Automating legal aid: using technology to make crime and civil law pay

Karl Viedman, pre-sales consultant at Advanced, says the right PMS can create a new client, open a matter file, post the time recorded on to the ledger and, depending on the boxes you’ve ticked, generate fully populated client care and next step letters.

As a former legal aid lawyer, I’m aware of the pressures and challenges of legal aid work. A big pressure point is finding a way to make legal aid work profitable. Often, the time taken to process, and attend, is so poorly compensated that firms have to cross-subsidise the work, do less of it, or abandon legal aid altogether to stay in business. This is an excruciating choice for people committed to the principle of justice for all.

However, I do believe that legal aid work can be made more viable by introducing automation. Although technology can’t make travelling time and attendance any briefer. What it can do is slash the time taken to administer legal aid. Imagine, for instance, when first meeting a client, that you type the client’s details into a form on a laptop instead of writing them out on paper.

It doesn’t matter, incidentally, if the laptop is on or off-line at the time. The information will still be held. And, once in the system, the data never needs to be re-entered. Plus, it’s accurate, complete and searchable, and as soon as the laptop is back online the new client’s information can be uploaded easily into the firm’s practice management system (PMS).

It’s now that things start to get really clever. The right PMS can create a new client, open a matter file, post the time recorded on to the ledger and, depending on the boxes you’ve ticked, generate fully populated client care and next step letters. Meanwhile the system has recorded the police station attendance, so generating the relevant CRM11/7 is quick and easy.

To the uninitiated this might all sound like fiction. But I assure you it’s not. At Advanced we’ve developed this technology with our user groups so that it works seamlessly within our PMS.

But what’s the actual impact of this type of PMS technology? Well, as a lawyer, I can spend 10 minutes drafting the next step letter or I can click a button that generates it near-instantaneously. That time saving is helpful, but the point is that these things are about cumulative impact. If you save 10 minutes a day, it adds up. Ten minutes x 200 working days a year x 20 lawyers = more than 660 hours. Monetised at £40 per hour, it’s well over £26k per annum.

So, the question really isn’t: ‘Can you afford to introduce a new PMS while you’re delivering legal aid?’ The question has now become: ‘Can you afford not to?’