What can be standardised in a law firm and what cannot

Where law firm work repeats itself

Anyone running a law firm with two or three lawyers goes through the same motions every day: open a matter, request a power of attorney, diarise a deadline, send the client a progress update, draw up an invoice, chase payment. None of these steps calls for legal judgement. Even so, in many firms they are handled differently each time, depending on who happens to be at the desk. This is exactly where standardisation comes in: a process is defined once and then always carried out the same way, with or without software.

The key point up front: anything in a law firm that repeats itself according to fixed rules can be standardised. Anything that depends on the individual case can at best be prepared. The art lies in drawing the line between the two honestly.

Administration and communication first

A survey of around 300 lawyers conducted by FFI-Verlag in 2020 shows where small firms feel the pressure. They wanted relief above all in client communication and in secretarial work, each named by roughly half of those surveyed. Sole practitioners also mentioned document drafting. Large law firms set different priorities: for them, document drafting and document analysis came first.

That matches everyday practice: in a small firm, administration eats up the largest share of non-billable time. The Legal Tech Verband describes deadline monitoring, status updates to clients and filing emails into the digital case file as typical tasks that practice management software can take over without any input. Add to that appointment booking, document uploads when taking on a matter, as well as sending invoices and payment reminders. These processes are the same in every firm, whether the work is employment law or tenancy law. They are the easiest place to start.

Templates and text modules

The second stage is documents. Document automation means that software builds a finished letter from templates and text modules, into which only the details of the matter still need to be inserted. It suits documents with recurring passages: engagement letters, standard contracts, unfair dismissal claims with an identical structure, letters to opposing parties and courts. A 2025 survey by legal-tech.de of around 80 participants, half of them sole practitioners, names document drafting as the most common next digital project.

The catch is getting started. Marcel Horndasch, founder of a contract automation provider, concedes himself that building and maintaining such templates is usually laborious. A poorly maintained template produces the same error in every matter, and goes on doing so until a court or a client notices. Anyone introducing templates therefore needs someone who revisits them after every change in the law and every case lost. And documents written largely on an individual basis for the client can only be prescribed in their structure, not in their content.

Where the individual case draws the line

That describes the limit. A standard works as long as the inputs can be sorted cleanly into categories: notice of dismissal received yes or no, deadline running until date X, amount in dispute Y. As soon as the assessment of the facts determines the outcome, every template fails. Whether a warning was sufficiently specific, whether a client is better off settling than litigating, whether a draft contract fits the negotiating position: that is decided by a lawyer who knows the case.

The same applies to AI. Alisha Andert, chair of the board of the Legal Tech Verband, writes in Anwaltsblatt that generative AI drafts sample clauses and pleadings which then have to be legally underpinned and checked. The draft can be standardised, the responsibility for it cannot. Anyone who believes a template takes care of the review is cutting corners in the wrong place. A standard saves the lawyer the typing, not the reading. That applies to the form letter just as much as to the pleading from a language model.

Why standards are worth it nonetheless

Standardisation is not an end in itself; it creates time for the part that cannot be standardised. The Legal Tech Monitor 2026 published by the Legal Tech Verband, a survey of just under 360 people, shows where the market is heading: 57 per cent of the in-house lawyers surveyed now handle tasks themselves that they would have sent to law firms two or three years ago. Almost 40 per cent require evidence of the use of legal tech or AI when selecting external advisers. Standard work is therefore moving away or will come under price pressure.

For a small firm, that does not mean chasing the large firms in buying tools. The legal-tech.de survey shows that 22 per cent of respondents work digitally either not at all or only in rudimentary terms. A uniform process for taking on matters, deadlines and invoices costs no licence fee, just an afternoon meeting and a little discipline. Software then helps to keep to the standard, because it sets out the process and makes exceptions visible. Without a process defined beforehand, it merely digitises the chaos.