Rightsourcing can help in-house legal teams that have too little time and too much that needs to get done.
Interim legal professionals may be more cost-effective than outside counsel.
Legal-specific AI tools can dramatically speed up time-intensive tasks like contract review and redlining.
It’s no secret that in-house legal teams are being asked to do more with less. This can be particularly noticeable in areas where legal teams have historically relied on outside counsel. Since work demands tend to ebb and flow, it’s typically not cost-effective to make a new hire, but, as budgets fall, outside counsel may become too costly.
The solution is interim support. If you can hire a skilled interim employee just for those times when you need an extra hand, you reduce the cost while still receiving the support you need. Now imagine that interim employee has the ability to do more in less time, making them substantially more efficient.
All of this is possible through the combination of rightsourcing and advanced technological tools that harness the power of AI.
Paragon Legal President and COO Jessica Markowitz defines rightsourcing as “the right work getting done at the right time by the right people using the right technology.” Let’s break that down.
The right work: Outsourcing work becomes less attractive if extensive training is required to get any interim employees up to speed. You need trained and qualified legal professionals who are ready to hit the ground running and can help with the work you need done from day 1.
The right time: Although there is no such thing as an average day on an in-house legal team, some times are reliably busier than others. You’re going to need more attorneys available when working on meeting a compliance deadline or completing a quarter than you will during down times. No amount of shifting work will completely eliminate this feast-and-famine cycle of work. You’re going to need help.
The right people: The wrong person can create far more work than they alleviate. You need someone who can fit into your existing system and work with current staff. Unfortunately, these people aren’t always easy to find when you need them.
The right technology: Much like the right people, technology can either simplify things or complicate them. Unfortunately, sometimes it’s hard to know which technology will be a net benefit without going through a long period of evaluation, implementation, and onboarding. This is particularly true when it comes to new technology like generative AI (GAI).
The horror stories are well-known at this point: attorneys who have cited fictional caselaw or otherwise been misled by GAI, often with catastrophic results from formal sanctions to having pleadings struck. Part of this is a misunderstanding of GAI’s purpose and capabilities: it is not necessarily intended to be a research reference, and, if it cannot find the information it’s looking for, it can sometimes ‘hallucinate,’ or create something out of nothing. To say that this is a problem in legal work is an understatement.
However, AI also offers many benefits to lawyers, law firms, and legal departments. AI is much better at comparing internal consistency in a document than a human, for example. It can also evaluate large amounts of data very quickly. If used correctly, AI has the ability to make legal work much faster and more efficient.
There are several products on the market intended to make AI more efficient, accurate, and useful for the legal field. These products should be evaluated very carefully to ensure that they respect data privacy and security, but once due diligence is performed, these programs have the potential to revolutionize the legal field.
Efficiency looks much different for legal services that rely on billable hours than it does for in-house teams. In fact, it may seem counterproductive for some lawyers to improve efficiency: the billable hour system rewards thorough contemplation over speed. And there is a case to be made for thorough contemplation. However, not every legal matter requires the original thinking that you’re paying for when you use a big law firm for outside counsel.
Particularly when you’re hiring for day-to-day tasks, task efficiency can help stretch your outsourcing budget even further. If an attorney is completing routine tasks, a thoroughly-evaluated AI solution that is designed for use in the legal field can compound the amount of work that can be done in an hour.
Screens.ai is a perfect example of this fusion of technology and human knowledge. It’s an AI-powered solution to assist with contract review and redlining. Contracts are put through screens, which are a set of standards that need to be met in a particular type of contract or transaction. Users can use pre-made screens that were created by legal experts or make their own customized screens.
This solution can dramatically decrease the amount of time it takes to review and redline a contract. However, the time savings is negated if it’s difficult to audit what the AI did and why it did it. Screens.ai resolves this issue by offering users the opportunity to accept, modify, or reject suggestions, as well as offering the ability to easily audit changes made.
Use of this software for contract review can dramatically speed up the process by flagging areas that would benefit from the attorney’s attention for manual review. In addition, Screens.ai has the benefit of quickly standardizing language throughout the contract.
Does it really save time if you need to train interim support on how to use this new technology? Obviously, it’s ideal if the interim talent is already trained on these new tools.
That’s why legal professionals at Paragon Legal are provided with a complimentary Paragon Contract AI Bundle that utilizes the power of Screens.ai. When you hire one of our team members, you’re not only getting an amazing, qualified attorney — you’re getting one who is equipped with the tools to make them even more efficient.
This can also be a cost-effective way to try new technology or see how it might be integrated into your current department. Working with an interim attorney who is equipped and trained in the newest AI technology can help you decide whether the technology is worth investing time and energy into.
Things are changing for in-house legal teams, and it doesn’t seem that things will be calming down anytime soon. Legal departments will continue to be asked to improve efficiency without sacrificing outcomes. The current way that many departments utilize outside counsel may no longer be feasible.
However, change isn’t necessarily a bad thing. By embracing both qualified flex talent and technology tools, including AI, legal teams can respond to these challenges with imagination and agility.
If you’re considering working with interim legal counsel, we’d love to speak with you about your use case. Get in touch with us to discuss how we can help rightsource your legal team with the people and tools you need to succeed.
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