend time looking at how we can improve customer experience and develop metrics to track our levels of client “delight”.
• Take the time to consider our clients businesses and how we can help them better.
• Our lawyers with less years of experience will have many of their administrative tasks automated, freeing them to work with our more experienced lawyers on matters with higher levels of complexity. Exposure to higher level tasks = lawyers expanding their knowledge base further and more quickly than previously and this can only be a bonus for our lawyers, our clients, our business and the industry in general.

By automating some of our legal offerings, particularly through the use of Bots, we are able to help more people, more quickly and at a cheaper price.

There are processes in every job, in every industry that can’t be (and shouldn’t be) replaced by machines (although the list is probably shorter than most think). Nevertheless, if thoughtful and purposeful use of tech solutions is going to benefit clients and providers we believe it is worth pursuing new opportunities in this space. If your answer to our original question is what we think it is, you’re going to like what is happening at Kit Legal.