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!