Transaction Management: How Tech-Savvy Law Firms Save Time & Money Through Cloud-Based AI Software

5 min read

Leading law firms are getting deals done faster by embracing new AI and cloud technology. Here’s how artificial intelligence and document automation are making tech-savvy lawyers more efficient.

At the risk of stating the obvious: Legal transactions are complicated. Whether it’s a corporate reorganization or acquisition, a merger, or something else entirely, even a relatively small, simple, and straightforward transaction could involve getting dozens of signatures on dozens of documents.

Managing a legal transaction takes a significant amount of time and effort, as there is a never-ending list of small, crucial details that must be ironed out. Complicated transactions can also involve a number of phone calls, emails, and status updates with clients — and the more time your lawyers spend keeping clients up to date, the less time they have to work on the mechanics of the transaction.

That’s where artificial intelligence, automation technology, and cloud-based software solutions are streamlining the process. AI-driven legal transaction management software is making transactions faster, easier, and less expensive to execute. Here are some of the ways that advanced transaction management technology can save your firm time and money.

Real-Time Exchange of Organized Information Enables Faster Closing

One of the challenges involved in using asynchronous methods of communication is that exchanges of information are delayed. Even email, which is quite fast compared to a certified letter, can be slow if the parties involved must send multiple emails back and forth while waiting for responses in between.

Complicating matters is the fact that email is a poor way to organize all of the information involved in executing a transaction. Attachments and links from one email don’t show up on another, so parties often must go digging through email chains to find important documents. The larger the transaction, the more information there is to sort through in order to find the right document.

But with cloud-based transaction management software, your firm can organize and synchronize your documents and communications in one central platform. All of the information you need is kept in a central repository that is constantly updating to reflect the latest changes. In software development, this is referred to as the Single Source of Truth (SSOT) methodology. When paired with a legal AI that’s always learning, this solution makes communications fast and easy.

Fewer Errors Mean Faster, Easier Transactions

While technology has enabled lawyers to communicate more easily and send documents faster, it has, unfortunately, resulted in an increase in errors. There are all sorts of transaction and drafting errors that could impact the enforceability of a legal document or contract, and the longer the document, the greater the likelihood of an error. When these errors occur, it results in lost time, money, and energy, and it delays deal closing. In some cases, you may need to get various parties to initial a waiver or amendment; in other cases, if the error is serious enough, you may need to start the entire deal over from the beginning.

One of the great advantages of AI software is that it can detect a variety of errors in legal documents and communications. An AI-based records and transaction management solution like Appara can automatically draft error-free documents, identify missing signatures or key information, and leverage a pre-defined workflow for a complex transaction to ensure no steps are missed. Cloud-based AI software can also track all of the changes that all parties have made, which enables your team to determine where an error may have been introduced into the drafting process and revert to an earlier document version if needed.

Artificial intelligence software is particularly well-suited for error detection and mitigation. In many cases, an AI records/transaction management and document automation suite like Appara can automatically draft documents for you, which reduces the risk of human error during document creation. Artificial intelligence is immune to many of the factors that result in human error: It doesn’t forget, it never gets tired, and it cannot misinterpret instructions. By having artificial intelligence manage your transactions, you reduce the need for error correction, which saves time, gets deals closed faster, and reduces risk.

Automatically Drafted Documents Make Light Work of Complex Transactions

AI-driven automation software can do much of the heavy lifting involved in legal transactions. With AI-enabled transaction management software like Appara, your team can standardize your transaction processes across projects and clients, making it faster and easier to manage multiple transactions at the same time. Appara’s built-in artificial intelligence makes it easy to automate drafting, signing, closing, and updates.

AI software excels at handling not only repetitive tasks, but also tasks like document creation for multi-step and multi-entity transactions. Modern AIs can do much of the heavy lifting involved in annual maintenance, reorganizations, and more. 

With AI-enabled document automation software like Appara, you can prepare incorporations, annual resolutions, share transfers, amalgamations, wills, and power of attorney agreements in a fraction of the time manual preparation would take. You can also automatically draft more complicated reorganization agreements, saving an average of 12 hours per file.

Artificial intelligence is opening up new avenues for managing a variety of complex legal transactions. Document automation technology and AI have advanced to a point where transaction management solutions can handle much of the work that was previously done by legal assistants — in a fraction of the time and with fewer errors. That’s why law firms in Canada and the United States are incorporating AI software into their practices. As AI-driven transaction management software continues to develop, it will result in faster closing, fewer errors, a more seamless experience for clients, and a reduced need for administrative minutiae — all of which means higher profits for law firms.

How much time and money can your law firm save with AI-powered tools? Check out our case studies for the answer.