In my latest talk at the annual conference at the ELTA (European Legal Tech Association) that took place in Madrid last 20, 21 & 22 of November 2019, I talked about how technology can help us as lawyers to expand our profession and to enhance our creativity. Us lawyers are inevitably bound to perform repetitive tasks that consume our time and drains our energy, and for that, Bigle Legal was born to take over those repetitive tasks and give us more space to focus on what is more important.
I am a firm believer that we, humans, have evolved technology and advanced it in order to help us in our day to day lives, whether it is as simple a task as doing a mathematical calculation through a calculator, or as complicated as flying you and your belongings to another country across the globe with a plane.
We have kept trying to innovate the ways in which we use technology in order to achieve the most convenient and efficient results in our objectives, and this does apply for all individuals out there who want to achieve a certain task one way or another.
Among many of the technologies that are evolving around us in every sector and in every industry, legal technology has also shown its importance and significance in the tech scene and has thrived to help law professionals with different tasks they do. Being a lawyer myself, I have faced difficulties in my daily work and have relied on technology to help me with it.
I share with you my speech at the ELTACON19 that was aimed at convincing my legal professional colleagues to bury the hatchet against technology and open their arms to Legal Tech for their ultimate own sake.
“Every lawyer needs a robot
My name is Alejandro Esteve de Miguel, I am co-founder and CEO of Bigle Legal, the Next-gen Document Automation Software.
Let me tell you my story of how I ended up here. I am a lawyer I studied a law degree at the University of Barcelona, after law school I studied a Master in International Business Law in ESADE and right after that, I was hired as a Corporate Lawyer in the M&A & Corporate Department of a big law firm in Spain with more than 150 lawyers.
As most of the legal professionals, I spent day after day (i) giving legal advice, (ii) drafting legal documents and (iii) managing document workflows.
Setting aside the legal advice, drafting documents and managing workflows meant a lot of manual interaction. A lot of copy-paste, manual review, emails up and down and piles of documents on my desk.
At the beginning, I had a lot of energy because I was learning a lot. I had to work countless hours but at the same time I was growing as a professional and also personally, and it paid off.
Until one day I couldn’t stand this situation anymore. Several years had passed, the learning curve was getting flat and I realised that I was repeating the same mantra:
Don’t get me wrong, I loved being a lawyer, someone trusting you and solving the client needs is highly addictive. But I hated how we were working because it leads to a lot of hours in repetitive tasks with a high risk of making human mistakes. Which in the long term leads to frustration.
And I spoke with more senior lawyers and all of them hated too, but they accepted the situation and got used to it.
I needed to do something about it.
At that moment Bigle Legal was born.
We founded the company because we believe there is a better life for lawyers, where time spent is not that important but knowledge and experience is.
Where lawyers have a social life. It’s not asking much, and the most important thing is: it’s possible.
And the way we achieve this is thanks to legal technology.
Let technology help you, let the robots carry out the manual and low-value tasks and focus your efforts on performing the high-value tasks. Those tasks that robots cannot perform. E.g.: study new case law, take time to give better advice, take better care of your customers, expand your legal business.
The benefits of automation are huge:
Other industries have done it with great success, Medicine & Healthcare, Travel, Marketing, Music,...
We don’t have to be afraid of change if it’s for good.
Technology is not going to replace lawyers.
When some people think of Legal Tech, the problem is that their mind goes directly to “the terminator”.
Machines that are self-conscious, capable of building other machines and dominate the world. Humans are slaves of the machines or being erased from planet earth.
It makes a great movie but still, nowadays, it’s science fiction. We have this impression because the press is constantly bombing us with these ideas. Unfortunately, there is no news if it’s not bad news, right?
Well, the reality is different. Robots are designed and trained by humans to perform activities that we cannot do that fast or accurately, or simply we don’t want to perform.
Technology is not going to replace lawyers. But lawyers who use technology will replace those who don’t.
Someone might think, ok, where should I start, what should I do?
Take a look out there, there’s a lot of technology that can be introduced in your practice. Each and every one of you should analyze what part of their job can be automated.
In my case, I created Bigle Legal, a document automation tool because document drafting and document management took me most of my energy and the automation brought the most impact to the P&L of a law firm.
Find out more about Bigle Legal
And now our clients create outstanding legal documents in less than 10 minutes and have full control over the documents that are being processed in the organization.
Time has come to take a step forward and change the way we lawyers work. Plus, the clients of the firm behave differently. They seek faster services, they demand lawyers that interact online, they don’t want to move to the office if it’s not strictly necessary and they want to know in advance the price for the legal services.
Lawyers are heroes, but legal technology will give them superpowers.”
At the end of the day, innovation and technology are evolving and expanding towards every profession. And just like every other technology out there, automation is there to expand and help professionals dedicate their repetitive and mentally exhausting tasks to the machines, and leave your energy towards creativity.
I hope you liked today’s post and we lawyers start thinking about technology as our friend and not our enemy.
I would love to hear your thoughts in your comments below.
And I really encourage you to try Bigle Legal or any other legal tech out there and try for yourself and see how it makes your life easier.
Alejandro