Deloitte Central Europe is announcing the expansion of Deloitte Legal’s Center of Excellence (CoE), based in Bucharest, to support clients and Deloitte Legal professionals around the world in delivering innovative legal technology solutions.

Among the first examples of how the Deloitte Legal CoE is expanding its legal technology capabilities is a new collaboration with UiPath, a global leader in robotic process automation (RPA). Through this strategic collaboration, both organizations will design, develop and implement cutting edge Robotic and Cognitive Automation (RCA) solutions for clients around the world.

This Deloitte Legal CoE and the UiPath collaboration aims to help legal professionals leverage technology to increase efficiencies and navigate a rapidly transforming legal industry. Traditionally seen as the enterprise’s lawyer-in-chief, general counsels (GCs), and the teams they oversee, are now expected to perform a much broader role as a partner to the rest of the organization and a trusted adviser to senior management. At the same time the legal function is under pressure to cope with an expanding set of regulations, heightened public scrutiny, and business models which are adapting to digital and other opportunities, creating an increased and more global need to manage legal risk.

The first solution co-developed by Deloitte Legal and UiPath is a robot for the legal industry which can search public records such as a securities register, which are frequently accessed in due diligence exercises. This has the potential to drive greater efficiencies – for example in one case the robot performed a search in approximately seven minutes versus the three and a half hours it took a lawyer to do the same thing.