How a legal data scientist can take the pressure off your legal team

Summary

• In-house legal teams are often under-resourced, but legal data scientists can help by optimising or automating time-consuming and repetitive processes
• Many in house teams don’t realise that a legal data scientist could help them, but these versatile computer scientists are making a huge impact in teams that don’t handle much “data” in the traditional sense
• It’s easier than ever to work with a legal data scientist, either for a short-term project or as a permanent team member
• If your business deals with data, e.g. saved in Microsoft Excel, in a bespoke software or across a collection of documents
• If you have standardised high-volume drafting or review tasks
• If you could benefit from extracting data from web-based resources, such as analysing social media posts, Google search results, historical website data, etc.
  ….a legal data scientist could release valuable lawyer time for strategic projects

Businesses often (incorrectly) view their legal departments as a source of cost rather than competitive advantage. If your in-house legal team has just enough resource to cope with the expected workload and spends more time-fighting fires than addressing strategically important legal projects, you’re not alone.
Fortunately, the rise of legal engineering and legal design, two practices that advocate the collaboration between lawyers and experts from other disciplines, has given legal teams new tools to combat fluctuating workloads. One of these is the legal data scientist – a data scientist who has recognised the opportunity to apply their computer science and data analysis skills to legal work.
some think that data scientists are primarily a number crunchers and therefore not very relevant to the in house team. On the contrary, legal data scientists are often experts whose skills are very well matched to the pain points of the in house legal team – they help to speed things up, increase accuracy, reach into information and data from across a business, translate between the legal team and the business, the list goes on. But where to start?
Could you use a data scientist? Here are some tips that will help you decide.

Be on the lookout for work that takes a lot of time but not a lot of legal skill

Data scientists are engineers who take pleasure in automating boring day-to-day operational tasks. Circulating documents for approval, getting contracts digitally signed, populating a spreadsheet (possibly The Spreadsheet, on which the entire business depends) with data about/hidden in contracts: all of these things are ripe for “robotic process automation” and a legal data scientist may have the technology skills to allow you to closely monitor a process without having to manually carry it out yourself.

Incremental process improvements are better than an overhaul

In 2020 we proved that remote working and a distributed team can be healthy and productive in many cases. However, it’s as challenging as ever to manage complex business processes where multiple team members need to contribute. Just like Dave Brailsford, who coached Team GB to eight gold medals at the London Olympics by advocating the “aggregation of marginal gains”, you can increase your team’s productivity by making small improvements where it counts. Likewise in the in house setting, there are often small changes which can be made which collectively add up to a lot. To feel the benefit of legal data science doesn’t require a wholesale redesign of the legal function nor a huge budget.

If you struggle to lay your hands on the right document or the right clause, data science could be the answer

Legal data scientists are masters of search. Using a mixture of legal understanding and state of the art computer science and maths, they can help you locate (and compare, or even mark-up) the documents or clauses of interest in record time. For some teams, having powerful document search at their fingertips is a game-changer. Imagine being able to Ctrl + F over hundreds of documents at once, have the results ordered by relevance and cross-referenced against several other sources of information.

Learning lessons from other parts of the business

Experts from disciplines outside law can bring useful ways of working. Challenges for the legal team are sometimes also shared problems with other parts of the business and looking for ways to redeploy

Big data is coming to the legal industry

Big data is not the purview of the marketing and sales teams only and data scientists can help a legal team manage its information as a data resource.. Many businesses depend on their ability to agree a large volume of contracts efficiently. Organising, analysing and managing a business’s catalogue of contracts is the bread and butter of the in-house team, but what if the volume becomes many times what the team can handle? Data scientists have the skills to treat documents as sources of data, meaning that you can with greater speed and accuracy process huge volumes of contracts in consistent and efficient ways and have at your fingertips the information within the contracts available whenever needed.

Not just theory

Since its inception, Simmons Wavelength has put together a highly skilled team of data scientists from different backgrounds, who help lawyers automate and optimise their daily workload, saving valuable time and resource, and empowering them to confidently call themselves true legal professionals of the 21st century. We have worked with in house teams across sectors, geographies and size to help them achieve their best outcomes as a team using data science. We’re here to help if you would like to learn more.