A Day In the Life of a Large Law Lawyer: Negotiating From Experience with Litera’s Legal Tools and M365 Copilot
The importance of negotiation in the practice of law cannot be overstated. Negotiations are integral to finalizing various business transactions and achieving mutually beneficial outcomes. A key advantage of negotiation is the ability to reach a win-win solution, where neither party is unduly burdened, and decisions are made collaboratively.
For lawyers, effective negotiation skills are paramount. These skills are not only utilized in interactions with opposing parties but also in dealings with colleagues, clients, and governmental entities. However, possessing negotiation skills alone is not sufficient. Lawyers must also be equipped with the necessary negotiation tools to have a competitive edge.
IT and Knowledge Management teams play a crucial role in empowering lawyers with the technological resources, knowledge, and expertise needed to thrive in negotiations. By leveraging tools such as Litera and Microsoft's Copilot, lawyers can streamline the negotiation process and enhance their effectiveness at the bargaining table.
Here are some key steps within the negotiation process where these tools can provide valuable assistance.
Aligning With Clients and Counterparts
An essential aspect of negotiation involves grasping and harmonizing both the client's objectives and the perspective of the counterpart. Active listening forms the bedrock of this understanding, facilitating the processing and empathetic comprehension of both parties' viewpoints.
To facilitate this alignment, technology capable of aiding lawyers in listening and synthesizing information is crucial. This is where M365 Copilot proves invaluable. By integrating it into meetings, Copilot can capture, transcribe, and condense information, empowering the lawyer with access to key insights without the necessity of recalling from memory or dividing their attention between listening and providing insights or note-taking.
Negotiating From Experience
Lawyers need to understand their firm's past negotiation experiences for similar matters to leverage that knowledge effectively. Unfortunately, much of this valuable insight is scattered among individual lawyers' memories, making it difficult to consolidate.
Litera Foundation offers a solution by empowering legal professionals to filter relevant matters and easily identify past instances of similar work, clients involved, and collaborating lawyers. This feature streamlines the process of seeking advice within the firm and showcases expertise to clients.
With Foundation, lawyers can export relevant experience into documents and further summarize them using M365 Copilot.
Foundation Dragon, Litera’s GenAI deal-point database tool designed to easily extract precedents and deal terms from past deal documents, allows firms to turn their experience into client value, furnishing negotiation intelligence by providing actionable data during negotiations including seeing what opposing counsel has done in the past.
Document Creation and Proofreading
Drafting documents is an integral part of legal work, especially in negotiations where legal professionals aim to secure favorable outcomes for their clients through contracts and other documents.
However, the manual process of document creation can be time-consuming and error-prone, typically relying on a "dupe and revise" method. This method risks missing key provisions, leaving behind sensitive information, or introducing errors that could harm the firm's reputation and client relationships.
To mitigate these risks, firms can leverage M365 Copilot to:
- Quickly summarize the state of the law
- Create document outlines for a solid foundation
- Generate simple, non-client-specific documents like general letters
In conjunction with Litera's document creation platform, Litera Create, legal professionals can further enhance their document creation process by:
- Initiating documents using enterprise-approved templates with placeholders
- Accessing a content library for the best precedent language
- Retaining document styling and numbering when inserting content from the library
- Ensuring anonymization of sensitive client data
- Integrating with other firm systems via the Litera Create API
Additionally, with Litera Check, our document proofreading tool, legal professionals can:
- Analyze documents with one click to surface issues related to definitions, cross-references, citations, and more
- Resolve issues while drafting documents through the Active Drafting feature
- Mark citations for an accurate Table of Contents
- Apply proper formatting and styles, resolving numbering and cross-reference issues
- Address common Microsoft Word issues and automatically fix any arising problems when converting to PDF
By utilizing M365 Copilot and Litera's drafting tools, legal professionals can efficiently record negotiation positions in documents, minimizing risks and ensuring accuracy.
Effective Communication
During the negotiation process, it's imperative to share documents for review with both clients and counter parties. To facilitate this process, we recommend utilizing M365 Copilot for drafting emails and Metadact for metadata cleaning.
Upon receiving an updated version from either the client or the counterparty, it's crucial for the lawyer to comprehend the changes made. It's important to note that while M365 Copilot can summarize paragraph differences, it's limited to a 2,000-character limit. In cases where redlines are necessary, Litera Compare can fill this gap. So, M365 Copilot can be utilized to summarize differences in paragraphs, and Litera Compare for full comparisons.
Litera Compare is trusted by 99% of the Am Law 100 and along with M365 Copilot can help deliver better client experiences, enhance collaboration, and mitigate the risk of missing crucial changes to your documents. With Litera Compare, legal professionals can:
- Compare documents and view detailed redlines of changes, filter results and quickly accept or reject changes
- View comparisons in three synchronized scrolling windows
- Catch any formatting changes and view hidden document layout changes
- Compare entire documents or snippets of Microsoft Word, Excel, PPT, and PDF files and see changes in text, tables, charts, images, etc.
- Easily save and share comparisons via email with redlines as attachments
- Compare documents on Desktop applications or Microsoft 365. Integrate with iManage, NetDocuments, SharePoint, OpenText eDocs DM, Google Suite, Worldox, Epona, etc.
In conclusion, negotiation stands as a cornerstone activity within the legal realm, requiring precision, clarity, and efficiency. To navigate this complex process effectively, legal professionals must have access to the right technological tools. With the combined power of M365 Copilot and Litera's drafting tools, legal professionals can execute their work with confidence, ensuring accuracy and efficacy every step of the way. By embracing these innovative solutions, legal teams can elevate their negotiation strategies, foster stronger client relationships, and ultimately achieve optimal outcomes in their legal endeavors.
Watch our full on-demand webinar where we discuss the combined power of M365 Copilot and Litera’s drafting tools, “Beyond the Desktop: A New Era in Legal Drafting Tools”.
