In this post, Joe Pirrotta of ProSearch discusses the four questions to ask before automating anything. Who wouldn’t want to know that?

In his blog post titled (wait for it!) The Four Questions to Ask Before Automating Anything (available here), Joe discusses how demos keep getting better, yet organizations keep doing things largely the same way. And these are not slow organizations afraid of technology. Some of the sharpest thinking about AI in legal is happening in those rooms.

And the docket keeps growing anyway. More matters, more data, more sources that did not exist five years ago, and flat budgets in the good years. Legal teams need to move faster inside organizations built to make new technology move slowly. That does not mean they have to wait eleven months to solve problems today.

The instinct is to go after the biggest pain point. Resist it. If the last article was about turning playbooks into skills, this is about choosing the first piece of the playbook worth automating. The biggest pain point is usually the hardest judgment call in the matter, which makes it the worst place to start.

Joe says ask four questions instead. Here’s one of the questions:

Do I do this in every matter of this type?

You only get paid back on work you do over and over. The thing you did once, in the awful case, stays manual no matter how much it hurt. Pull your last five matters of one type and write down what your team did in all five. The better candidate is usually the small task somebody does forty times a year without anyone noticing.

So, what are the other three of four questions to ask before automating anything? Find out here, it’s only one click! Clicking gives you both the answers and the questions! 😉

So, what do you think? Is your organization struggling automating processes in discovery? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Image created using DALL-E 3, using the term “robot lawyer wearing a suit holding up two peace signs”.

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