Law firm ditches off-the-shelf solutions, enhances data security and client experience

Our client is a national law firm representing clients in complex litigation at the trial and appellate levels. With a large pool of attorneys, case managers,  and tech experts spread across six offices, they serve clients from the early stages of litigation to the final moments of settlement distribution. Always striving to provide attentive client support, the company also operates a dedicated technology, data, and analytics team that deploys cutting-edge technology and processes to optimize the litigation process.

The class action suit industry relies on storing and generating sensitive data. Information storing varies by case and can include documents, signatory gathering, and communications once a client has been qualified. As such, the industry requires robust, data-driven technology that empowers customers with the simple services they need, and the law firm with powerful tools to manage complex legal processes efficiently and securely.

The firm wanted to transform the way law firms handle data collection and make information easily digestible. But they lacked the customization necessary to create user-friendly, non-repetitive forms (e.g., nested questions, conditional logic). The tool they used to create forms was restrictive and inflexible, limiting their ability to generate leads. (Statistically, when forms are repetitive or complicated, users tend to abandon them, resulting in fewer clients being reviewed as part of the case.)  By building the necessary data, documentation, and signatory applications in-house, they could control how all the client data is stored and managed.

The company sought a solution that would allow them to create and customize ad-hoc web forms that could be reused for other cases without business interruption. Adding multiple functionalities to gather client data, pull in documents for review, and add signatory requirements was cost-prohibitive. However, building their own technology would offer the law firm more control, as well as an opportunity to market their solution as standalone capabilities to other law firms.

Lumenalta built Stark, a solution that processes and stores confidential information effectively and makes it available to authorized users securely and efficiently.

Stark is a set of applications and processes that transforms the raw client data into structured, actionable data for the wider organization and includes three components: Form Submission, Form Builder, and Entity Builder.

When clients submit their responses, the system processes the provided information and broadcasts it to integrated data management platforms such as Salesforce. This integration ensures that all client data is well organized and consistently maintained across different systems.

Banner integrates Azure Service Bus, CosmosDB, and AI-powered OCR (optical character recognition) to streamline the review process of medical records within the Salesforce environment. It automates the process from initial record submission via Form Builder to final review, using AI to extract relevant information from the provided PDF medical records.

The AI then generates possible responses to a set of predefined questions, aiming to answer as many questions as possible based on the extracted data. This significantly eases the workload of the reviewer by providing a preliminary analysis and possible answers. The data is then both automatically and manually extracted from the documents, reviewed by legal consultants, and submitted to the wider organization's knowledge base.

Stark Sign is an independent application that enables intake specialists (agents) to create and design forms specifically for agreements with electronic signatures on different devices using PSPDFKit as the underlying technology. Stark Sign's simplest use case is transforming responses from a web form created with Form Builder and answered through Form Submission into a PDF document that the client can electronically sign, giving legal validity to their responses.

Additionally, Stark Sign is flexible enough to support various data input sources, allowing users to accommodate different use cases related to electronic document signatures, which is common in a law firm. Its interface is similar to Form Builder’s, enabling the creation of web forms on demand with the added capability of working on PDF documents.

On the first day of implementation, conversions of clients who submitted raw information into Form Submission and signed up with the firm rose to 82% from 50%.  This greatly reduced the time spent helping clients by phone and freed up agents for more strategic tasks.

By streamlining the collection, structuring, and analysis of confidential information, our comprehensive solution empowers the law firm to quickly extract raw data into actionable knowledge. In addition, the system's ability to securely manage and distribute this knowledge enhances decision-making processes, improves client services, and ultimately drives more effective and efficient operations across the entire organization.

Ongoing developments include Stark Entities that will categorize the questions in the forms into distinct entities, allowing for the creation of a canonical model that aligns with the structure used in Salesforce. This ensures that all submitted data remains updated and consistent across downstream schemas.

Lumenalta is also working on a communications application that will enable email automation for clients.

The firm is now equipped with a secure, scalable, and fully customizable data ecosystem that strengthens client experience, unlocks new revenue opportunities, and positions them to lead the legal industry in AI-driven innovation: