How is Data and AI shaping the future of the Legal Industry

A lot of legal firms are looking to plan their data strategy and transformation. Having a data platform act as a centre of command and control for a firm’s entire data strategy might sound very complex, but we believe otherwise.

Our Sidra Data Platform is a comprehensive, highly automated solution designed to support a company’s data strategy, and aid a law firm with all of its data-related business needs and scenarios.

Sidra Data Platform, built on Microsoft Services has helped one of the biggest law firms in the UK, with the biggest class-action lawsuit in history.

Firms can now merge a variety of data sources (such as iManage, CRM, Finance data, etc.) faster than ever, and improve the data quality, security, governance & management.

Sidra intelligently enables the easy development of a variety of business use cases, from AI/Search for contract analysis, to data science for bid optimization, and can even support building new technology-driven products & services.

Digital Transformation Impacts the Legal Industry

Here are a few ways in which we are helping legal firms address their most common challenges with the help of Sidra Data Platform:

• Ultra-fast deployment time < 48hrs – Automation of data source configuration gets you from zero to data lake in hours.
• APIs for the integration of third-party tools in areas such as Data Catalog or Data Retrieval, as well as Python SDK for Data Scientists.
• Transform Data Silos: merge data sources, improve data quality, and benefit from having a centralized Data Store for improved analysis/insights, governance, and innovation. Support for both batch and real-time data loads. Multimodal storage supports all types of data sources: from databases and APIs to documents and media files.
• Security and user-based Identity management, allow secured access to the platform to users with different authentication providers (Azure Active Directory, Google Accounts…). This feature allows customized data access for employees and, if desired, external stakeholders.
• Customer 360 profiles: leverage Sidra to encompass and consolidate all the information available in the firm(s) about individuals and the matters involved. Data can be processed in real-time, viewed, and analyzed in BI and analytics tools, and provide up-to-date information on the client.
• Contracts/Documents Analysis: enable digitization and management of paper-based contracts, and leverage AI/Search to surface key insights/risks/clauses from the contract.
• Intelligent Knowledge Management and eDiscovery: Centralize knowledge and valuable assets, such as precedents, from experienced partners and fee earners, and create a self-serve culture where junior fee earners can leverage the knowledge to improve eDiscovery speed and quality.
• Cognitive Services can reduce repetitive tasks, and automate manual, paper-based processes, to maximize case efficiency and margins.
• Automate case management: automate customer engagement throughout case timeline via web portals (such as information intake and share to involved internal and external stakeholders, questionnaire serving and response analysis, conversational AI for support, etc.), integration with necessary external third parties (such as medical providers, governmental entities, regulation updates, etc.), tender process and matter assignment to the fee earner based on matter size. Conversational AI can capture/surface matter-related insights.
• Data Catalog and governance capabilities, such as data lineage audit and traceability, can help address the data protection regulations challenges, design data retention policies, enforce the new “Right to be forgotten”, and thus allow customers to view and act on the available information.
• Pre-packaged ML models can tackle the most common challenges during the data load process, such as corruption or anomalies in the data set, as well as automatic detection of PII sensitive data. Sidra can enable Machine Learning use cases such as bid optimization in order to meet industry demands of fixed-fee contracts, thus maximizing profit per matter.
• Digital Marketing: Measure the ROI of Marketing efforts, using ML to identify high-value leads or as a tool to help with real-time surveys, information, or alerts.
• New Digital Revenue Streams: Differentiate and disrupt by identifying and creating new digital products/services through Data insights and technology innovation. The Cost attribution feature enables tracking and analyzing the resource consumption associated with each business use case across the firm. This along with the client app partitioning and user-based access enables the firm to package and offer such services externally, as a subscription.
• Digital Finance & Operations: Automate P&L accounts that can be viewed in near real-time and at a practice level. Consolidate invoices, financial records, purchases, etc., and extract insights.

As companies consolidate post mergers and acquisitions, we have extensive experience with the integration of complex systems and portals, as well as building collaboration tools for seamless communication with internal and external stakeholders. Plain Concepts has also executed some of Europe’s largest data and application migrations with no interruptions.