When businesses lack automation in their legal operations, they often rely on external counsel. In many cases, this reliance tends to increase over time as companies expand their organizational structure, enter new jurisdictions, or face growing regulatory challenges.
In the face of rising law firm rates, many global organizations seek legal cost reduction through automation. Below, we discuss why automation is the key to cost-effective legal operations, review the legal workflows that can be automated, and explore how to ensure the best ROI for your legal technology.
Why Automation Is the Key to Cost-Effective Legal Operations
Reducing external counsel dependency starts with equipping your team with the right technology.
In-house counsels handling governance, compliance, and entity management tasks need automation solutions to address the challenges faced by their organizations, including:
- Cutting Manual Work: The growing number of data points needed to ensure compliance requires automation to cut down document processing time and manual input.
- Saving Time Lost on Searching: With time lost on searches amounting to almost two hours per day, legal teams need effective technology for immediate access to required data.
- Managing Shifting Regulations: The regulatory uncertainty, jurisdictional divergence, and constantly changing legislation call for automation tools to support legal teams tasked with ensuring compliance.
- Managing Complex Structures: Managing compliance for global organizations with multiple legal entities across jurisdictions requires an effective entity management platform to provide visibility and immediate access to all entity data.
- Keeping External Legal Spend in Check: When legal teams can automate governance and compliance work, they can reduce their reliance on external counsel, speed up due diligence, streamline reporting and reduce external legal costs.
Tasks that Legal Teams Can Automate to Save Time and Money
When organizations implement an effective entity management platform, their teams gain access to multiple in-house legal efficiency tools for diverse applications.
Data Management
Moving entity data to a single platform allows role-based access to corporate records for all teams from anywhere on any device.
When company stakeholders can search and access required information on a single platform, the number of inquiries to the legal department is immediately reduced, saving time for more strategic tasks.
Compliance Filings
When an organization employs automation in legal operations, compliance teams can leverage customized templates to reduce manual input, push data into reports and generate disclosures automatically.
Working in Athennian, the legal teams can further streamline their compliance work with eSignature and electronic disclosures to file annual reports and changes to government registers.
Documents Processing
The most advanced entity management platforms, like Athennian, offer AI-based tools to process multiple documents simultaneously within seconds.
For example, the Athennian AI Centralize tool significantly reduces data upload time, saves multiple hours through automated data entry and allows a 90% reduction in document filing time.
AML/KYC Checks and UBO Reporting
With all information on ultimate beneficial owners centrally stored on a single platform, the teams can ensure UBO disclosures, provide for compliance at all times and streamline the AML/KYC checks.
Creating Legal Entities
Working in Athennian, the legal teams can use the AI-based Initialize tool to create legal entities automatically, reducing entity creation time from 45 minutes to under 10 minutes per entity.
Automated Deadlines Tracking
Assisted by automated deadline tracking, the legal teams can ensure regulatory adherence at all times and stay on top of compliance across all their entities and jurisdictions.
Org Charts, Cap Tables and Other Custom Reports
Athennian entity management platform includes an advanced org charting module that allows businesses to create detailed organizational charts within a few clicks, demonstrating entity data and complex ownership relationships.
The teams can further leverage the platform's capabilities for automatic cap tables and other custom disclosures.
Success Stories: Companies Reducing Legal Costs Through Automation
In one case, Athennian was deployed by Westgroup, a Canadian real estate developer with a $4 billion investment portfolio of residential, commercial, and industrial developments across hundreds of legal entities.
Committed to planning for growth, the company aimed to improve its adaptability to shifting regulations and foster collaboration among teams while achieving cost savings with compliance automation.
The Challenges Before Automation
Westgroup's decentralized organizational structure and legacy entity management system created challenges for all teams, including executives, legal and finance:
- Large Number of Data Points: With several hundred entities in the organizational structure, their corporate records included multiple data points dating back to 30 years, creating significant challenges for all teams.
- Manual Processes: Corporate records included paper documents, which required scanning and validating, which slowed down searches and retrieval of required data.
- Lack of Adaptability: When new legislation affected the company's operation, the organization had to prepare complex reporting for hundreds of entities individually.
- Heavy Reliance on External Counsel: The teams had to request external counsel to conduct searches among fragmented corporate records and handle all their information requests.
Why They Chose Athennian
The company realized that their existing entity management system was holding them back and looked for a holistic solution to:
- Bring Most Entity Processes In-House: The management was aiming to have more control over their data and processes to reduce risks.
- Improve Collaboration: A new solution was needed to foster collaboration between tax, finance, and legal teams and allow various stakeholders to self-serve their information needs.
- Streamlined Workflows: An organization was looking to have a system that would allow it to improve productivity and provide access to entity information at the property level instantly.
The Results: Decreased External Counsel Spend
After migrating to Athennian, the company was able to significantly reduce its external legal costs with :
- Centralized Cloud Database: Powered by Athennian, Westgroup created a single source of truth for all their entity data available from anywhere on any device with role-based access.
- Immediate Access to Information for All Teams: Working on Athennian, the executives, tax, and finance teams could get all the information they needed directly from Athennian without emailing their external counsel.
- Decreased Reliance on External Counsel: By bringing their entity management processes in-house, the company was able to save over $10,000 in external counsel fees on a single project and continued to achieve significant legal cost reduction moving forward.
Choosing the Right Automation Tools for Your Legal Department
When evaluating legal technology ROI and capabilities, organizations need to consider if it can allow their legal teams to address modern compliance challenges, ensure collaboration and implement best practices for legal document automation.
Modern Legal Technology
By choosing effective legal tools designed around compliance processes as they are implemented today, organizations can ensure efficiency and maximize ROI.
Effective Automation
An effective entity management platform should provide legal teams with the necessary functionality to automate their workflows, including data entry, document upload, compliance filings, eSignature, and automated deadline tracking.
Intuitive Interface and Easy Learning Curve
When legal teams automate their processes, they need a system with UI that is easy to learn, enabling them to start working on tasks without a steep learning curve.
Streamlined Migration Process and Dedicated Support
The transition to modern legal technology can be made easier when the platform allows a streamlined migration and can provide dedicated support and training to legal teams starting to work with the system.
Building a More Efficient Legal Team with Automation
Legal automation tools don't just cut costs—they empower teams to work smarter and more effectively. Automation tools help teams save time, effort, and resources by allowing immediate access to all corporate records, generating reports within seconds and enabling collaboration across the board.
See how automation can transform your legal operations and provide for legal cost reduction—schedule a demo of Athennian's automation tools today!
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