Modern legal technologies go beyond creating efficiencies or reducing time spent on mundane tasks – they can now be enablers for lawyers and businesses to create opportunities to strategise and earn greater income, says legal tech and innovation expert Leah Molatseli.

“I think the biggest pain, being in legal tech and really loving what it stands for, is when lawyers or in-house teams don’t understand the importance of how actually implementing legal tech can save you time and  money, and ultimately will also make you earn even more money,” commented Molatseli, the Head of Business Development at Legal Interact. 

This South African technology company has been helping lawyers on the continent for four decades now. Legal Interact creates customised technology solutions for the local legal market and has grown and evolved its products in consultation with African lawyers. 

Earlier this year Molatseli was honoured by the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) as one of five outstanding women leaders in the global legal technology community.

Illustrating the power of locally created legal technologies to help African lawyers increase their impact, Molatseli shared the example of one large law firm client that uses Legal Interact’s customised legal automation platform Matter Management. They grew their service offering from dealing with crash and bash matters to handling the collection recovery process, thereby growing its employee base. 

“That was the power of the legal tech, and it allowed them to free up enough time for them to look for other income generating opportunities. So, it’s like a win-win,” she explained.

Legal Interact’s Matter Manager legal automation platform is “a juiced-up project management tool” that’s particularly popular with in-house counsel, harnessing customised workflows to allow them to easily keep track of all internal requests, legal matters and referrals to external counsel. Key facets and benefits include “the legal triage” and a business intelligence dashboard, said Molatseli..

“The legal department can oversee how many matters they have running, how far they are in the process, where they are within different business units within the organisation, and also key strategic knowledge and insights,” noted Molatseli. Such insights can be utilised at board meetings to advocate for greater budgets or staffing to support the type of work they’re doing.

A secure platform that allows easy collaboration between in-house team members (and external counsel given access), Matter Manager also speaks to Legal Interact’s Contract Manager solution, which handles everything to do with various contracts post-signature.

“We call Matter Manager and Contract Manager your enterprise legal management software solution, because it literally helps from end to end.”

Contract Manager addresses all those pain points companies have around keeping track of huge numbers of different contracts relating to their business: obligations, benefits, deadlines, renewal periods and more. AI technology extracts key information and delivers real-time data, notifications and reminders, and helps lawyers with their main role of mitigating risk.

“Our products have this way of harmonising the legal department so you know exactly what is going on,” explained Molatseli, whose business also provides legal operations consultants – “our rock stars” – who get into businesses and law firms to help them implement and customise the technology to suit their needs and navigate this exciting new frontier.

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