Alex Little is the managing partner of Litson PLLC, a boutique practice focusing on white-collar criminal defense, high-stakes litigation, and regulatory work. Alex previously worked in big law before starting his own practice. 

Alex implemented Gavel as part of his vision to create a more technologically advanced and efficient law firm. This meant automating routine tasks, cutting down on administrative work, creating standardization in work product, and ultimately spending lawyer time on substantive legal work. 

Having practiced for the last twelve years, Alex has experienced the inefficiencies and administrative burdens that often come with practicing law, especially at a large law firm.

While he attempted to incorporate technology to combat some of these inefficiencies and administrative burdens at his last firm, he was really able to have his vision come to life at Litson PLLC. Here he saw an opportunity to leverage automation tools in ways that larger firms struggle to adopt. 

Why Gavel?

In building their modern, tech-focused law firm, Alex and his team evaluated a number of different document automation tools for their practice. They landed on Gavel due to its stability, ease of use, and ability to integrate with other automation tools through its API.

‍In fact, Gavel was implemented into the firm within a week, and onboarding for new users took about an hour - each a testament to Gavel’s user-friendliness, both in creating workflows and learning to use the interface as a front-end user.

According to Alex,

“Everybody who’s touching anything client-related, which is everybody, is using Gavel in some way, shape, or form, and there’s no client who hasn’t received a document that has gone through Gavel.” 

How Was Gavel Implemented?

A tech-savvy attorney, Alex implemented Gavel himself with some assistance from Gavel experts for back-end automation.

The implementation process took about a week and involved setting up templates for various document types (engagement letters, court filings, etc.); integrating Gavel with complementary tools (Zapier, etc.); creating automated workflows for document creation and delivery; and training staff. 

Benefits of Gavel

Gavel has transformed operations at Litson. Time spent on routine tasks has gone down from hours to minutes, allowing the firm to operate with more efficiency and more accuracy, with fewer errors and high-quality output.

For example, complex engagement letters for the white-collar practice might’ve previously taken 3-4 hours to a half day, but with conditional formatting and pre-approved templates in Gavel, staff can send out an engagement letter to new white-collar clients in minutes.

‍Alex estimates the time from lead to client has been cut by 90% with the introduction of Gavel! Such quick turnaround times provide a sneak peek to potential clients as to the responsiveness and efficiency of the firm. 

Internally, the implementation of Gavel has translated into significant cost savings, eliminating the need for additional staff - Alex estimates this equals a savings of 1 - 1.5 additional staff members.

With document automation, attorneys are freed from more routine administrative work and can now focus on more complex legal issues and client satisfaction, enhancing both job satisfaction and service quality.

As Alex mentioned,

”If there's something we can automate in Gavel, we shouldn’t use lawyer brain power, we should save that for the hard questions.”

The other big benefit of using Gavel has been increased compliance with the “things lawyers should be doing to protect themselves.”

This includes, among other things, sending every client an engagement letter, sending litigation clients a document preservation letter, and sending disengagement letters at the end of an engagement. Alex estimates that the firm is 2-4 times more compliant with the help of Gavel.

The Future of Litson 

Alex sees great potential in further automating and templatizing legal practice areas. The firm plans to expand the use of Gavel in developing micro-practices. He also foresees a “Lego-like” construction approach to document creation, allowing for highly customizable yet efficient document assembly.

For the future of the legal industry, he believes that document assembly tools like Gavel will be more beneficial for lawyers in the near term than AI-generated documents. 

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