Bigle Legal Blog

At the core of all law practice is the basic premise of trading legal expertise in return for a fee. In the words of the UK Law Society, lawyers “represent a 'gold' standard in the provision of legal services, and members of the profession should strive to continuously improve the service they provide to their clients, rather than being content to provide a merely competent service.”

In the context of knowledge management for senior lawyers, junior lawyers, and paralegals, it is essential they update their legal skills throughout their careers to ensure that the advice they provide is legally accurate and reflects best practice.

Meet Jessica. She leads the legal team at a popular real estate firm. Her team is hardworking and dedicated - but she’s noted their performance has been faltering as of late. With heavier workloads, the team clearly wasn’t working as efficiently as they could be.

Each day they’d spend hours drafting complex contracts by hand, tediously copying and pasting clauses and explaining contracts to different parties. There were communication breakdowns due to poor collaboration between colleagues - and even some contract errors. For Jessica, it was evident: the legal team was placing all their energy into drafting legal documents, instead of supporting the real estate firm to really thrive.

The new world of legal analytics now offers compelling and exciting ways to assist law firms achieve huge operational efficiency and improved outcomes for their clients, often just by making use of existing data sources.

According to research by Gartner in 2018, 70% of law firms state they intend to invest in legal data analytics, but in practice, only 20% are using it to drive efficiency and enable data-driven decisions.

When you find yourself working 60-hour weeks with a towering pile of casework, it can seem impossible to achieve any form of work-life balance. In fact, a 2017 survey by The Bar Council revealed that half of participating lawyers felt unable to sustain lifestyle equilibrium.

Yet there are many routes towards a better work-life-balance – but could the simplest solution be the way we approach our workloads?

Every agent knows the real estate industry is competitive. Employing creative lead generation techniques is critical for real estate professionals wanting to keep their heads above the crowd. In this post, we’ll look into a few motivational lead generation techniques for real estate, and explore how they work to reel more clients in.

Start-up companies provide enormous economic growth prospects and employment opportunities in all countries across the EU and other parts of the world. According to Start-up Club Europe, a staggering 4.5 million people worked in 830,000 companies across 20 EU start-up hubs in 2017.

For the thousands of existing start-ups, their future success will partially depend on the extent to which they have invested in legal advice throughout their journey.

In the world of legal team management, it's important to ensure that the legal professionals working for you are doing their best at all times. This is imperative not just from a profitability standpoint, though your bottom line is, of course, important.

The truth is that well-motivated lawyers, legal assistants, and any other legal professionals do their best, most valuable work, and that makes a real difference in the lives and livelihoods of their clients.

On the Bigle Legal blog, we often delve into how innovation is disrupting the legal industry. We’ve spoken about how cutting-edge tools incorporating AI, machine learning and document automation have helped law teams to increase efficiency and better represent their clients.

Today, we’re going to explore another technology that’s revolutionizing the legal sector.

That is: blockchain.

Depression and anxiety costs the global economy an estimated US$ 1 trillion per year in lost productivity, according to World Health Organisation figures published last month.

Whilst such labels aren’t common parlance in the legal profession, The Guardian newspaper reported a year before that Barristers in England and Wales were “in the grip of a mental health crisis.”

A survey for The Bar Council revealed that nearly half of participating counsel said they worked over 60 hours and only 50% said they felt able to balance their home and work lives. The consequent negative impact on wellbeing is obvious.

Potayto, potahto, right? Well, not quite. The terms electronic signature and digital signature are often used interchangeably. However believe it or not, there’s actually quite a big difference between the two.

So what characteristics distinguish a digital signature from an electronic one, anyway? And which one might be better for your business to embrace?