Digital legal advice forces companies to rethink

Good for the consumer – challenging for companies – more and more mass action portals have emerged in recent years. Legal departments and law firms need to adapt to this. Legal tech is a central topic here.

Promising times are dawning for customers who have lost capital on securities, for example, or who feel they have been misadvised when buying a car. Today, specialized young companies offer them legal prosecution at a flat rate. They use databases and algorithms and are as cost-effective as they are promising. Injured parties hope to obtain their rights quickly, easily and conveniently.

Companies not prepared for wave of lawsuits

For the defendant companies, however, this development is a challenge to which they cannot respond appropriately in the structures to which they have been accustomed. This can have fatal consequences, as incorrect or late responses and missed deadlines can result in financial losses and damage to the company’s reputation. Legal departments and law firms find themselves overwhelmed, because they are often neither staffed nor technically prepared for this challenge.

Arivision of labor & standardization

In such a scenario, the traditional legal manufactory has no future. Structured legal project and process management by lawyers trained for this purpose is necessary here, with which standardized complaints can be responded to quickly and efficiently as standard. This project management is used to control the flow of work in the office or department and to coordinate tasks in a meaningful way.

A so-called shared delivery center (SDC) can also be an essential part of efficiently handling mass claims. There, colleagues with the appropriate technological training carry out standardized preliminary work, collect the necessary information for legal processing, control the flow of information and maintain the necessary databases. Lawyers in this model focus on purely legal issues. These services can also be outsourced to external providers – an important aspect because so far only a few law firms and even fewer companies have set up such a department themselves.

Rapid relearning necessary

Legal departments and lawyers in companies should quickly rethink and reorganize their processes. To do this, it is necessary to create an internal awareness of the problem, train employees and set up appropriate structures, databases and processes. Only well armed can the challenges posed by mass litigation be mastered.