The emergence of artificial intelligence as a critical legal technology has prompted discussions among law firm leaders regarding how AI usage should be disclosed to clients and who – the law firm or the client – should benefit from any resulting cost savings. While artificial intelligence technologies will undoubtedly play a role in minimizing litigation expenses, it’s important to be mindful of all the ways that less glittery technologies can play in keeping litigation costs down.

At a minimum, insurance companies and corporations with large litigation budgets should be taking advantage of the following ways to leverage currently available technologies to minimize litigation costs:

Using technology to prevent represented claims. Insurance industry studies indicate that “represented claims,” meaning claims where the insured is represented by counsel, are significantly more expensive than similar claims with unrepresented claimants. Litigated, contested claims typically have both higher expenses and higher payouts to the insured. Technology that can rapidly, and fairly, process claims soon after the coverage-triggering incident will have a significant impact on an insurer’s litigation costs.

Using technology to select counsel. One emerging legal technology is so-called “litigation analytics” software that extracts insights from a database of litigated case outcomes. Not only are these technologies useful for predicting judicial behavior, they also have compelling use cases in the areas of litigator selection, identifying litigation strategies, and establishing litigation budgets.

Using technology to increase collaboration between clients and outside law firms. Although billing practices are evolving rapidly, it is nevertheless still true that a litigator’s time is his or her most valuable asset (and likely the most expensive item on a law firm’s billing statement). Implementing measures to cut down the time a litigator spends on a case matter necessarily results in cost savings for the client. For this reason, collaboration, data-sharing, messaging, and videoconferencing technologies all have the potential to create cost savings for the client.

Nearly all modern law firms deploy a range of technologies that aid the firm in tracking case deadlines, organizing the client file and litigation materials, and facilitating client communication. These technologies all yield cost savings to the client.

Using technology to track and possibly control law firm billing practices. Technology can be used to identify areas for efficiency and enforce agreed-upon litigation budgets. Clients should be mindful that litigation management guidelines can be a contentious topic, however. Some courts will not enforce them if it can be demonstrated that they impeded the litigator’s ethical obligation to use independent professional judgment regarding how best to competently conduct the litigation. Technologies that analyze law firm billing statements – and enforce agreed-upon fee arrangements – also can produce significant cost savings.

Using technology to minimize litigation costs. Finally, litigators and their clients should not underestimate the financial impact of the ongoing revolution in the court reporting industry. Remote depositions, for example, have the potential to bring significant cost savings to pretrial discovery obligations by minimizing travel time to and from the deposition, by allowing more members of the litigation team to participate (or observe) the deposition, by making depositions easier to schedule, and by yielding a digital finished product that can be stored – and analyzed – by litigation management technologies. Sophisticated new digital platforms that are purpose-built for conducting remote depositions make for a more effective in-deposition experience, particularly in depositions that require a non-trivial number of exhibits.

Finally, from a technology standpoint, the prudent selection of court-reporting service providers will minimize the chances that client confidential information will be inadvertently exposed, or lost, during the deposition process.

Bottom line: insurers and businesses already have at their disposal compelling technologies to at least partially mitigate the rising costs of litigation. Judicial analytics technologies, collaboration tools, and rapid digital innovation within traditional justice system participants like court reporters and e-discovery providers give companies today the tools they need to efficiently share with outside law firms and vendors the burdens of modern litigation.