Why to Automate Manual IP Processes | 5 Reasons

Black Hills AI
December 12, 2025

What Manual Processes Are Really Costing Your Practice

By Jim Hallenbeck, President & CEO, Black Hills AI

“It’s working fine.”

I hear this a lot when I talk to IP departments about their workflows. The docketing gets done. The renewals go out. Deadlines are met—mostly. The system they’ve had in place for years keeps chugging along, and there’s a natural reluctance to fix what isn’t visibly broken. Whether you’re a corporation or a law firm, “working fine” has a cost, and that cost is exactly why to automate manual IP processes. That cost amounts to far more than the kind that shows up on an invoice or balance sheet.

Here’s what manual processes are really costing your practice, and why law office automation in the legal industry or even in corporations that want to streamline IP processes while safeguarding their patents is of the utmost importance.

Why to Automate Manual IP Processes | 5 Key Reasons

As you read this, the future of legal work is changing irreversibly, and adopting legal automation tools and solutions is no longer a luxury. It’s a necessity. It’s how you adapt to this ever-evolving environment and keep pace with the industry. Otherwise, you risk getting left behind. Here are the top 5 reasons why law firms and businesses automate IP processes:

The Overtime You’ve Stopped Noticing
The Burnout Nobody Talks About
The Liability Hiding in Plain Sight
The Opportunity Cost of Misallocated Talent
The Margin You’re Leaving on the Table

1. The Overtime You’ve Stopped Noticing

The purgatory of unending overtime is the first reason to consider automation for lawyers and paralegals in IP departments and practices.

Manual processes are time-hungry by nature. Every docketing entry requires human attention. Every renewal deadline needs someone to track it, verify it, and act on it. Every document requires eyes-on review.

When portfolios were smaller, that was manageable. But portfolios aren’t smaller anymore. They’re growing—often faster than headcount. The gap gets filled the way it always does: longer hours, missed family dinners, weekend catch-up sessions, and a quiet expectation that your team will absorb the overflow.

After a while, overtime stops feeling like overtime. It just becomes part of the job.

But it’s still a cost, paid in salary, in fatigue, and eventually in turnover. This cost transcends an easily calculated dollar amount and is why automating legal work for your IP needs is key.

2. The Burnout Nobody Talks About

There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from doing high-stakes, repetitive work, and this exhaustion often results in burnout. This is another key reason to consider legal process and workflow automation tools.

Docketing isn’t intellectually demanding in the way that claim drafting is, but it’s unforgiving. One transposed digit. One missed deadline. One overlooked response requirement. The consequences can be catastrophic.

That combination—routine work with serious consequences—is a recipe for burnout. Your best people didn’t go into IP to spend their days on data entry. When the work feels like an endless treadmill of administrative tasks, they start looking for the exit.

Replacing experienced IP paralegals and docketing specialists is expensive and slow. The institutional knowledge that walks out the door doesn’t come back. So it is imperative to adopt the best legal document automation solutions and systems.

3. The Liability Hiding in Plain Sight

Here’s the uncomfortable truth about manual processes: humans make mistakes. Not because they’re careless, but because they’re human. Fatigue, distraction, a moment of divided attention. That’s all it takes.

This is essential to understanding why to automate manual IP processes for your patent needs. In IP work, mistakes have teeth. A missed maintenance fee can abandon a patent. A docketing error can blow a response deadline.

A renewal that slips through the cracks can cost a client protection they’ve spent years and significant resources building. Most firms have been lucky. The near-misses get caught. The errors get corrected before they become disasters.

But “lucky” isn’t a risk management strategy. It’s a backbreaking mistake that just hasn’t been made yet.

Every manual touchpoint is a potential failure point, and the more volume you push through legacy systems, the more you’re rolling the dice. This is the risk you face without the automation of legal services, including legal compliance automation.

4. The Opportunity Cost of Misallocated Talent

This might be the most expensive hidden cost of all: what your people could be doing instead, and a key reason why businesses and law firms nationwide are turning to legal assistant office automation to transform their operations.

When senior paralegals spend their days on routine docketing, they’re not preparing the more complicated PCT filings, reviewing filing packages, ensuring the right entity size fees are being paid, or ensuring every unique client requirement is being met.

When experienced specialists are buried in renewal tracking, they’re not catching the edge cases that require real expertise. When attorneys review work that could have been automated, they’re not advising clients, developing business, or, more importantly, doing billable work.

This is the power of bringing in AI-powered tools for legal compliance automation and even legal research automation. You hired smart people. You’re paying for their judgment and experience.

Every hour they spend on tasks a machine could do better is an hour of expertise you’ve purchased but aren’t using. Legal tech automation of legal processes empowers you to empower your team to do its best work.

5. The Margin You’re Leaving on the Table

Let’s be direct about the business case for why to embrace legal workflow and document automation tools and solutions. IP support work, docketing, renewals, routine paralegal tasks, is typically low-margin. This is the reality.

It’s necessary, but it doesn’t command premium fees. The more labor you throw at it, the more you compress your margins. Legal department and law firm automation solutions flip that equation.

When machines handle the high-volume, rules-based work, your cost per transaction drops dramatically. Your team’s time shifts toward higher-value activities.

The same revenue comes with better margins, or the same margins let you offer more competitive pricing. This isn’t about replacing people. It’s about freeing them to do work that justifies what you’re paying them.

Further, pairing legal document automation with AI, automated legal drafting and document creation can be a game-changer for your department or practice, though the power of Generative AI for legal IP work is a conversation for another day.

Now You Know Why to Automate Manual IP Processes for Your IP Needs. Partner with Black Hills AI Today. You Deserve More Than “Good Enough.”

The status quo has a way of feeling safe. Change involves effort, learning curves, and short-term disruption. When the current system is “working,” the case for change can feel abstract. But as you’ve learned, there are countless reasons why to automate manual legal processes for your IP needs, whether you’re a law firm or a company with a growing IP portfolio. Ultimately, automation in law is here to stay, and if you want to stick around, too, you must embrace the power of these tools.

The costs of failing to do so are real, even when they’re hidden. Your team is absorbing them in extra hours. Your best people are feeling them in diminished job satisfaction. Your firm is carrying them in unrecognized liability and unrealized margin. “Good enough” has gotten you this far. The question is whether it’s good enough to get you where you’re going, with portfolios growing, talent harder to find, and competition intensifying. You cannot afford not to embrace legal AI automation.

Sometimes the most expensive choice is the one you don’t realize you’re making. Partner with Black Hills AI for the best legal document automation solutions.