How AI will make your firm more compliant and secure
Thursday 27 April, 2023
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People react to AI on a spectrum. They fall somewhere between ‘AI is a fad that’s going nowhere’ and ‘AI is going to replace every aspect of human work’. Realistically, AI is not going to take over, nor is it going to fizzle out. Automation is here now, and it’s only getting better. True AI is on the way.
What they will replace are the tasks that humans are wasted on — the work that’s repetitive, routine, and uncreative. Crucially, some of the tasks that are the least fulfilling or motivating are also vitally important — think of processes like compliance checks, client due diligence, and VAT.
People can be tired and bored, which often means mistakes. Software can’t be either of those things, and since it’s not human, it doesn’t make human errors.
Here’s what AI will do for your firm’s security, and compliance, and how it will leave you to do the work that only a solicitor can do.
AI for Security
Law firms handle vast amounts of sensitive data, so there are obvious legal and reputational reasons to keep it safe. There’s always a technology arms race between security and cyber crime, and AI is making multi-factor authentication increasingly difficult to fool.
The combination of a password with a verification code is already hard to defeat, but it’s only going to get more difficult for criminals. AI may well start to verify users with extremely advanced biometrics, even to the point of being able to identify a user based on how they type or hold their mobile phone.
As it stands, existing measures are more than secure enough most of the time. That’s why when breaches happen, 95% of the time they’re due to a human error rather than a technological weakness.
One real difference that AI will make is in verifying your prospective clients’ identities. In a world where you might see a matter to its conclusion without ever having met your client in person, it can become difficult to establish that they are who they say they are. AI has the answer. Among other methods, AI can verify identities with the biometrics above, making your investigations quicker and more reliable.
AI for Compliance
On the subject of new customers, AI promises to handle a lot of routine investigations, like anti-money laundering. In wider practice, automated workflows would mean that AI completes and advances obligatory but tedious tasks, ensuring everything is completed to a high standard, nothing is missed, and everything is ready before deadlines approach.
Once again, you should take any opportunity to reduce or remove human error. Handling your own accounts, and those of your clients, you need to process transactions quickly, but that can’t come at the cost of accuracy. Getting them wrong will be at the very least inconvenient or embarrassing, and possibly very expensive and damaging to your reputation. AI can remove much of the risk and doubt that legal accounting can present.
Will your firm need AI?
In short, yes. The firms that use it will be safer, more reliable, and more attractive to clients. Not to mention the fact that they’ll be far more efficient, cost-effective, and agile than those who don’t.
What, then, can you do now to prepare? The best thing you can do is put in place the systems and the workflows that establish effective compliance and security routines. Insight Legal has provided those to over 1,000 law firms.
See how you could meet your compliance obligations, easily, efficiently, and securely — call 01252 518939 or visit
insightlegal.co.uk/solicitors-software/
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