Fortunately, we are living in an era where the motto “work smarter, not harder” has never been more relevant.

Gone are the days when legal teams had to generate new client intake forms from scratch.

Today, advancements in legal workflow automation allow firms to streamline processes such as contract review and eliminate cumbersome manual tasks.

By leveraging innovative apps and technologies, legal professionals can enhance efficiency, accuracy, and client service.

Whether you’re just beginning to explore the benefits of legal automation or looking to optimize existing workflows, this blog aims to provide insights and strategies to propel your journey towards more streamlined and effective legal operations.

First things first…

What is legal process automation? Legal process automation involves the adoption of technology to streamline and enhance the creation and management of legal documents and workflows.

By leveraging automation technology, artificial intelligence, and automated systems, legal firms can significantly reduce the time and effort spent on routine tasks such as drafting contracts and reviewing legal documents.

Rather than starting from scratch for each new document, intelligent software offers easy drag-and-drop templates and specialized tools that allow legal teams to create, review, and revise documents efficiently.

This not only saves time and money but also ensures consistency and accuracy across all legal processes, ultimately improving client service and operational efficiency.

By automating manual processes with cutting-edge tools, firms can focus more on strategic legal analysis and client advocacy, driving greater value and innovation in the legal profession.

“We have seen at least a 30% increase in close rate with PandaDoc. It has simplified our previous process by eliminating the need to print, scan and return.” – Rhett Marlow, President & CEO, LexHelper

Contract creation and drafting

Legal department automation can help your team generate initial drafts of contracts by analyzing predefined templates, clauses, and variables.

Instead of making net-new, ad-hoc documents, simply feed your existing documents into the legal automation software so it can create templates based on it.

This will save you hours of work and streamline every document moving forward.

Review and analysis

Legal tech software can review contracts for errors, inconsistencies, and potential risks more quickly and accurately than human reviewers.

The system can flag clauses that deviate from standard terms or legal norms, improving overall contract quality and ensure compliance.

Contract negotiation

Legal tech can assist in identifying key terms during negotiations by analyzing counterparties’ proposed changes against predefined benchmarks.

What a time saver! This helps in maintaining consistency and ensures that negotiated terms align with legal requirements.

Risk management

Risk management is another area where legal automation software shines. Legal automation software can assess risks associated with different contract clauses based on historical data and industry regulations.

It can assess risks linked to various contract clauses by analyzing historical data and industry regulations.

This capability not only enhances decision-making accuracy but also helps legal teams proactively mitigate potential risks before they escalate.

Workflow automation

Legal automation software can automate workflow processes by triggering actions based on predefined conditions (e.g., approval thresholds, renewal dates).

This reduces manual intervention and accelerates the contract lifecycle.

Compliance monitoring

Legal technology can help you monitor contracts post-execution to ensure ongoing compliance with regulatory changes or internal policies.

It can alert stakeholders to upcoming deadlines or necessary actions, reducing the risk of non-compliance for law firms of any size.

Analytics and insights

The data available in legal document automation can provide insights into contract performance, such as cycle times, negotiation trends, and common sticking points.

This data helps in optimizing contract management processes over time – enabling your firm to grow to its full potential.

Signing NDAs

Arguably one of the most powerful use cases for adopting legal automation tools is dealing with non-disclosure agreements (NDAs).

As a lawyer, you know that NDAs are among the most common contracts globally, but despite their straightforward nature, in-house legal teams frequently encounter a high volume of NDA requests.

Legal automation tools streamline this process for you by automating the creation and management of NDAs. They eliminate the need for manual searching and correction of Word document versions, ensuring efficiency and accuracy in handling these essential but routine legal tasks.

This allows you to focus more on strategic initiatives and high-impact legal matters, rather than getting bogged down in administrative details.

Legal intake

Document automation in the legal industry streamlines the legal intake process by automating the collection and organization of client information and initial legal requests.

This ensures prompt and accurate capture of client details, facilitating faster response times and improved client service.

Invoicing

Automating invoicing through a legal automation platform like PandaDoc simplifies the creation, delivery, and tracking of invoices.

PandaDoc’s specialized legal tech software simplifies document management, enhances client communication, and saves you valuable time by utilizing customized tools that streamline the invoicing and billing processes for legal professionals.

General counsel

Automated legal operations help support general counsel by providing efficient document management and collaboration tools.

AI-powered features streamline legal document workflows, enabling GCs to focus on strategic initiatives and legal advisory roles rather than administrative tasks.

Legal tech integration

Most legal tech solutions will offer integration capabilities with platforms like HubSpot.

This allows for document automation across diverse legal tech environments, optimizing overall efficiency and reducing time-consuming administrative tasks.

Start leveraging legal tech automation with software like PandaDoc.

Reduce speed to signature and accelerate time to begin work and ensure compliance in your legal process workflows.

Law office automation not only reduces administrative burdens but also enhances overall risk management and strategic decision-making.

Virtually every part of the legal industry is being transformed and legal workflow process automation is no exception.

Learn how this change in legal work enhances contract creation, review, negotiation, risk management, workflow automation, compliance monitoring, analytics, and document management.

Automating your legal processes offers numerous benefits that significantly enhance efficiency and effectiveness.

Here are the top five advantages of legal automation software.

More work gets done

Automation reduces the time spent on repetitive tasks such as document drafting, review, and management.

By leveraging AI templates and workflow automation, legal professionals can expedite the creation of automated legal services and other legal documents, allowing them to focus more on strategic initiatives and client interactions.

Create documents without errors

AI-powered tools ensure consistency and accuracy in legal documents by standardizing formats, clauses, and compliance requirements.

This reduces the risk of errors and non-compliance, which is crucial for maintaining legal integrity and mitigating potential legal risks.

Save time and money

Automating legal processes can lead to significant cost savings by reducing the need for manual labor and minimizing operational inefficiencies.

By streamlining workflows and reducing administrative overhead, organizations can allocate resources more effectively and improve overall financial performance.

Improve visibility

Automation software like PandaDoc facilitates efficient document storage, retrieval, and organization.

With centralized document repositories and advanced search functionalities, legal teams can quickly access and manage contracts, agreements, and other legal documents, enhancing productivity and collaboration.

Make clients happier

Automated workflows accelerate the contract lifecycle from creation to execution.

Features such as automated notifications for deadlines and approvals ensure timely actions, reducing delays and improving responsiveness to client and business needs.

By adopting automation tools like PandaDoc, organizations can transform their legal operations, achieving higher efficiency, accuracy, and compliance while optimizing resource utilization and enhancing client satisfaction.

This strategic shift not only empowers legal teams to deliver greater value but also positions the organization for sustained growth and competitiveness in today’s dynamic business environment.

Yes! Your legal department should think about jumping into legal automation if you’re constantly running into any or all of the following scenarios:

Your team is performing the same task over and over

When legal stuff like contract reviews, generating documents, or checking compliance starts eating up too much time for your legal team, it’s prime time to consider automation.

Your team feels overloaded and overworked

If your business is drowning in a flood of legal documents day in and day out, automation can really smooth out the process and make everything run more efficiently.

Your legal practice is ready to grow

When your business is growing fast or spreading into new markets, legal automation can step in to handle more legal work without needing to hire a whole army of new people.

You’re ready to become a leader in lawyer automation

Bringing in legal automation isn’t just about keeping up — it’s about getting ahead. It means quicker responses, faster deals, and happier clients, which all add up to a stronger edge over the competition.

Now that we’ve reviewed the benefits of legal process automation, it’s time to see how you can streamline legal document creation using PandaDoc’s templates, integrated data sources, workflow automation, collaboration tools, and document management capabilities.

Start using PandaDoc’s templates

Begin by creating or customizing templates within PandaDoc that reflect your organization’s standard legal documents, such as contracts, agreements, and NDAs.

Utilize PandaDoc’s templates to ensure consistency in formatting, clauses, and legal language across all documents.

Integrate your data sources

Connect PandaDoc with your existing CRM, document management system, or other data sources where relevant information for document generation is stored.

Automate data entry by mapping fields from these sources to your PandaDoc templates, ensuring accuracy and reducing manual input errors.

Configure workflow automation

Define workflow rules within PandaDoc to automate the document generation process.

Set up automated triggers for document creation based on specific events or actions, such as client onboarding, contract renewal dates, or project milestones.

Include approval workflows to streamline the review and approval process, ensuring that all necessary stakeholders sign off on documents promptly.

Enable collaboration and review

Utilize PandaDoc’s collaboration features to facilitate real-time document editing and review among team members and external parties.

Enable comments and annotations to gather feedback and make necessary revisions efficiently within the platform.

Set up a virtual data room to share documents and set up signing orders.

Track and manage documents

Monitor document status and progress using PandaDoc’s tracking and analytics tools.

Receive notifications for document status updates, such as when documents are sent, viewed, or signed.

Centralize document management within PandaDoc to easily access, search, and retrieve completed documents, maintaining an organized and efficient document repository.

By following these steps, you can effectively automate legal document generation using PandaDoc, reducing manual effort, improving accuracy, and accelerating the document lifecycle to better support your organization’s legal operations.

PandaDoc empowers you to seamlessly integrate with your preferred custom or third-party applications, accelerating the generation of legal documents.

Don’t wait — start your PandaDoc journey today with a free trial and discover how you can enhance efficiency and reliability in legal document automation.

Disclaimer

PandaDoc is not a law firm, or a substitute for an attorney or law firm. This page is not intended to and does not provide legal advice. Should you have legal questions on the validity of e-signatures or digital signatures and the enforceability thereof, please consult with an attorney or law firm. Use of PandaDoc services are governed by our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.