New technologies are making their way into the legal industry. Artificial intelligence (AI) is replacing some staffing needs in research and data entry positions, bringing great benefits for productivity and data analytics. Application programming interfaces (APIs) are data pipelines that law firms can use to automate data entry and basic business processes. The combination of AI and APIs replaces costly functions that support law firms while streamlining business operations, increasing innovation, and enhancing business development.
A Look at APIs
The practice of managing application programming interfaces (APIs) using scalable software for API design, publication, security, monitoring, and analytics is known as API management. A successful management platform drives the business goals of providing API-based services easily so that internal and external developers can quickly adopt and integrate them into applications. A successful API program focuses on scalability, security, and support.
API scalability ensures the program is successfully adopted without performance issues from backend systems. An API management solution provides edge caching for data and imposes traffic limits on developers. Security controls ensure that only authorized users have access to data at any given time. API authentication is done with API keys that quickly and reliably ensure the identity of those requesting and gaining access to necessary data. API management support provides a positive developer experience through interactive documentation, built-in static documentation, self-service key registration, and developer-specific reporting.
Reduce Overhead and Human Error
The automation of daily tasks saves lawyers time, money, and costly manpower while ensuring data accuracy, organization, and usability. Streamlining litigation management saves man-hours, money, and effort by legal teams. Gathering and reviewing case documentation requires combing government databases and websites to locate key filings, downloading them, categorizing them, and compiling updates for the lawyers on the case. Using a document management system allows law firms to streamline processes that require large amounts of human labor.
Technology removes a large amount of human error that’s common with data entry and classification. Structured data is key for integration with existing internal applications and the development of reliable reporting and analytics. The structured data that results from APIs provides law firms opportunities to connect newly filed court records with internal data points that are already being tracked.
Legal precedents and policies arise as a means to address issues that affect human lives, for example, human rights abuses. The Canadian government set the world stage on upholding international human rights in the face of geopolitical challenges with the passage of the Special Economic Measures Act (SEMA) of 1992. Malliha Wilson, a Tamil Canadian lawyer with extensive experience championing human rights, offers her view on how the country can better deliver a clear and consistent signal to the world when it comes to protecting international human rights.
When it comes to punishing human rights violators, it’s essential to aggressively use the Magnitsky Act, which gives the passing country the power to punish violations and corrupt actions taking place abroad. Malliha Wilson advocates that the aggressive use of the Magnitsky Act restores the global recognition of normative values of respect for human rights. Failing to use the Act results in a missed opportunity to take a clear stance on upholding human rights.
Enhance Business Development
APIs can integrate with customer relationship management (CRM) solutions or practice management solutions to create a steady stream of data, automating a large bulk of a law firm’s business development efforts in litigation. Law firms can easily input new leads generated from automated searches directly into these systems, which can then send real-time alerts to the lawyer, practice, group, or business development team in charge of interacting with the client. This saves time while putting development teams at the forefront of emerging, relevant information that can be acted on to drive new business opportunities.
Competitive intelligence and market share analytics also fuel innovation. Law firms can get a better view of their clients’ litigation portfolios by accessing court data through APIs to discover what percentage of the caseload they receive compared to competing firms, as well as find new, profitable business opportunities to pursue.
