The Environmental Impact of Legal Tech: Moving Towards a Paperless Legal Department 

If you’re looking to decrease your carbon footprint, and limit your environmental impact as a legal department, then you’ve come to the right place. First, we’re looking at some of the major environmental challenges faced by traditional legal practices and exploring the expansive world of legal tech and sustainability. Next, we’ll delve into Lexzur Solutions and the steps you’ll need to start your digital transformation, today. 

Environmental Challenges in Traditional Legal Practices: 

Clearly, your legal practice has an environmental impact, whether you’re choosing to consider it or not. Your legal team traditionally requires paper, ink, transportation, and much more. Some of the key challenges that stand between legal practices and environmental sustainability are as follows.  

• • Use of Paper: The extensive consumption of paper for documents, contracts, legal filings, and more all contributes to deforestation and waste. 

• • Generating Waste: When printing, copying, and disposing of paper documents, traditional legal teams are producing significant waste, impacting landfills. 

• • Energy Consumption: The office space likely uses equipment and facilities. This contributes to higher energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. 

• • Carbon Footprint: Whether from paper production, transportation, or waste disposal, there will be a huge impact on the industry’s carbon footprint. 

• • Depleting Resources: Naturally, traditional law practice relies on finite resources like ink, toner, and paper. 

• • Limited Mobility & Collaboration: Dealing with physical documents or collaborating with stakeholders that are not physically present necessitates transportation, leading to additional fuel consumption and emissions.

The Intersection of Legal Tech and Sustainability: 

So, why is legal tech the ultimate solution for environmental sustainability? Legal Tech Solutions could include anything from Legal Practice Management Software to Contract Lifecycle Management Software, Centralized Communication Portals, and even advanced integrations with popular apps. This type of Green Technology in Law Practice addresses each of the above-mentioned challenges, and drives even more efficiency, saves on costs, and streamlines communication and collaboration like never before. Let’s look at the environmental benefits of using Legal Tech;  

• • Paperless Workflows: Enabling digital document management reduces paper usage and associated environmental impact. 

• • Remote Collaboration: Empowering your team with Virtual meetings and cloud-based platforms to minimize the need for travel, decreasing carbon emissions. 

• • Energy Efficiency: Configuring optimized workflows, automating tasks, and auto-routing digital documents, lead to reduced energy consumption. 

• • Eco-Friendly Software: Prioritizing sustainability and green practices will show environmental consciousness and elevate the practice.  

• • Reduced Carbon Emissions: Adopting digital tools reduces overall carbon emissions.

Lexzur’s Eco-Friendly Legal Tech Solutions: 

Lexzur offers an array of leading legal tech software that revolutionizes law practice in every aspect, especially when it comes to environmental sustainability. Here’s a quick overview of the Lexzur product offering.  

• • Lexzur Core: Comprehensive Legal Management Software with Workflow & Task Automation, including everything Legal teams need to manage cases, clients, matters, tasks, documents and much more. Learn more here. 

• • Contra: Complete Contract Lifecycle Management Software, covering everything from drafting, to redlining and e-signature, with advanced Document Automation features. Learn more here. 

• • Lexzur Portals: Centralize Communication and Redefine Remote Collaboration with Clients, Other Departments, or External Legal Advisors. Learn more here. 

• • 5000+ Integrations: Connect Lexzur products to thousands of the most popular applications to streamline and centralize work across different platforms – no code required. Learn more here.

Steps to Transition to a Paperless Legal Department: 

Let’s say you’re ready to start your digital transformation journey. Contrary to popular belief, digitizing your practice has become easier than ever. There are a few key steps that you need to take to ensure that you choose the right solution for your practice. 

1. Assess your operations  

First, conduct a detailed evaluation of all current processes and identify areas for digitization. Make sure you understand what you will need the software to do. Once you have a clear understanding of the tools and features you need, you can move to the next step. If you’re not quite sure which aspects of your operations, you can digitize, below is a quick and brief checklist for you to fall back on;  

• • Case & Matter Management 

• • Client Intake (CRM) 

• • Workflow & Task Automation 

• • Dashboards for Tracking & Reporting 

• • Time Billing and Accounting (for law firms) 

• • Central & Secure Digital Repository 

• • Reminders and Notifications

2. Choose Your Tech:  

Now that you know what you need, it’s time to explore all the solutions that meet your requirements and compare every aspect of their offering until you’re sure you have exactly what you need. Some important aspects to consider when comparing software are as follows;  

• • The software provider is trusted, secure and certified 

• • The software has proven success for similar practice 

• • Testimonials and Reviews on multiple platforms are positive 

• • Support is prompt and available most days of the week 

• • Extensive Training is provided readily and on-demand 

• • The software complies with regulations applicable to your practice

3. Digitizing Documents:  

In fact, this might require some manual effort to get started but is entirely worth it! Scan and convert all paper documents associated with your practice in any way into digital formats. This will allow your practice to have one central and secure digital repository, with advanced search features, permission-based accessibility, integrated collaboration tools, and so much more.  

4. Training Staff:  

With software solutions like Lexzur, multiple channels for training are available to all users. This isn’t always the case. First, Lexzur offers a complete and thorough documentation center, where users can have access to guides, instructional videos, walk-throughs, and so much more. Additionally, Lexzur has recorded dozens of Training Videos on every tool and feature provided by the software on YouTube. Furthermore, Lexzur offers Live Weekly Training Sessions that users or anyone else can register for and attend for live interaction and engagement with Lexzur’s experts. That’s not all. Lexzur also offers several webinars that tackle a multitude of topics, including how to maximize the use of certain tools and features. All that said, Lexzur also provides online and in-person training for clients based on request. 

5. Implementing Policies:  

So, now that you’re digitizing your operations, you’ll need to establish guidelines for digital document creation, storage, and sharing. This is a quick list of what that may include. 

• • Document Creation Guidelines 

• • Document Storage Policies 

• • Sharing and Collaboration Guidelines 

• • Data Security and Compliance

6. Integrating Software with Existing Systems:  

Certainly, you’ll need to study how you plan to integrate the new software with your existing systems and workflows for seamless operations. This is best done directly with the software provider that should help along this journey from migration to configuration, and more. 

7. Security Measures:  

Security is of the utmost importance when using legal tech. It is crucial that you and your software provider comply with regulatory regulations that apply to your practice. You and your software provider must be clear on the measures taken to protect sensitive data. Something to look out for when it comes to this is certifications from international regulators, such as; GDPR, PIPEDA, ISO, and others.  

8. Feedback & Rollout! 

Run a test internally and gather feedback from your staff on the use of the product and make necessary adjustments. 

Finally, successfully launch paperless operations across the entire department. 

Case Studies: Real-Life Examples of Sustainable Legal Tech 

Lexzur has successfully transitioned countless legal teams and their operations from traditional to paperless and sustainable. For example, Nouf Adib Al Zamil, Director of the Corporate Communications & ICT department at Zamil Group Holding, remembers when papers were the only means to get legal work done at Zamil Group. The tedious and repetitive processes, bottlenecks, and errors that unnecessarily slow down legal operations at every stage. Now with Lexzur, the legal department is fully automated.  

“Going paperless has greatly impacted our productivity and efficiency. The time we used to waste sending a paper around! Now, all board members can be online in an instant and approve or sign documents with the click of a button from anywhere.” – Read the full Case Study, here. 

Another example is the team at Juristconsult, who loved the fast and easy implementation of Lexzur. They enjoyed how efficiently they were trained on the software and credited the Lexzur support team for their quick responses and ability to find solutions.    

“From training and implementation to the support throughout, Lexzur is always quick to respond, and find solutions for us. We never had an issue with support. When we raise a ticket, it gets sorted properly. This is very important to us.” – Read the full Case Study, here.