How LawToolBox technologies are changing the work of law firms in 50 US states

Every day, lawyers around the world balance on the thin edge of procedural deadlines. Miss a document filing date – and the case is lost, regardless of its substance. Missed deadlines remain the main cause of professional liability for lawyers in the USA, with annual insurance payouts of 100,000,000 dollars. LawToolBox has developed a technological solution to this problem. Their solution is based on integrating Microsoft Azure OpenAI artificial intelligence with the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. This transforms familiar tools like Teams and Outlook into full-fledged legal process management platforms. The system automatically recognizes and extracts deadlines even from handwritten court orders. In addition, it highlights important provisions from contracts and tracks deadlines in commercial agreements without human intervention.

Technically, LawToolBox calculates procedural deadlines for 1000 courts in all 50 US states, as well as in Canada and other countries. These deadlines synchronize with different calendars – Outlook, Google, Apple – and leading case management systems. Statistics show growing adoption of such technologies by the legal community. If in 2015 less than 20% of law firms used automated deadline management systems, today this figure approaches 60%. That means 60% of lawyers have admitted that artificial intelligence handles the calendar better than Harvard Law School graduates. An excellent example of how technology fills gaps in elite education.

The system brings particular benefit to paralegals, freeing them from the need to manually calculate and track deadlines. And in the legal industry, a new class of specialists is emerging – legal technologists working at the intersection of law and information technology. Their task is to set up and optimize such automated systems.

The social consequences are no less important. Reducing the number of missed deadlines leads to more fair consideration of cases on their merits, rather than resolving them on formal procedural grounds.