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73 their practice, 79% store data in the cloud, and 83% hold virtual meetings with clients. e report also found that 69% of consumers prefer to share documents electronically and 56% prefer video conferencing to phone calls. e legal industry can leverage this data to inform how they approach software and their cloud presence to ensure it is thoughtful and effective for their clients. Account management and customer relationship management (CRM) tools are also a must. Successful firms must first gain internal 360-degree visibility of all work done for a specific client in order to provide better external visibility. Today's customers in the consulting sector, for example, expect a dashboard showing the real-time status of ongoing and completed activities, billing, workflow, and other associated information. is transparency requires improved coordination and communication internally, as it's hard to present a united front if the team is not truly united or able to access the latest status of a case. Spinning wheels securing information on the client's dollar does not bode well for time and resource savings. Additionally, one of the most impactful technology trends to hit the legal industry and drive efficiency is Artificial Intelligence (AI) coupled with Machine Learning (ML). ese innovative technologies can discover patterns and correlations within the data that the human eye is incapable of detecting without a significant investment of time and experience. As a result, intelligent tools are being deployed across the legal field in several exciting ways, such as identifying tasks and workflows that need to be initiated, as well as populating common documents and contracts, saving lawyers valuable time to invest in other client-facing tasks. For instance, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a fairly simple technology that allows anyone to configure computer software—or a "robot"—to emulate and integrate the actions of a human interacting within digital systems to complete a business process. RPA utilizes the user interface to capture data and manipulate applications, just like people do by interpreting data, which triggers responses and communicates with other systems to perform a wide variety of repetitive tasks, sans human error. Additionally, many legal professionals are working on legacy systems. ey are still manually taking data from one system and moving it to another because the traditional platforms are not integrated or don't have Application Programming Interface (API) capabilities. APIs are a software intermediary that allows two applications to talk to each other much like the apps used every day by millions such as Facebook, instant messaging, or weather updates. e adoption of more modern infrastructure provides legal professionals with new agility to scale services up or down as their clients' needs evolve. Given customer demands for a more proactive approach to legal services are evident, savvy legal professionals should consider using AI and ML to spot sector-specific trends, capture and leverage intellectual data, and offer certainty and predictability. Integrating these intelligent tools, when possible, will help clients share knowledge and inform future decision- making. e road to widespread technology adoption in the legal industry will be a long one, but the initial adoption of some of these innovative technologies are helping legal professionals envision how modern tools can improve efficiency, while also meeting customer and client needs. Steady integration of these tools is critical—not just to evolve the industry and make it more customer centric—but also to increase legal service access to millions of businesses and individuals currently unserved. Sascha Mehlhase is the VP of Growth at ABC Legal Services. Mehlhase oversees ABC Legal 's growing product, marketing, and customer experience teams in transforming ABC Legal into the best-in-class technology and service industry leader, while simultaneously finding new avenues to scale. With nearly 20 years' product and marketing experience in software and technology, Mehlhase has advanced product strategies and led global teams in a variety of industries. Most recently, as Senior Director of Product Management at Intrado, Mehlhase oversaw their cloud-based telecom and communications platform as a service business and drove the company's international product expansion into more than 170 countries. Modern solutions such as videoconferencing, virtual notaries, digital documents, eSignatures, and e-filing have become widespread as just a few of the methods firms are taking to boost efficiency of operations and simultaneously improve customer satisfaction and retention.