In-house legal teams are constantly pressured to deliver high-quality legal services promptly while managing a growing workload and increasing business demands. Legal workflow automation offers a powerful solution to optimise processes, improve efficiency, and maintain consistency. Today, we’ll explore legal workflows, why automating them is essential for corporate legal teams, and how this practice can elevate service delivery in 2025.
What Are Legal Workflows?
A ‘workflow’ is the structured sequence of tasks required to complete a particular job or process. In the context of in-house legal teams, workflows often involve multiple stakeholders, both internal and external, making them prone to inefficiencies and delays. Having well-defined workflows allows legal teams to simplify complex processes, improve accountability, and ensure tasks are completed with minimal error.
Take, for example, the process of briefing external counsel. This often involves various steps, such as conflict checks, document preparation, and internal approvals, which can be time-consuming and challenging to manage. The complexity rises as the number of law firms involved increases or when the company runs a competitive request for proposal (RFP) process. Workflow automation can help in-house teams gain control, streamline approvals, and reduce the time spent on these tasks.
What is Legal Workflow Automation?
Legal workflow automation uses technology to automate and optimise routine legal tasks, creating repeatable, efficient processes that can be scaled with the business. This technology empowers in-house teams to manage legal matters, compliance, risk assessments, and other tasks faster and more accurately.
By automating key processes, corporate legal departments can save time, reduce operational costs, and keep pace with the increasing demands from across the organisation.
Key Benefits of Legal Workflow Automation for In-House Teams
Legal workflow automation offers significant advantages for in-house teams, including:
- Increased Efficiency: Eliminating manual tasks allows legal teams to speed up routine processes and focus on higher-value activities.
- Scalability: Automation allows legal departments to handle a growing volume of work, adapting to the company’s needs without increasing headcount.
- Collaboration: Streamlined workflows make it easier for teams to collaborate across departments and geographies.
- Accuracy & Risk Reduction: Automated processes reduce human error, ensuring consistency and mitigating risks across legal functions.
- Better Reporting and Data Management: Automation makes tracking key data, monitoring performance, and generating actionable insights for decision-making more straightforward.
- Continuous Improvement: Automation enables legal teams to iterate on their processes over time, continually enhancing efficiency.
Numerous research papers report that automating workflows can reduce process time and costs by up to 45%, which is critical for in-house legal teams looking to operate more efficiently within constrained budgets. To work out your potential return on investment (ROI), use Lawcadia’s Business Case – Savings Calculator.
How to Start Automating Legal Workflows
The best place to start is by identifying high-volume, repetitive tasks prone to inefficiency. For example, automating the intake and triage process of legal requests from internal clients can save valuable time. Customised intake forms, tailored to specific types of work, can ensure that the correct information is captured from the outset, allowing legal teams to prioritise tasks based on urgency and complexity.
More advanced automation can take this further, automatically assigning tasks to the appropriate team members and generating documents. For example, once a legal matter is updated, automation can trigger notifications to internal stakeholders and external counsel, ensuring seamless communication.
Mapping Your Processes: A Critical First Step
Before automating your workflows, it’s crucial to map out your current processes. Process mapping helps you identify inefficiencies, bottlenecks, and areas of improvement. Using tools like Mural or even simple post-it notes and whiteboards, you can visualise the steps involved in each process, from intake to task completion.
Reviewing these workflows allows you to identify where automation can have the most significant impact, such as in areas where manual tasks cause delays or lead to errors. Legal tech providers, like Lawcadia, often offer pre-built, best-practice workflow templates designed specifically for in-house teams, making it easier to implement automation.
Conclusion
As in-house teams are tasked with doing more with fewer resources, legal workflow automation provides a much-needed solution to streamline operations and deliver high-quality legal services more efficiently. By automating workflows, in-house legal teams can eliminate bottlenecks, enhance collaboration, and create scalable processes that support the business’s evolving needs. Embracing legal workflow automation in 2025 is not just a way to optimise operations—it’s an essential strategy for staying ahead in a fast-paced and increasingly demanding corporate environment.
