Getting Started in Legal Operations

Whether you’re trying to make personal changes like getting healthier or professional changes like improving the operations of your legal department, the hardest part is getting started. Advances in technology and process improvement are rapidly evolving adding more complexity and confusion, while the existing business is demanding more support from resources already stretched thin. Much like the health industry, the plethora of choices for business and process improvements makes it more challenging to figure out what steps and action will lead to the most impactful and immediate results to your waistline or bottom line.

The legal industry has embraced the fast-growing discipline of legal operations to improve the delivery of services. Legal operations specialists can manage existing solutions, recommend and implement new technology and further improve processes. Both law firms and in-house legal departments are being challenged to transform their approaches to the delivery of legal services to create scalable growth and sustainable success.

As you begin to develop a strategy to establish, improve or scale your legal department there are two fundamental questions you must be able to answer: 

1 - Are you maximizing the value of your legal resources?

There is so much efficiency that legal teams are leaving on the table that could be reclaimed by deploying effective technology, better processes, and right-sourcing counsel or alternative legal service providers for all legal activities. Start tackling change and heading down the path of maximizing your existing legal resources by segmenting your existing workload into two categories - foundational and strategic. 

Foundational Legal Activities

Foundational legal activities are those that are required to keep the business engine running smoothly. Examples of such activities include reviewing core contracts, organizational compliance and regulatory matters, employment matters, IP filings, and entity and corporate governance management. This is just a short list of activities that have the ability to be right-sourced because of the availability and track record of proven alternative solutions. Overflow work for these activities can be channeled into solutions once you understand the effort and costs. What would happen if a company’s general counsel were to send its head of sales an invoice for legal services rendered to support the “end of period” sales rush? That pain is felt on both sides of the transaction, most often by the lawyers.  Or worse, what if resource constraints cause a legal team to fall behind in the foundational activities and such delays lead to regulatory violations or delays in the implementation of strategic initiatives?

Foundational activities are essential to the business but given the array of possible solutions, can be managed to require minimal legal intervention for transparent and measurable processes. The faster a service can be developed into a process, the easier it will be to automate it.

Strategic Legal Activities

Successful businesses need lawyers at the table and working collaboratively. Some businesses have a short-sighted view on the role of attorneys and instead of deploying their legal resources as trusted assets through the course of business or strategic projects, they relegate their legal departments to the back burner until a problem arises.

Without having a complete understanding of the business it would be difficult to develop an effective and informed strategy. Attorneys are skilled at negotiation and mitigating risk but they can also help identify opportunities. Attorneys should be focused on activities where they bring the most value - growing and protecting the business while unlocking the potential.

Strategic legal activities result from issues or events that occur during the course of doing business. Having a trusted advisor with a comprehensive understanding of the business will lead to the most efficient and effective deployment of legal resources, and can minimize the exposure or frequency of “fire drills”.

2 - How well is your legal department positioned to support the mission of your business?

Beyond providing general legal services, in-house legal departments have the capacity to create a cultural impact throughout an organization. Companies that are growing their business and footprint are hungry for operations leaders with a mindset that aligns to the ambitions of such companies. Almost 40% of the Fortune 500 are members of the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium.

One of the best ways to determine the effectiveness of your legal department is to leverage metrics but you can’t measure what you can’t count! Legal teams need processes and systems are required to track work product, resources, responsiveness and spend. Centralizing the intake funnel for all internal legal requests will show the complete picture of all activities and of where bottlenecks may develop inside and outside of the legal team. Having a holistic, objective view enables you to apply impactful resources to the areas where they’re most needed. Cost benefit and ROI can easily be calculated, and baselines are established. Metrics will give insight to costs which ultimately lead to better value for spend, and a better use of lawyer’s valuable time. Having such metrics in hand will better allow legal teams to justify the need for additional legal resources or solutions and also help identify dependencies as well as barriers to streamlining the delivery of legal services. 

Both law firms and in-house legal teams should consider exploring legal operations and how to start down the path of implementing legal operations standards and concepts. Law firms must determine how to leverage technology to differentiate themselves in a competitive market. For developing and/or growing companies, building a legal function is essential but doesn’t have to be expensive or resource intensive. Mature companies need to deploy legal resources more effectively and shift the reactive nature of the legal service relationship to being proactive while continually improving and innovating the delivery of their services. Legal operations solutions can help all segments of the legal industry create and prove a better value proposition.

The Attorney’s Guide to Strategic Implementation of Legal Technology

Implementing legal technology is neither a one-size-fits-all nor a plug-and-play operation for high-growth legal departments. Most GCs feel inundated with legal technology options and overwhelmed by complex planning needs. This article offers strategic insights on how to:

• Pinpoint areas that would benefit from efficiency and optimization;

• Determine the resources needed before implementation;

• Overcome common implementation challenges and evaluate results effectively; and

• Leverage critical data and information to optimize your digital transformation journey.

Scalable legal technology solutions can help you achieve a host of modernization benefits including greater transparency, adaptability, and predictability to manage uncertainty and change better. Here’s how to chart and remain on a path to technological success:

1)  Define legal technology objectives and requirements.

First, identify what bottlenecks and challenges you want to address to help you visualize the overarching goals for your legal technology journey. To understand how to plan for success, here’s a broad overview of three capabilities legal technology solutions typically offer:

• Integration: Amplify control over and visibility into legal and organizational processes. Build digital connections that allow software applications to seamlessly exchange information and work together.

• Automation: Increase productivity, consistency, and accountability by automating basic steps in legal workflows, e.g., gather information through forms, assign and track tasks digitally, and click to generate reports.

• Data Processing & Analytics: Significantly speed reporting and assessments to understand the stakes involved in any situation. Centralize, standardize, and classify data from almost any source. Artificial intelligence techniques, such as machine learning and natural language processing, can significantly speed the analyses of massive data sets. Establish and track KPIs, identify trends, spot anomalies, evaluate the impacts of decisions, and generate recommendations that help reduce risk and optimize strategic initiatives.

A. Decide where to apply legal technology solutions.

Use legal technology to streamline legal and business operations, create efficiencies, surface information, and expand real-time responsiveness to legal needs across the organization. You can apply integration, automation, data processing, and data analytics capabilities to various use cases, including contract review and analyses, matter intake and triage, M&A due diligence, legal spend management, and much more.

Specify your intended use cases to determine:

• What project management tools and strategies will you use?

• Are there other stakeholders who can champion proposals and solutions?

• What change management tools and techniques will you use?

• What specialists do you need to consult?

• How long will it take to get up and running?

• What is your budget?

• What other resources will you need?

B. Determine how you will demonstrate and measure success.

What does success mean to you, your business and your transversal partners? Legal teams often achieve significantly higher efficiency, productivity, and satisfaction with new technology. However, legal teams can find themselves overburdened by tracking metrics that don’t align with the hopes or expectations of other stakeholders.

Every legal department faces unique challenges, especially in high-growth environments. An experienced consultant typically helps GCs determine realistic and meaningful targets for their internal team and business-facing functions. Establishing reasonable and achievable goals ensures transversal consensus towards measuring and acknowledging success.

2)  Develop processes for how legal technology will be used.

To maximize the benefits of legal technology, start by mapping out existing workflows in sufficient detail to identify opportunities to streamline flows. Implementing digital solutions based strictly on inefficient manual workflows will add to existing workloads and create drag. Determine who will use the new software and ask:

• What steps do they currently follow to complete a workflow manually? Lay them out end to end.

• Who else and what other systems are involved?

• At what steps do people and systems connect?

To choose where technology can most effectively speed and streamline a workflow, figure out which steps consume the most time and resources. Strive to eliminate redundant and unnecessary steps and leverage technology in place of administrative tasks. Building an automated system that contemplates and addresses legal, regulatory, and audit requirements for documentation and data retention saves even more time and effort later.

Establish baseline measures for your success metrics.

Set baseline measures to determine whether and how much the new technology improves your processes later. Consider:

• How does each workflow link to a measurable outcome?

• What impacts are possible?

• What outputs will you track to determine an impact?

• What timelines and milestones will you set?

• What reporting can the system generate to support your metrics?

Designing and implementing a technology solution with these baseline measures helps ensure that the system will deliver as expected.

3)  Integrate systems and adopt new legal technologies.

Your team must base legal advice and services on the most up-to-date information. And you must always be able to quickly confirm the exact steps taken in a workflow with an easily producible audit trail.

As you put new software into play, you must ensure you’ve built meaningful connections among systems, people, and processes. For example, does automation push and pull the correct data consistently? If not, what step is missing or causing an issue? A technology solution provides an opportunity to accelerate the flow of information and timing to all relevant parties and eliminate the loss of time required to inform other team members of the latest developments.

Consider whether a technology solution that links to other software systems used by stakeholders would allow seamless information movement and rapid approval flows. Common problems include overlooking steps in a workflow or bugs in a software’s programming. Getting buy-in from all stakeholders is also critical.

4)  Triage defects and iterate legal technology success.

As your team grows and faces new challenges, so should your technology solution. Initial implementation requires a follow-on period for testing, socialization, adjustments, and further customizations. The more effort put into the post-implementation process, the more likely the system will be fine-tuned to your department’s needs and constituencies. It’s common to assume that the development process ends as soon as the system is implemented, but doing so will jeopardize the success and utility of the technology.

Digital transformation is an ongoing process. Plan to automate repetitive and low-risk activities before duplicating your success elsewhere. Let people get comfortable with changes before automating major systems.

5)  Consistently build on success with decisions supported by metrics.

Because legal and business environments constantly evolve, success remains a moving target. As you analyze outputs and evaluate workflows, you’ll identify how new systems outperform the old. Can you improve those results? What areas still need improvement? Use your findings to improve experiences and preemptively address issues. Consistently gather and evaluate metrics to:

• demonstrate progress against business targets,

• identify where and how to eliminate capacity constraints, and

• quantify and intelligently allocate resources and determine resource needs.

Data-backed decisions help you continually iterate toward success. Three other critical information sources to help refine and enhance your efforts include:

• Gather feedback from technology users to address software usability issues and collect ideas for new features.

• Collaborate with business stakeholders to stay informed of future needs.

• Seek guidance from specialists who can steer you away from common implementation pitfalls and help you confidently deliver fresh innovations.

You don’t want to take on your company’s digital transformation alone or without a clear plan. But you can lead the way forward with confidence! Take advantage of the experience of a legal operations and technology implementation specialist with proven strategies to scale your success smarter and faster. Schedule a consultation now!

Solving Contract Management

Build a workflow-based, scaleable contract management system to meet your needs today and in the future

Lawyers at high-growth companies face increasingly complex and variable responsibilities than ever before while finding themselves stretched to manage an expanding landscape of contract demands and needs. The General Counsels and Chief Legal Officers of nearly 9 out of 10 companies struggle to manage high volumes of low complexity contracts. Over 50% report that inefficient and outdated contract processes result in revenue delays and lost business. Meanwhile, the manual contract review process is less aligned with most organizations’ digital transformation strategies and ambitions.

There is a better way forward - legal departments can solve contract management by implementing a scalable, end-to-end automated solution for tracking and managing all contract-related activities. The benefits of adopting a digital solution are numerous such solutions:

• Are more cost-effective than implementing  standalone point systems;

• Can leverage and integrate with technology tools used across your organization;

• Provide detailed reporting and capture meaningful metrics while documenting audit trails;

• Create a centralized contract repository of drafts and contract-related communications, which reduces emails and internal e-discovery costs;

• Use data to help predict demand for legal resources based on internal business activities and timelines; and

• Provide process transparency which promotes increased confidence in and support for the capabilities and functioning of legal departments.

Implementing an automated contract solution will allow your legal team to focus its valuable time and resources on strategic legal activities to address business priorities while effectively managing foundational legal activities with minimal legal intervention.

An effective contract management solution pairs an automated workflow-based technology solution and a right-sourced contract review. Here’s how it works:

Step 1: Automate contract intake and review.

Use your organization’s tech stack to centralize intake and automate workflows that track contract-related activities. If your company doesn’t yet use automation technology, choose one that can digitize and automate workflows throughout the organization (versus only contract-related work).

This allows you to build workflows based on customized internal requirements rather than conforming your processes to a contract management software’s standard configurations. The first phase of your contract-related digital workflow involves sending third-party contracts through AI-powered contract review software to automate metadata extraction and initial contract review.

Step 2: Automatically review contracts and collect data

A contract is a collection of valuable data, including dollar amounts, milestones, and obligations. AI-enhanced contract review software systematically reviews contracts, clause by clause, extracting data such as dates, contract type, and contract value along the way. It can also compare and track revisions against pre-approved clauses and terms according to your company playbook to:

• Identify errors and non-compliant and contradictory language;

• Suggest your preferred fallback positions and acceptable alternate language; and

• Identify and highlight language that requires further scrutiny
  

The next phase of your contract workflow will route contracts to a trusted legal service provider for human review.

Step 3: Outsource for human contract review.

AI-driven contract review is highly accurate. Yet, until you feel fully confident relying solely on AI-enabled contract review, you may prefer to have human eyes reviewing each contract. Supporting AI with a layer of human review will provide you with the highest possible confidence and peace of mind while still saving you time and money.

Providing your contract review software and your legal service provider with your parameters for contract escalation enables them to flag contracts for legal team review when elements fall outside established boundaries, pinpointing the specific issues to be addressed for the maximum efficient deployment of lawyer resources and time.

Contract management with convenience, choice, and compatibility.

Using outsourcing and technology costs less than ongoing contract lifecycle management software licensing fees. You can construct automated  workflows to perform a plethora of contracting tasks, including:

• Routing contracts and ensuring review and approval tasks stay on track;

• Preventing the acceptance of a contract before required approval sign-offs;

• Inviting all parties to sign a contract electronically and confidentially;

• Enforcing the order of signing and ensuring all parties receive a signed copy; and

• Providing a defensible audit trail documenting contract creation, review, and signature.
  

By leveraging your organization’s automation software, you can customize and tailor workflow without third-party vendor intervention and cost. And your contract data lives alongside the rest of your company’s data, making it much easier to include in meaningful analyses.

• Build workflows to connect your existing array of technology tools to contract processes.

• Continue to draft contracts in the word processing program of your choice.

• Use your preferred e-signature solution and document repository.

• Enable push notifications to keep contract tasks out of crowded inboxes.

• Experience convenient contract management that offers you flexibility and compatibility.
  

Enjoy end-to-end, companywide contract management.

Set up a self-serve portal that empowers procurement, sales, HR, and other colleagues to enter required metadata and generate contracts. Develop custom templates for low-negotiation contracts such as NDAs, vendor agreements, and employment letters for colleagues to choose from. The system uses standard data to fill in details and route the contracts accordingly. You can also use it to send amendments en masse automatically.

A single contract routing system gives you much greater awareness of legal demands and priorities. With all your contracts tightly controlled in a digital framework, you can swiftly pinpoint what’s in your contracts at all times and:

• Search large volumes of contracts to answer specific questions efficiently.

• Quickly assess levels of risk exposure and liability while also identifying cost-saving opportunities.

• Improve contract enforceability and resolve disputes faster.

Optimize and scale your contract management success

Track contract workflows and establish KPIs to assess workflow efficiency. Metrics reveal workflow bottlenecks and help identify tasks that can be automated, eliminated, or outsourced to achieve the most benefit. 

In implementing this solution, you also establish the foundation for an internal due diligence tool. Review the contracts of a potential acquisition using your contract management solution. The fundamental requirements for both processes are similar, and the cost savings could be significant.

Contract management is no longer a problem with the plethora of stable technology solutions available. Let’s solve this problem together!

Let's talk so we can free your legal team to generate greater value for the company while optimizing many of your existing resources.