Legal Process Automation & Expert Systems
VisiRule enables lawyers to automate legal processes and legal triage by capturing their valuable legal knowledge visually and using it to generate self-service legal expert systems or legal chatbots. You can try the legal chatbot at SmithLawson.
VisiRule includes an easy-to-use visual authoring tool which allows you to explot your legal expertise and make it available to a wider audience.
Lawyers can keep current their legal expertise in an online rules based legal advice system without the need for programmers. VisiRule enables law firms to deliver personalized advice, content and guidance. Aspects of legal services, which need human contact, can be delivered online via phones and computers.
The automation of legal services and legal processes is delicate and must be able to be trustworthy. VisiRule is logic-based and provides valuable audit trails and explanations. There are various online VisRule legal demos here you can explore.
Opportunities for VisiRule:
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Create self-serve applications for clients to use without involving lawyers
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Perform intelligent document review & assessment in conjunction with contract analysis tools
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Provide interactive triage systems to help advise clients with bespoke information and guidance
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Generate personalized legal documents and agreements with links to explanatory texts
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Deliver situation specific advice to help ensure regulatory compliance for areas like AML, FCPA
What are Expert Systems?
Expert System applications replicate the thought processes of subject matter experts. Once deployed, these systems permit the rapid execution of complex logic and the generation of high-quality advice, reports, checklists and legal documents tailored to the specific situation. They can work stand-alone or with other applications. All the answers and derived inferences can be exported and shared with other applications.
Why Automate Manual Processes?
Legal Expert Systems offer a way to automate legal processes. By providing your clients' staff and customers with direct access to your expertise on a self-service basis, you greatly enhance the level and quality of service your provide them. You can also free up your own people from having to deal with those tedious routine cases that they dread.
Is Legal Reasoning Logical?
Yes - thankfully, the law is both based on, and encourages, logical reasoning. This means that legal processes are well suited to automation. However, it does require a high degree of care and attention, hence the need for software with a high degree of logical integrity..
Use Cases for VisiRule
VisiRule Expert System solutions can be used in the following areas:
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Internal: make specialist knowledge and best practices available to colleagues and junior associates on a firm-wide basis
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Client facing: provide existing corporate clients with greater access to specialist advice and documents at their convenience 24x7
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Intermediaries: provide expert guidance and specialist advice which can be customized, packaged and branded by third party parties as in B2B2C
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External B2B: attract new clients via a marketing showcase which offers free access to some smart legal capability without 'eating your own babies'
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External B2C: provide low-cost but high-quality legal advice to consumers on matters which affect many citizens such as consumer rights, benefit entitlements
Document Generation
VisiRule can automate legal document output in various formats.
VisiRule produces bespoke high-quality legal documents using the answers gathered and a suitable tagged document template.
Answers can drag through the appropriate text fragments from a database of approved clauses. These are then applied to the template to create the document instance.
VisiRule can combine complex logic with conditional text selection and insertion.
Automated legal document generation, or document assembly, is an important aspect of many legal services. VisiRule can generate multiple documents from a single session or none at all!
VisiRule can also export its session data to other third party Document Assembly tools so that they can be used to generate a document.
Automating Legal Processes
Legal process automation is transforming the way law firms, in-house legal teams, and government agencies operate. VisiRule helps lawyers streamline their workflows by automating steps such as document assembly, research, legal triage and risk assessment.
Understand the Benefits of Legal Process Automation
Legal process automation can provide significant benefits to law firms, in-house legal teams, and government agencies. By streamlining their workflows, organizations can save time and money by improving accuracy and efficiency. Automating repetitive tasks can also free up resources that can be better used elsewhere. In addition, the use of automated technology results in more consistent outcomes, as rules-based automation helps ensure that all steps in the process are followed correctly.
Identify Areas to Automate Within Your Practice
One of the first steps in legal process automation is to identify areas of your practice that can be automated. Consider the types of tasks that are done on a regular basis and their complexity, as this will help determine what type of technology might work best for each process and where VisiRule may best fit. You should also consult with staff to get feedback about which tasks they believe could benefit from automation.
Have a Plan in Place for Implementing Automation
Before you start implementing legal process automation, it is important to have a plan in place. This should include details such as who will be responsible for managing the system and how long the implementation process is expected to take. You may also need to define clear processes, such as when and how staff and clients will receive training or when key decisions need to be made. This planning phase can help ensure that you are successful in meeting your goals with VisiRule legal process automation.
Why VisiRule for Legal Process Automation?
Legal process automation involves legal analysis and human expertise. The author needs to understand how the laws, regulations, and cases apply to a specific legal question and how they relate to each other. VisiRule provides a very soft and flexible tool for capturing legal knowledge and a comprehensive platform to deliver it. VisiRule supports the design, documentation and execution of the dense chain of reasoning, a common feature of legal reasoning. VisiRule also lets you build solutions that are scalable from internal users to outside business partners and citizens.
Rules as Code
Legislation is complex and not easy to understand. But some parts of it are well understood and that understanding can be broken down into a sequence of smalls steps like you find in a flow chart. By encoding that expert interpretation of best practice, you can provide clients with systems which will guide them safely to do the right thing at the right time and in an informed and consistent way; just as if the compliance expert was there in person. One example is companies wanting to ensure that staff adhere to company policy with regards to accepting gifts and FCPA.
As legislation is updated, and your interpretation of how to enact it changes, you can easily update the VisiRule chart to reflect those changes, and so provide detailed, up-to-date, situation-specific legal advice and guidance. VisiRule provides a range of regression testing tools which enable you to monitor the effect that any such changes may have on your deployed legal process automation.
Legal Expert Systems
Work on legal expert systems has been going on since the 1980s. Indeed, one of the first uses of Prolog was in the work at Imperial College, London in encoding the British Nationality Act. This article in the ACM covers that work. There are interesting articles describing the potential for legal expert systems such as Expert systems are here, let’s welcome them to the legal world.
Self-Service Legal Advice
This powerful combination of legal expertise and intelligent technology means that both corporate legal departments and law firms can leverage their own legal knowledge to provide their customers, clients, staff and prospects with convenient and efficient, self-service 'intelligent' legal systems. You can use VisiRule to provide "self-service" or "self-help" legal apps to deliver automated legal advice to staff, clients, agents, representatives and consumers alike.
Disruptive Legal Technology
Legal expert systems are a disruptive technology for the traditional delivery of legal services. The dis-intermediation of legal services means the role of the professional legal practitioner will change. The challenge is for law firms and corporate legal departments to rethink, reinvent and reposition themselves in light of technical advances in LegalTech and LawTech and enable legal knowledge to be commoditized and automated. VisiRule not only allows you to automate your existing products and services, but also to create new ones which, up till now, were not practical.
RoboLawyers
RoboLawyers or Robot Lawyers are automated software systems which fulfil some of the role of a real lawyer in certain very narrow and constrained situations. Recent examples include the LawBot which helps drivers appeal parking tickets. Other examples are within the legal industry to review specific kinds of legal documents. RoboLawyers can reduce the cost and increase the availability of high quality legal advice using mobile technology.
ChatBots for Law Firms and LawBots
VisiRule’s unique approach of "programming via flow-charting” permits rapid prototyping and review, and this greatly enhances the accurate capture and shared understanding of decision models. The ability to represent complex decision making graphically improves quality, transparency and ease of maintenance. This logic can then be delivered via Legal Tech ChatBots for law firms.
Sharing Knowledge - Legal Process Automation
Legal knowledge is a valuable commodity. It can be captured visually in VisiRule charts using a simple flowchart decision tree. VisiRule charts can capture best practice from compliance officers and legal experts and make that know-how available to a much wider audience in a simple and self-explanatory manner. Law firms and corporate legal departments can reduce the traditional costs associated with giving both general and personalized guidance without increasing the associated risk or workload.
Regulatory Compliance
Situation-specific guidance can be made available to customers, employees and consumers via a collection of interactive, dynamic questions to help ensure a high degree of regulatory compliance and spread best practice.
Once set-up, such systems are scalable without requiring any additional staff, deliver consistent and trusted advice and create a digital record of each session. Session data can be used downstream by other processes as well as provide insightful analytics.
Unlocking and Delivering Knowledge
VisiRule Author helps legal experts unravel and organize the decision logic which can precede form filling and document generation. For example, to establish whether or not a person is, or is not, eligible for a benefit or entitlement, what steps they need to take and to identify which form(s) they need to complete.
VisiRule assists in the creation of a chart, allows it to be immediately tested, and when completed, uploaded and shared as a web asset. The presentation of questions can be customized using standard web technology to reflect corporate branding.
The user then answers the targeted questions, the logic executed and a conclusion reached. By accessing the question and answer trail, VisiRule can explain and justify its findings.
Deliver Charts using JavaScript
You can compile your legal models into HTML/JavaScript and execute them client side using the VisiRule JavaScript Legal Delivery Engine.
VisiRule enables legal experts to rapidly build and deliver highly interactive systems and so provide bespoke legal guidance in a consistent and transparent way.
"An algorithm is a stepwise set of operations that perform logical and arithmetical operations in a pre-defined order. Algorithmic law requires that valid interpretation of the law is established as part of the system design."
Why Should I Trust VisiRule?
VisiRule is steeped in logic. VisiRule charts are stored as a set of facts and logical links. VisiRule flow diagrams generate executable logical rules in the form of Flex which itself is compiled into Prolog, the world's leading logic programming language.
VisiRule makes specialist legal expertise available to a wide audience in a safe and trusted way. All the questions visited by a user and the answers given are available for inspection and analysis. Textual and visual explanatory guidance can be attached to help users better understand what they are being asked and why. A visual map of the chart can be made available to provide a better understanding of the context and help people reach a suitable outcome or conclusion.
VisiRule provides an excellent way of communicating, disseminating and delivering legal information and expertise to both a non-legal and legal audience.
AI in Law Firms
Legal innovation aligned to improvements in baseline technology, both hardware and software, is transforming the way the legal industry operates and connects to its customers. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly being used to help automate and streamline various aspects of the legal industry. The automation of traditionally skilled human tasks can open up many legal processes. AI in Law Firms increases both customer satisfaction via increased accessibility, improved consistency and accountability, whilst reducing costs. It is needed to meet customers' expectations.
As Richard Susskind, OBE, has long argued, IT is bringing about fundamental changes in the ways lawyers and legal professionals do their work which will signal a fundamental shift in legal service from a form of advisory service to an Internet-enabled and often packaged service. Just read "The End of Lawyers? Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services", published by OUP back in 2008.
AI in Law Firms is becoming increasing recognized as a way to automate repetitive tasks within the legal sector and help deal with the sheer volume of data that surrounds us. You can read here how "Law Firms are climbing aboard the AI Wagon".
Productivity Improvements
VisiRule enables legal teams to improve their internal processes and productivity, and offer innovative legal services to clients and prospects. In this way, law firms and corporate legal teams can reduce both their costs and risks, whilst improving the quality of service they provide internally and externally.
Automating legal processes can help free some of your best legal brains from the routine drudgery associated with those common yet important manual tasks, and let them focus on the more complex challenges which are not so easy to automate. There's an interesting blog on LawClerk entiled "How Expert Systems & Legal Document Automation Can Help Law Firms & Freelancers Stay Competitive".