Six reasons for using Clarilis to automate your legal opinions

Transactions requiring legal opinions tend to be complex, often involving multiple parties and jurisdictions. They’re also usually high value.

“Legal opinions might not be the longest of documents, but they’re deceptively complex, and there’s no room for error,” says Nicky Ellis, one of Clarilis’ experienced finance PSLs. “These factors often lead lawyers to conclude that they’re beyond the scope of automation platforms.”

At Clarilis, we challenge the assumption that legal opinions are outside of the remit of automated drafting. In fact, we argue they’re the perfect match for our deep automations.

6 reasons why legal opinions are ideal candidates for Clarilis automation

Legal opinions often gather information regarding multiple documents, parties, and jurisdictions. This makes them particularly burdensome for lawyers to draft. Using deep automation helps navigate this complexity. Our carefully constructed questionnaire collects information about the transaction and uses the matter data provided to accurately tailor the wording used in the opinion statements.

2) Risk mitigation

The complexity of legal opinions introduces ample opportunities for human error, even when experienced lawyers are leading on drafting. Clarilis’ deep automations are precisely configured so that each opinion extracts and includes the right information. The rigour and consistency of our approach significantly reduces the risk of drafting errors, producing highly accurate first drafts.

 "When drafting manually, the wrong precedent can be used, a junior lawyer can mistakenly add something incorrectly, and an exhausted senior lawyer can miss this error during their review,” Nicky says. 

3) Time savings

The complex nature of legal opinions means manual drafting can be time-consuming for lawyers. Clarilis is designed for complexity and typically enables lawyers to turnaround first drafts for their clients 90% faster. In fact, the more complex the opinion, the greater the time-savings delivered by our automations.

4) Consistency and quality

Our managed service makes sure automations are continually evolving to reflect changes in precedents. This enables Clarilis to capture best practice and ensures it’s used as the basis for all automated drafts. In short, with our automations, you can be certain your lawyers are always working from the same and most accurate precedents when drafting legal opinions.

5) Risk-mitigated delegation

We add in-platform drafting notes, guidance, and controls to provide extra support for junior lawyers. This mitigates the risk of drafting error, allowing the task of producing first drafts of legal opinions to be delegated to less experienced team members. And because of the accuracy of Clarilis output, our automations also significantly reduce senior lawyer review time.

"Our clients tell us the time taken by supervising lawyers reviewing drafts is typically cut by 50% when using our automations to produce first drafts”, says Nicky. 

6) Better job satisfaction and increased capacity

Deep automation not only reduces the time spent on producing and reviewing drafts it also frees up lawyers' time.  This creates more capacity to take on additional, higher value work.

The perfect match for automation

From our highly structured questionnaire and powerful data model to the bespoke guidance notes we meticulously add to automations – we embed numerous features into Clarilis to safeguard the accuracy and quality of the drafts generated by our automations. The six reasons above explain why advanced, deep automation is particularly effective when mitigating the risks and complexity of drafting legal opinions.

If you haven’t yet automated your legal opinions, it’s worth exploring the benefits Clarilis can offer for these documents. And then, why not book a demonstration to see exactly how it works?